Report
Keith Evans and John Wiltshire,two ex-miners, report on their visit to a Wrexham school.
Keith's feedback
“We set the tables up with the children in the class room, they were a great help putting the artefacts on the tables and I introduced John & myself to the class.
I spoke to the children about the life of a miner working underground in the mine. It was hard work but the one thing we miners had in the pit was that we all looked after each other. I spoke about Gresford Pit and one of the boys stood up to say that his Great-Great-Great Grandfather was one of those left down there so I moved on to something else. I told them more about life in the pit, using the artefacts off the table, and we asked the class if they wanted to ask any questions. One of the questions was about how dark it was in the pit, which took me to the next item, to talk about the pit lamp and the self -rescuer that we wore on our belts. Also about the pit tallies we had to hand in, to say where we were working. We had to give the banksman one tally before we went down so, with having two tallies before we went down, they knew where we were working and that we had gone down. I told them what we had done down the pit and then told them about the artefacts we had on the table. I then thanked the teacher and the children and passed over to John, who talked about how coal came to be formed.”
John's feedback
“I had made some models. For one I just used painted strips of wood depicting the layers of the Earth, stopped by the part that I called "When the Dinosaurs Lived" I showed them a little Dinosaur with red eyes and told them that he could not see, I asked them if they knew what type he was, I let them guess a bit and then I tell them it is a Dyathinkhesaurus.
I then packed on some more wood and then I asked them what happened next. I gave them a clue by saying that there had been three films made about it and I gave them a clue and said "Acorn" and a little girl put her hand up straight away and said "Ice Age" so I put a few white blocks on representing the ice.
There were two blocks from the front that were Green and I told the kids to keep their eyes on the green blocks and explained that there was millions of tonnes pressing on the trees, vegetation, etc and when I turned them around, hey presto, the green had turned to black - COAL.
I then told them that, when the ice melted, it carved out valleys and altered the seams which ran up and down. Then I showed them a model showing different types of coal seams and how they were accessed via deep mines, drift mines and opencast but I need to make a new one before our next school talk.
I then showed two models of bellpits that I had made, one with a windlass and the other with two pulley wheels and a horse. I explained how the waste was distributed around the outside of the mine shafts and then went on to say that coal waste was then stacked on to spoil heaps, using Bersham as an example.
I then went on to say how many pits there were in South Wales and the heaps were piled either side of the valleys and just mentioned the Aberfan Disaster.
Because of only having only half an hour, I hurriedly went on to ventilation and I mentioned the rescue teams and how they carried canaries with them down the pit. I then showed them two models of cages with canaries in, the first in an ordinary cage and I showed them the canary falling off the perch and how they shook the cage to revive the bird. The second model showed a box with an oxygen bottle on top.”