Plumbing the depths

It has been remiss of me not to re-link to the Witanagemot Club in my blog move. I have no desire to see our Nations disappear in order to become Regions of the EUssr.

I noticed a new vision spiel on the CP site:

It is also the height – and limit – of our ambition. We have no other agenda. There is no underlying social, political or economic “master plan” and we guard our independence keenly.

I don’t recall seeing it last month and there isn’t an obvious navigation to it either today. Curious. Maybe Lord Randy (Jerk) of Higham has them rattled?

-oOo-

My first visit to a Mine was in the mid 70s as a young Scientist, although we only visited the surface workings. It was a regular NCB Mine in full production and was a fascinating afternoon. Of particular interest was the visit to the Pit Head winding house, where the life of the men in the travelling cage was entirely in the hands of the man who worked the lift gear, watching out for markings on the ropes as the cables wound on and off.

Ten minutes down the road from our house is the National Coal Mining Museum at the former Caphouse Colliery which is well worth a trip and currently free admission. You get to go 450′ underground, although the lift cage is built to modern passenger safety standards. My first underground mine visit, however, was to a Colliery at Chatterley Whitfield, now sadly gone but not forgotten. This felt as though it had just closed the day before and we half expected to hear distant machinery in the tunnels.

As so often is the case, we were shown round by a retired grizzled old miner who was a bit curmudgeonly but knew his stuff. We went round a number of surface buildings first then eventually went to hand in our contraband and get our lamps, hats and pit check tokens. We then went to the outside of the pit head building and he told us that when we got into the cage, to go as far back as possible then turn round and face him.  We then traipsed inside to a small brick room with wooden doors and some of us went right up to the doors, squashed together and turned around. He followed us in, took in the scene, then exclaimed;

“Yer daft buggers! This is the fookin’ air lock!”

The pit cage was cramped and on two levels. As we squeezed in, he explained that the bells we heard signified that there were miners in the car rather than just coal trucks. On asking what would happen if this had not been signalled, he explained that some of us might have ended up with broken bones when it braked fiercely.

I revisited Chatterley Whitfield a number of years later and was disappointed to find that the tour had been grockled; instead of going hundreds of feed underground, we only went about 15′ down to sub-surface areas rather than the mine itself and the various seams & machinery layouts were faked. (Faked very well, but you don’t expect a seam of coal to sound hollow when you tap it).

There is a Mine at Beamish, although it is just a Drift Mine into the hillside  and a little disappointing, but it is worth a day there to see the Town, the Trams, the Station, the Home Farm and the Miner’s cottages. (The Bank is particularly interesting and there is a Masonic Hall, although I haven’t seen that yet)