First Job

A Memory of Newburn.

It was 1958 and I had just left school at Walbottle Secondary. Me and my best pal Wes Coulthard (who I'm sad to say has since passed away) went on our first holiday together before starting down the Pit. We went with his parents Jimmy and Polly to Middleton Towers in Morecambe, it was just like a Butlins camp and bye, did we have some fun. Then, that over with, it was the pit. We started doing training at Wheatslade Colliery which was for 16 weeks' experience, part in the classroom and part down the pit. We had to get a bus from Newburn to town, then a bus to Hazelrigg Road ends and walk to the pit along Sandy Lane. This lasted 8 weeks, then it closed as a training site so we got transferred to Seaton Burn. I enjoyed it there as there were ponies, and guess who came out top of the class with these? Wes and me were courting two lasses from Rye Hill, Joan and Carol, and they worked in a dressmakers' factory in Charlotte Square, just off Cross Street. So when we had a training day down the pit we would get the bus back to town with our pit hats, overalls, boots, and a lot of grime rubbed into our faces. Bah! did we feel hard when all the girls would came to the windows to stare down at us when we shouted up. Training finished, we would go to our respective pits. Ours was The Havanah Drift at Dinnington. There was a bus laid on and I was picked up at the bottom of Millfield Bank and it dropped me off there. The first job for everyone until they reached sixteen was working on bank, loading the sets (four-wheeled bogies) with materials such as pit props etc, or working in the screens sorting the slag from the coal on a huge conveyor belt. I once did a stint at this and found a live detonator which I gave to the supervisor - could you imagine putting a shovel of coal on the fire with this thing in the middle? Wes and me were working together in the yard and there was this little steam shunting engine. The driver showed us how it worked and even give us a little try. One day, all the yard staff as usual had their bait (snack) in the weighbridge and we sneaked into the little engine and we were off down towards Hazelrigg with the driver and his mate in hot pursuit. He never reported us because we would have been sacked on the spot, and we never chanced it again. When the year passed and we were sixteen it was down the pit. This was a Drift, so we went down in these bogies with a roof over, and seats. There were maybe 20 of these - 'Cars' was their proper name and they were all attached to a long steel rope and were lowered down, I was told, for about a mile. At the bottom, depending which seam you were allocated by the Over man, you were paired up and it was our job to feed the materials to the face. I loved it when I was paired with Big Tom Hetherington from Throckley, who I just found out had sadly passed away a week or so ago. Big Tom would put an arched girder on each shoulder and I would follow behind with the fish plates and bolts up the back drift, which was a low narrow tunnel. And if a shot had just been fired you would choke in the fumes as the air was sucked down here from the coal face. There was loads of mice down here and I have even seen frogs. When it was bait time we would sit between two airlock doors where it was lovely and warm, and if you turned your light out, the darkness was something to experience, there were no stars in the night sky here, it was blacker than black. If you were about a mile in from the main drift you would ride the belt. This entailed jumping and doing a belly flapper on the conveyor belt on top of the coal and turning your light out, because if you were caught you would be fined, you always knew when the Over man was about because his lamp was a spot light. One day my light had a fault and when this happened you had to go to bank and get an exchange from the lamp cabin. I was working with a school friend, Malcolm Aitkinson, so I sat on a bogie and rode it out downhill. This weighed about 2 hundredweight, it had no power, you just sat on it with your feet out front and used your boots on the rails as a brake getting up a fair speed. Malcolm came behind with the set full of empty sets towed by a steel rope which was operated by a man at the winch house. There was a cable which ran the length of the tunnel and it was attached to a bell - this you used to guide the winch man by pulling on it, the number of rings was a code for him to operate. Anyway, I was flying along and my foot got caught and I came to an immediate stop with my leg under the bogie, and I could hear Malcolm coming behind me with the set which amounted to a few ton. I was waving my arms like mad because my light was out (and don't forget it's dark down the pit!), the set was almost on me when Malcolm caught a glimpse of me in his lamp and jumped on the cable. The set stopped just feet away. Was someone looking after me that day or what?      

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