Walton Colliery

A Memory of Walton.

My name is Roland Mitchell. I worked at Walton colliery as a haulage hand. I worked alongside Percy Heckles, Alan Jennings, Phillip Casgoin and Phillip Redmond and a young lad by the name of George Bernard Shaw. We would take supplies up the tailgate of Berkwood. The tailgate was uneven and also had a very low roof where one would crouch down and walk for fifty yards. The haulage engine driver was an old man whose name was Dan, he had worked down the mine since he was fourteen. He'd only a few weeks before his retiring date and was racked with arthritis in his hands and feet. It would take him all of his time to walk fifty yards to the engine. why he was allowed to stay on at the pit was simply out of pity. The haulage engine had one lever and a button to operate it which was child's play in the right hands. there was an electric bell which would give instructions either to go forward or to go backwards or to go slow. Two short rings forwards, three short rings backwards and four short rings meaning for to go very slow 4-3 reverse 4-2 forwards and one long ring stop. Very easy instructions if the bell is working. Well, off we went with a load of supplies where two rings could be heard and all was well as we went some nine hundred yards with the trams filled with various things for the pit face! What we did not know at the time was that Dan being racked with pain had sat down on his seat and stretched out his legs and placed one foot onto the bell switch that switched off the bell and in doing so it was a catastrophe in the making. Nine hundred yards in-by, Phillip noticed that some twenty yards in front of us a small amount of rock had fallen onto the roadway and was in danger of derailing the front tram. Phillip took hold of the bell pull and pulled hard on the bell wire but the trams kept on going at a top speed of ten miles an hour. The front tram was derailed which then was followed by the second and forth tram. It was then that the first tram swerved into the side of the iron girders and then jerked to an abrupt stop: the problem was that the haulage rope kept on pulling and pulling until it snapped. The steel wire rope suddenly sprung backwards to where I was standing; and like a snake coiling itself around its victim the rope entwined around my girth. Dust and debris sprang up as the rope then began to whip along the tub track. Lucky for me the wire rope did not cause me much harm but was most certainly an experience I would not want to go through again. Having no idea that the bell was switched off, we assumed that Dan had had some some form of an accident and that he himself could have had a heart attack. Phillip had managed to run up to a phone to see if either he could phone Dan or Phone out-bye. All four of us began to run back towards the engine house and then in the distance we saw a cap lamp coming towards us. It was Dan, he was hobbling towards us. Knowing what had happened and why he did not stop in an emergency, we decided amongst us that our lives should come first and we could not risk our lives for the sake of four weeks; pension or no pension he was persuaded to go on the sick. Now there was young lad by the name of David, he should have been supervised at all times for at least six months; the problem with David was that he was always messing about, doing the wrong things, and no one wanted to work with him. He would come to work and go home from work on the same bus as I. I recall that he had opened a full packet of cigarettes on the bus whilst travelling to work. We'd go down the pit where he'd be deployed to the haulage engine all by himself. At the end of the shift he had left the job and was on his way back to the pit bottom. Prior to this the lads that were working in-bye began to smell a distinctive smell of cigarette smoke and was more than a half mile in-bye. In some kind of a panic they began to try and trace where the smell was coming from. There were too many districts from where the smell could have come from. Not only that, the smell would cease and thus make it impossible to find the area of where the smell was coming from. Periodically the smell would wisp back again. Anyway finally they concluded that the only place it could be coming from was where David was working! By the time they'd got to the engine house, David had legged it out of the pit. There where he had been working were cigarette butt ends strewn on the floor of the engine house; above where he had smoked was a methane pipe which was to extract gas from out of the pit. It was only luck that did not cause the whole pit to go up with one big bang! On the bus home David asked me for a tab. When asked where were his own tabs he told me he had left them in the locker. The following day David and I were to go to the check house. He was refused his check and then grabbed by a police officer and was to be put before the court; Because he should have had supervision at all time and was too young to operate machinery, the charges against him were dropped Lucky lad eh!

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