Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  ‘When I went to work that first night,’ he wrote later, ‘history was repeating itself, for generation after generation of Bullocks had made the same journey. They had all undergone the same experience, but whereas most of them had made their descent into the depths of the earth in the comforting presence of their father, I went alone.’ The advice his father had given him, as hundreds of others had given to their sons before him, came in the form of a poem. Jim had learnt it by heart:

  If the mice move out, move out with them

  If the rats run, your life is nearly done.

  When the roof begins to trickle,

  Father Time is sharpening his sickle

  When your pony baulks, then death stalks,

  If your lamp goes out, don’t muck about.

  No one spoke to Jim as he went down in the cage. When he reached the pit bottom, a group of older boys jumped on him and dragged him into a ‘passby’, a small enclosed space set back from the main tunnel road. ‘There used to be all sorts of tricks played on young boys. When we first went down the pit we all had to go through our initiation ceremony, during which they used to pull our trousers down and examine our little sparrow. The size of that was very important. If we were well endowed, we were looked on with great respect; if we had a poor weedy little thing, they used to cover it with fat and make fun of us for days, or they used to paint it and hang a bit of bank on it and all sorts of things.’

  ‘Bank’ was muck and shale: a new boy was told that if he hung it on his penis, it would make it grow.

  It was the dark, not the older boys, that scared Jim the most. From the pit bottom, a Deputy, a senior official at the pit, escorted him along a warren of tunnels to the place where he was to work. ‘Despite everything I had been told, I was still not prepared for the overwhelming darkness, the stifling atmosphere, the deathly silence, the unusual creaks and the cracking sounds that broke the silence.’

  The darkness could – and did – send men mad. ‘There is no night so dark above, that the outline of an outstretched hand cannot be seen before one’s eyes,’ Arthur Eaglestone wrote,

  but down below the world, all darkness here is utter, final and controlling. Let your lamp go out and in IT floods upon the dying spark, overwhelming in intensity and volume. The blackness swims around you, thick and fluid almost, takes you by the legs, the throat, the eyes; presses with a sinister intention upon your shoulder blades; it seems to flurry in your hands; engulfs your body wholly, and drives your little soul upon itself in the remotest and most secret of fastnesses … Pinch your cheek if that is what suffices, touch your empty eyes, then, pull your hair … It is all of no avail – of no avail …

  Jim followed the Deputy through the tunnels for more than thirty minutes, stumbling to keep up. The roads were not flat or straight; there were twists, turns, inclines, places where the height of the roof dropped, so that not even Jim could stand. Corve rails, for moving the tubs of coal, ran along their length – easily traversed by an experienced miner, but for a small boy who had never been down a pit before, the sleepers, set two feet apart, were perilous in the dark. There were other hazards: the roads were strewn with debris from the sides and roof, and in places, wooden pit props jagged, buckled by the weight above.

  The Deputy did not tell Jim where they were going or what he would be asked to do. Two miles from the pit bottom [the shaft] he stopped by a line of empty tubs and a mound of dust. What followed, Jim remembered for the rest of his life. ‘As soon as the Deputy had showed me where I was to work and how many tubs I had got to fill with dust, he said, “Oh! you’ll be interested to know that this is where your John Willie got killed.” I can never, never forget that. As he went away and I saw his light slowly going into the distance, I was left completely alone.’

  Purposely, to inflict the maximum psychological terror on the thirteen-year-old boy, the Deputy had taken Jim to the exact spot where, five years earlier, his much-loved elder brother had been crushed to death by a fall of rock. Jim was eight years old when he was told what had happened to John Willie. ‘He had finished his own job and he was actually on his way out of the pit when another miner who was just going to set a girder said, “Give us a lift, John Willie, will tha?” And John Willie being what he was, immediately took his coat off and was just walking towards the girder when the whole place collapsed. The fall instantly killed him and the man whom he was going to help, as well as two pit ponies. There were two hundred tons of rock on top of them, and this all had to be shifted before they could bring the bodies back to the surface.’

  The morning John Willie died, he had been due to take Jim and his younger sister to Scarborough for their annual summer treat. The two children were woken by a knock at the door at the house in Princess Street, a few hundred yards from the colliery. It was the first time Jim had seen his father cry. ‘When my father was told that John Willie was trapped, we heard him breathing heavily and then a sort of half-stifled sobbing, and him saying, “Oh Lord, it is hard, help us now. If ever we needed Thy help we need it this morning, but if it is Thy will, if it is Thy will, then let Thy will be done,” and then he stumbled up the stairs. He passed us in our bedroom without even seeing us. Tears were running down his cheeks and he looked like a man mortally wounded.’

  As Jim worked alone on his first shift, shovelling the coal dust into the tubs, two miles from the pit bottom, the only light coming from his flickering oil lamp, he was terrified. ‘I have never known a night that lasted as long as that one; I thought it would never end. I was frightened to death. I had John Willie’s face in front of me that night, as plain as day. I kept thinking, Good Lord! if he got killed here, what might happen to me. I dared not hang my lamp in case it toppled over, I dared not put it on the floor in case it rolled over, I dared not turn the wick up, in case it smoked, I dared not turn it down for fear it went out.’

  It was six hours before the Deputy returned to take Jim back to the bottom of the shaft. Leaving the thirteen-year-old new boys alone in the dark on their first shifts, the bullying and the terrorization were common to all pits – an underground baptism to toughen the boys up. They were never warned; no one told them it would happen. It was something that had to be endured; to talk about it would have been to express fear, a sign of weakness, a failure of manliness.

  Jim did not tell his mother anything of his night, though he remembered the horror of it for the rest of his life. ‘When I got to the pit top, I handed in my lamp and rushed home in the darkness. My mother was already up, cooking the breakfast – only that morning, instead of bread and jam, I could smell bacon and eggs. I thought that now I was really a man. As she fussed over me, I looked with pride at my black body and legs. Nobody – and I mean nobody – could persuade me to get washed until I had been outside to let all my younger mates see me on their way to school. I felt really superior – they were just school kids whereas I was a worker. I had arrived. I was important. I was a contributor to the family exchequer.’

  From shovelling pit muck, Jim graduated to pony driving, a job given to all the new boys underground. Two weeks after he started down the mine, he was taken to the stables at the bottom of the pit shaft. Bowers colliery had 150 ponies; each had its name over its stall and any rosettes it had won at local shows. They had come to the pit wild from the Welsh hills to be broken in by the boys themselves. Underground, they were not ridden, but driven by verbal commands. Jim’s family had been pony trainers at Bowers Row for generations. ‘The ponies were put on a long rope and taught all the ordinary commands, such as “Whey!” (that means stop); “Get on a bit” (go forward a bit); “Come over” (step over one set of rails to the other); and “Back a bit”. At “Come here” they would lift their legs up and spin round in their own lengths, because the roads were too narrow to do anything else. When we said “Back, shuv”, the pony would put its bottom against the back end of the tub and start shoving it back. This was called britching. They were also taught to open doors with their heads, which was called
trapping.’

  Pony driving was important work. The ponies’ job was to pull the lines of corves, the tubs that carried the coal to and from the coalface. Rippers, the men who worked alongside the hewers, filled the empty tubs; the ponies then hauled them back to the cage to be sent up out of the pit. Hewers and rippers were paid by contract at so much per ton. Their wages were dependent on the pony drivers – the speed with which they could get the corves up to and back from the coalface. If a boy was slow, he was often physically beaten. At most pits the roads through the tunnels were poor. The journey up to the face was often a mile or more, debris from the roof and the sides of the tunnel littering the rails on which the corves ran. In temperatures that could reach upwards of 90 degrees Fahrenheit, as one pony driver described, ‘The pony was always in extremis, and the tubs were often derailed.’

  Traipsing the tunnels alone, the boys depended on the ponies for companionship; if their lamps went out, as they frequently did, a pony could guide them home. ‘The ponies knew their way around their own district of the pit and could always find their way back to the pit bottom. They did this by travelling against the air which was being fed down by the shaft,’ Jim remembered. ‘If you got caught in the dark, you grasped your pony’s tail and tried to get your head just below the level of his back while he walked slowly – never offering to kick you – straight back to the pit bottom.’ Jim was given a pony called Tim. ‘I could write about Tim for pages. He used to chew tobacco like a man; he would go mad for mints, he would pull his lips back and grin at me. If I were not going fast enough when we were on our way to the pit bottom, he would shove me in the back. He would drink out of my bottle and take crusts from my bread when I was eating my snap. When I was down that pit for hours and hours alone with my pony I had no one but him to talk to, so I used to chat to him. He would shake his head up and down as I asked him all sorts of questions; he seemed to listen as I carried on long conversations about football and all sorts of subjects.’

  The pony drivers’ dependency on their ponies sparked fierce rivalry between the boys. Wherever they congregated, at street corners or down the mine, as Fred Smith from Kiveton colliery recalled, they would argue over the abilities of their respective charges: ‘“I know that Dan can take three empties up 6c gate.” “Why, he couldn’t pull an old hen off the nest,” another would counter. “Tha wants to see Linnet take four fullens on 83’s cross gate,” and so on it would go. “I’ll bet thee he can’t” and “I’ll bet thee he can”.’

  The number of tubs a pony could haul determined a boy’s standing in the pit, both among his contemporaries and in the eyes of the older men. The boys also knew that they depended on the animals not just for company, but for their lives. To an inexperienced or inattentive pony driver, the roads, with their steep inclines and sharp descents, could be fatal. The ponies often pulled as many as five loaded tubs, weighing up to 600 cwt each. ‘The worst accidents,’ Jim remembered, ‘would happen when the full tubs were coming down the gradient and the driver missed his lockers. These were bits of wood or steel which the driver put into each wheel to make the wheel slide like a brake. If you missed a locker, the tubs started going faster. If you missed one, you could easily miss the lot. The tubs would then run and run, until finally they ran over the pony and invariably broke his back.’

  In 1925, seventy-three boys under the age of sixteen were killed in Britain’s coalmines and a further 15,241 injured. When the tubs ran, all too often the pony driver, as he tried to correct his error, would fall under the wheels. Made of sharp steel, they scythed through limbs and necks. There were other instances where a wrong move could have disastrous consequences: hooking the tubs up behind the pony, Jim explained, was one: ‘You would hang them on the pony’s chain and when you told him to stand up a bit, he would stand up about two or three inches. Then the driver put his hand in between one tub and the next, to link the two tubs together. If the pony set off without being told while the driver was doing this, he would probably have his fingers cut off.’

  Cruelty to the ponies was a dismissable offence. At Jim’s pit, one boy was sacked for pulling out a pony’s tongue with a switch. ‘Fortunately,’ as he recalled, ‘lunacy of this kind was exceptional.’ But from time to time, there was a stubborn pony that had to be thrashed. ‘The older lads would get the tail chain, pass it into the link on the bridle, very tight, so that the pony had something pulling on its left-or right-hand side, tightening all the time, so that he would start spinning. This was done when the road was about 12 feet wide in the passby, the pony spinning and spinning until finally it became dizzy and dropped on the floor. While one of the big lads sat straight on its head the other would just knock hell out of it with a pit prop or pick shaft. They let it stand up and put it back in the tubs to see if it behaved any differently. If it did not, they would do the same thing again.’

  The ponies were often killed, or so seriously injured they had to be put down. ‘I remember one occasion when a pony was “britching”,’ recalled Frank Johnson, a pony driver at a mine near Doncaster. ‘The rails were fishplated together and it must have got its back foot fast and its hoof was ripped off. I had to report it. The horse-keeper came from the pit-bottom and put a cap on the horse’s head.’ The cap, called a ‘peggy’, had a hole in it, positioned between the horse’s ears. Two or three miners would sit on the pony to hold it down, while the horseman dazzled it with his lamp as he placed the ‘peg’ in the hole. It was the most humane way of killing the pony in the cramped conditions underground; as Frank Johnson described, ‘The peg was hit with a hammer directly into the animal’s brain. It killed them instantly. We used to have to fetch dead ponies on trams, which were like tubs with no sides. The pony drivers cried like babies when their ponies were killed.’

  The pony drivers at Billy Fitzwilliam’s pits remembered the strike of 1926 for the rest of their lives. ‘I should not be living now were it not for that strike,’ said Arthur Clayton, a ninety-nine-year-old miner who worked at Elsecar. ‘It lengthened men’s lives. There were no holidays with pay. We were like young ponies let out to grass.’

  For the duration of the strike, Wentworth House became the focus of the neighbourhood. Joyce Smith, then aged seventeen, was home from boarding school for the Easter holidays. ‘Lord Fitzwilliam’s idea was to entertain his men. He turned the Park into a pleasure ground. There were games and competitions with prizes and all sorts of things to help the miners. I think they were all very sorry for each other. He did a lot to try and help them.’

  Handicap races were run for the pit ponies and rosettes awarded for the best turned-out; Maud Fitzwilliam gave £5 to every boy who had a pony with no scars. Football matches and tug-o’-war contests were organized between the two collieries and a fête was held in the gardens at the house. ‘There used to be great heaps of coal, tubs of it, and if you guessed the weight it were yours,’ a miner from Elsecar recalled. ‘Then there was this greasy pole with a ham on top of it. And you’d go skimming up it and if you got this ham it were yours.’

  The start of the General Strike coincided with the opening of the cricket season. Cricket was a consuming passion in the pit villages. ‘We’d play cricket on the dirt road between the terraces. We’d play the street down below us. Everyone would come out and watch. It were a great event,’ remembered Ernest Whitworth, who grew up at Rawmarsh where many of the miners at New Stubbin pit lived. ‘The men were stood along the side of the road and the women used to sit out on the chairs. We’d have a post as a wicket, a bit of board. There were no stumps. We couldn’t afford them, or a proper cricket ball. Someone would stitch it out of something, an old piece of horse hide out of the knacker’s yard was often used.’

  At Wentworth House, the cricket pitch was in the middle of the front lawn. On 1 May, the day after the collieries closed, Billy opened the pitch to the Elsecar and New Stubbin colliery teams. To the delight of the players, as one remembered, he issued a challenge: ‘He said if anybody hit a cricket ball from th
e middle of that lawn while they were batting and broke a window at the house there were £25 for them! It were more than four months’ wages! And there were all them windows to go at! It took some doing though. The distance from the crease to the house was a good few hundred yards.’

  No windows were broken at Wentworth House that spring – either playing cricket, or in anger. Nor was there much trouble anywhere else. The Government had misjudged the country’s mood.

  24

  Five days into the General Strike, on 9 May at 15.00 hours, the War Office issued its fourteenth Situation Report. The word ‘Secret’ was stamped in red ink across it. It was for the eyes of the Cabinet – and the top civil and military commanders – only. Britain was under a State of Emergency, her armed forces mobilized, but as the report reveals – some of the detail unworthy even of a line in a local newspaper – with the exception of Northern Division, the commanders in the field had precious little to communicate.

  SECRET

  SITUATION REPORT NO 14 Issued at 1500 hours on 9.5.26

  General Situation – Quiet throughout the country.

  Northern Division. Quiet but decidedly troublesome. Twenty-five telegraphs were cut near Blaydon – some bus services were withdrawn as a result of interference. In the Northwest area strong pickets have stopped private cars and refused them passage without permit. Much false news is being spread by strikers’ Councils of Action. In the Blaydon district the Chairman of the Council is a Communist. More trouble with food supplies is anticipated next week and more Special Constables would be welcomed.

  North Eastern Division. Quiet generally. Buses and trams started at Hull but have been stoned by mob. Police raided printing works at Shipley and found much seditious literature. About 48 buses running in Bradford.