In his memoir, The Home Place, author Brian Leyden gives a vivid description of life in the mines. Let's look at some extracts from the book.
In the following passage, Leyden describes the conditions in which the miners worked:
'The coal mines were often tiny by the standard of most industrialised countries. The men often had to lie on their backs in water, using a handpick or short-handled shovel to get at a thin seam of coal under a ledge of rock.'
Life as a miner was not for the faint of heart, as the next passage illustrates:
'At the pit entrance a red light burned at a picture of the Sacred Heart. The coal-miners blessed themselves at this spot before they went underground. Strangers who visited the mines out of curiosity often found the experience of the mineshaft so frightening they never got 'past the picture.''
Being down in the mines must have seemed like being in another world. The surroundings were very different from the world outside and the miners even had their own language:
'You never saw a 'styme' of daylight from the time you went underground that morning until you surfaced again that evening. They spoke an underground language of 'sumps' and 'gobs', 'hutches' and 'clips', 'bings' of slate and 'bullets' of rock, 'caps' for detonating 'spats' of dynamite.'