Plying my professional trade these days in North East Somerset, I have become fascinated by the history of the place. I knew that, until 50 years ago, there ran a railway called the Somerset and Dorset, cutting through Midford, Midsomer Norton and Radstock. Everywhere you look, there are remnants of the railway and in some areas almost everything remains, except for the lines themselves. The twin tunnels at Midford are so well-maintained, you walk through them half-expecting an express to thunder through. Instead, you get cyclists. And coal-mining, which took place in Somerset, I didn’t realise, right up until 1973. You have to look slightly harder for the signs, apart from the Batch in Paulton, an almighty spoil tip, preserved for the nation, which you simply can’t miss. I only realised how recently coal was mined when I met some of the ex miners and, more often, their widows.
The widows of the miners are everywhere in Somerset and they all tell stories of just how much their men suffered. If they didn’t die of miner’s lung, otherwise known as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, they died of something equally ghastly. Most, it seems, died agonisingly slow deaths, either retiring early because of illness or developing the illness soon after they retired.
Yesterday, I was shown the site of the pit head in Radstock, where the miners’ showers used to be, the paths they would walk home on, the houses in which they lived. This was no easy, cushy work: this was back-breaking work, sometimes literally. Fall sick and there went your job. There was no four or five weeks holiday and for many there were no real holidays at all. I was told that at the end of the long shift, you would watch the men pass and the main thing you would notice amongst the chatter was the coughing.
The stories I have been hearing are heartbreaking and suggest an era where either the rest of the people didn’t know the horrendous conditions these men were working in or we just didn’t care. I couldn’t have done it. I could not climb in the cage, rattle down to the pit head and work lying down in near darkness, hearing the creaking and groaning of the props and the ground. But they did this every single day.
I have met many of the old miners, some to be fair, not too damaged by the effects of working underground, but I have met far more widows, deprived of the loves of their lives, mainly through illness and disease and some, tragically, through accidents down below. Many of the men smoked and drank, smoking because everyone smoked and drinking because it made many men forget.
The stories of coal mining are not, I should emphasise, all bad. A visit to the excellent Radstock Museum will tell you that. But the effects of the closure of the mines and the railway have scarred areas like Radstock where the jobs were never replaced and there is almost literally nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Scrape only slightly below the surface and all is not well in many of the small towns and villages, with boarded up shops and pubs outnumbering those that remain. I always thought it was inner cities that were decaying and the small country areas that were thriving. How wrong I was.
When we dug coal, the country didn’t much care about the welfare of those who were digging for it. We just took it for granted. And in the 1980s, some of us did our bit to try to support the mineworkers when Margaret Thatcher took them on. She didn’t want to close the coal mines to save the men from working in terrible conditions at great risk to their own health, she closed them because it was part of her master plan to castrate organised labour. Perhaps if that had been the reason for closing the mines, many more of us might have sympathised. The lasting effects of coal mining in Somerset are still there and they are very sad to see.
