Archived Extracts

It has been several years since New Hucknall Colliery swarmed with miners, but in it's heyday it was one of the area's largest employers, turning tub after tub of coal.
  Gone are the days of the 12-hour shifts and the shilling and penny wage packet, but thanks to old Suttonian Cyril Baggaley of Banbury, we are able this week to recreate just a little of what life was like there, all those years ago.

  During his retirement, Mr Baggaley, who has an exceptional talent for memory drawing, has recreated his old pals at New Hucknall Colliery, remembering them to the last intricate detail.
  He said, "I began work at New Hucknall Colliery on Waterloo Bank in September 1922 and very soon was studying the faces and expressions of my colleagues."
  However the day Mr Baggaley showed his efforts to the men, there were mixed reactions. "Some were amused at my drawing, but generally it caused agro, so to keep the peace I discontinued," he says.
  Mr Baggaley worked on the coal wagons for around three years until moving to the check-weight cabin. His job was to call out the stall numbers on the coal which was loaded in tubs. (the numbers were written in whitewash by the miners down the pit). The weight of each tub loaded with coal was recorded by the two check weighmen seated in the cabin.
  After the tub was weighed Mr Baggaley and his colleague of the time Bill Moore, had to twist the weight tub and pull the next one onto the scale. The full tub then ran down a slight incline onto a creeper.
  In those days there was no pit head baths or canteen and machinery was steam driven, until about 1927 when electricity took over.
  During 'snap-time', which was a period of twenty minutes, recalls Mr Baggaley, many of the men would drink cold tea.
  He said: "I devised a method of keeping my bottle of tea warm, by fixing a small shelf on the bend of the compressed air pipe, which ran alongside the steel coal belt, covered with sacking it kept the bottles of tea warm."
  One of Mr Baggaley's most enjoyable years spent at New Hucknall were in 1928, when he was the working mate of the late Harold England. "Harold was good company to work with. He operated the tippler (a device for emptying the tubs of coal onto the steal belt)."
  "I worked behind the tippler, my task was to pull out the empty tub, which was partly pushed out to the advancing full tub. It was a noisy job and sometimes very dusty, depending on the way of the wind which blew through broken sky lights."

Most Ashfield pits were working normally this week and NCB chiefs coolly announced business as usual despite the wrecking of lorries at the South Normanton depot and the attack at Silverhill Colliery.
  Would Mr Scargill regard these outrages as standard practice in pursuance of a trade dispute?
  Will Mr Scargill publicly denounce these pathetic mobsters calling themselves a Hit Squad?
  Will Mr Scargill in his regular rantings against the media join un in asking how a Canadian TV film crew just happened to be there for the three minutes it took for the wreckers to do their dirty work?
  Or will he continue to prattle on about the frustrations of striking miners and the use of basic trade union principles to get Nottinghamshire miners to see the light?