BRITISH COAL INDUSTRY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26199, 9 July 1946, Page 5

BRITISH COAL INDUSTRY

By James Lansdale Hodson

(Special) LONDON, June 18. The pithead offices looked very neat from without; half a dozen motor cars were drawn up. The chairman's office might have been that of a London bank instead of a South Yorkshire colliery, and the man himself a young banker — as well turned out, as quietly spoken, his accent nearer Oxford than Sheffield. I knew that this pit and the two others allied to it had the reputation of being modern, but I had not expected this. The chairman and, when 1 met them later, the managing director and the chief engineer were the sort of men you run into in a brigade of guards, yet I have no reason to think they do not know their job—quite the contrary. I found it refreshing. I am told they have spent £1,300,000 on those three pits since 1933.

I was given a suit of blue overalls, a black helmet of compressed paper and a thick, short staff, and we set off for down the shaft, calling on the way to glance in at the store with its 5000 items, and to pick up our electric lamps—heavy, solid jobs (but some deputies carry an extra flame lamp for testing air). One store item is a delicate double-ended pick axe, the head weighing 21bs—that is the fashion today, 21bs. Some years back men preferred 2£lbs. They showed me round the engine house—as much power being generated as in a second-class powerhouse. You could have thought yourself on a mighty ship, so orderly was it.

The pit has a skip wind—meaning this: They do not bring up the coal wagons, as happens at most pits. The wagons are emptied down below into a skip, whose iron tubs, turn turtle to do it, and the skip then brings up nine tons —just three times as much coal in one lift as happens when the wagons are brought to the surface. Thirty or 40 winds an hour can be done. The next projected move is to increase the wagons used down below from 18cwt to four or six tons each—which is the size Americans are fond of. In a New World

We walked into the dark skip—for the lamps held near our knees gave little light—and down we went, myself swallowing at intervals to relieve my ear drums. Otherwise there was no sensation. We sank 750 yards in about one minute, walked out into the white-washed roadway, reasonably lit and with no need to stoop, with railroad (just over two-foot gauge) along which an electric haulage pulled wagons. The stone dust on the floor was an inch or two thick, and there was a good deal of noise from iron trams clanking or colliding with small thunderclaps. This was a new world —with tunnels or roadways, looking mysterious, leading to coal faces a mile' away, a world populated by men wearing only singlets and underpants and black helmets at odd angles, men who eyed me curiously as though I had dropped from another planet. We watched the check-weight-man at work (paid by the colliers) sitting alongside the company’s checker. A wagon outside ran over the scale, swung the finger along to 17£ or 18cwt, and a lad’s voice shouted which seam it was, calling out “Winnie” or “Joe” or “ Frank ” —short for Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt—the names given to the three coal faces being worked. As we walked to and fro, I chatted with four youths—two of them Bevin boys. The first Bevin boy was in an underground office checking stores. When his time in the pits is up he will leave for university to study languages. The second has come from the farming district of Essex, to which he will return. The third, aged 14, said he will stay two further years and then go into forestry. Only the fourth, the eldest of them, said he will make the pit his career. He is now working as

Modernised Equipment

thrower-off—his job is to uncouple wagons from the rope haulage, throw the loosed chain into the wagon and put a chalk mark on a boarddangerous work done as the wagon moved.

This part of the pit was warm—warm as an English summer’s day—and I was glad to move through three airlock doors to a cooler area, guided on the journey by an assistant manager who, wore a lamp in his cap and a battery on his hip.' He was dressed like, and as grimy as, any other miner. He was a man of 40. He spoke of the day when he worked as a pit-lad with his father, of how they would stay behind and put out three further tons of coal wljpn. the other men had left to go to the winding cage, and how they often caught the same cage. Better Amenities

This pit has just installed a diesel locomotive which will haul men to and from their work below T , saving 20 minutes’ walking time each shift and some energy too. We encountered the engine just.as it had made a trial run; and to my surprise just afterwards Tnet a pit pony, of which this pit has nine—thick-set ponies like miniature cart horses, some of them from Russia, and these spoken highly of as being less fiery than the Welsh. I have seen coal faces in other pits where men work two-foot seams lying naked on their sides, but in this pit the seams are five feet and six feet, and the conditions, therefore, more pleasant, and with much more machinery used for the job. Returning to the pithead, I saw baths of two sorts, where the miner has two lockers, one for working and one for travelling clothes, and where, having bathed, he may stand (if he wishes) on a moving floor which takes him for a two minutes’ ride between sun-ray lamps of alternate infra-red and ultraviolet. Two foam baths are built into the floor, also to treat rheumatism, sciatica, arthritis and so on. I do not suggest that this pit is unique inmodernity in Yorkshire (for I have read to-day of another group which introduced its first diesel locomotive for man-hauling in 1939 and where simultaneous cutting and power-loading at the coal face will be introduced in a few months), but it is better than most and is the best I personally happen to have seen—better machinery, skip winding, baths, canteens, boys' club, fishing club, and so on. Future Outlook The managing director of this pit said that he does not believe that when essential works orders are removed many of their men will leave the pit. He spoke of the reasons for poor output, naming some that are wddely ac-cepted-dislike of income tax, lack of goods in shops to buy, ability to earn all minor needs in less than a full working week. I suggested that on top of these reasons the problem is largely a psychological one. I suggested that the very qualities that allowed a miner to keep his head in 1940, never doubting we should pull through, were preventing him from seeing how grave the situation is now.

On pondering the matter, this other thought occurs to me—that I wonder if we shall ever again get the best out of our work-people unless they are made partners in running the workshops and factories, and partners in sharing the profits. I do not think even high wages are going to be enough in future if people feel shut out, no more than ciphers, and have it in their bones that “ they do not belong.” Maybe under nationalisation, knowing the pits are owned by the community of which they form part, provided they have a share and feel they have a share in running them, the incentive to higher output will be forthcoming. It is too early yet to say.