The Miner

Chapter 4 - My Ten Years in Weston  (1926-1936)

I was never a miner, so possibly I should not write about them.  I did live amongst them for ten years, but all I have is childhood memories from a long time ago.  I did work in the steel industry for many years.  While working in industry during the War I was often confronted with people’s attitudes to the miner’s strikes.  They just could not understand what was going on in the coalfields.  'I could', Harold Wells said: ‘The price coal owners and governments were paying for the Lock-Out and Rothbury was heavy.’  Jim Comerford said at Rothbury, ‘The hurt is there for all time.’

            I will just write of what I saw and remember.

            Many stories and newspaper articles have been written about the miner.  City people were unable to understand the continuous ferment in the mining areas.  They said the Coal Miner was Different.

            In those days the miner was either a British immigrant or of British stock, the same as the rest of the population.  He was an industrial worker the same as anyone else in industry.  He was an Australian, same as anyone else.  How was he different?

            In the City, there were multitudes of places to work, places to go, transport to get about.  Friends may come from the next suburb, or the next.  Neighbours may work in different worlds.  They may have different friends, different interests.

            On the coalfields, there was the Pit, nothing else.  If the Pit worked, there was money.  If it did not work, there was none.  Your neighbour was the same.  The whole town, all the towns around, were the same.  There was no area of life that was not dominated by the Pit.  Because they were forced to work in close contact in a highly dangerous environment under the ground, they grew to depend on each other.  There is no other occupation on earth where the worker is so isolated from the world.  No other occupation where the worker is so dependent on his workmates for his well-being and personal safety, for help or rescue when anything goes wrong.  There grew up between the coalfields people a bond of mateship and independence which had no equal.  Which carried into the Australian Seventh Division and became a legend in history.

            Miners’s sons did not enlist because they were more patriotic than anyone else.  They enlisted because the Army gave them clothes, shelter, food and the first pay day they had ever seen.  The economic system had denied them a decent living and independence when they needed it in their formative years.  Now it could miraculously find unlimited money to pay them to wage war.

            Much publicity was given to miners’ strikes during the war.  If the miner cared so much for his fellow men, for his own sons at the Front, why did he deny the country the coal it so badly needed to produce munitions?  I heard an American soldier say ‘Say Guy, why all this strike?’  The war against Hitler only began in 1939.  The war between the Worker and the Boss, the Coal Baron, the Capitalist, began in England in the sweatshops and the murderous mining practices of the Industrial Revolution.  It would continue after Hitler was defeated.  Far from caring, the miner had to fight right through the war to retain hard won safety and other conditions which the Boss tried to whittle away in the name of the war effort.  The miner at home feared the scorn of returning soldiers, if they came home to find conditions had been sacrificed.  ‘While we were away fighting, the battle had been lost at home.  Where is the promised land fit for heroes?’

            Miners could remember that promise in 1918 and what they got for it.

            The Coalfields became Home to thousands of people.  To some was measured out a grudging sense of security.  To all they gave hard, dirty, dangerous work.  To many they gave grinding poverty.  To many, stark tragedy in the form of rock falls, black damp, poison gas, fire explosions and phthisis, pneumoconiosis and other associated lung diseases.  I don’t think they ever made anyone rich.

            With monotonous regularity there would be a little notice in one corner of a newspaper – ‘Miner killed in fall of coal.’  -  ‘Miner killed in mine accident.’  The tragedy was not told in the corner of a newspaper.  It was told by a silent, whitefaced woman standing at the pithead, waiting for the body of her man to be brought out of the bowels of the earth.

            Newspaper headlines were reserved for ‘Miners strike again.’  If the readers looked closely enough at the small print they might find that the strike was over gas in the mine, inadequate ventilation, an unsafe roof or insufficient timber to hold it.  Discussions in the Board Room of the colliery proprietors were reserved for ‘How can we cut the miner’s wages?.

            Say the word ‘Bellbird’ and his intestines would contract into a knot.  One mine death, the shattering of the whole life of one family, was only a small news item.  When death became wholesale it became a ‘Disaster,’  The story of the Bellbird fire has been told too often to repeat.

            I just want to quote a little from the Annual Report of the N. S. W. Mine Department in 1923:

            ‘When they got a little below No.  4 West, they discovered four bodies lying one behind the other near the right hand rib.  They were lying at an angle, their heads being towards the rib facing outbye.  Noble and McCluskey then went on. When they reached No. 8 West,  McCluskey could go no further  -  Noble continued alone – When he got to No. 9 West he found nine men and three horses.  -  they were all dead  - He travelled up the main haulage tunnel to no. 8 East where he found a man and a horse dead. – He was found by rescuers and assisted to the surface.’

            A quote from Jim Comerford:

            ‘Fred Moodie, true to the best tradition of the mineworker, left his fellow deputies to go even deeper into the mine.  He sought to warn the men in his charge and lead them out of danger.  It was his last act.  He died in the attempt.’

            No front page news for people like Noble and Moodie

            Was the miner different?  We all begin life as a product of our heredity.  This product, this person, is then re-acted upon by our environment.  Nobody can deny that the environment of the miner was different.