Yorkshire Mining Veterans opens tip a rich seam of social history in which participants - workers, officials and managers - speak for themselves. The book assembles extracts from forty-seven recorded interviews of former mineworkers born between 1890 and 1952, spanning the hand-got era to the age of mechanisation, from day-holes to super pits. Read what it was like to work on the pit-top or in the pit-bottom as a thirteen or fourteen year old, even to tram using a candle for light; to drive ponies and develop a variety of specialist skills; to experience and witness accidents and dreadful disasters, strikes, disputes, hardship and poverty. Anyone reading these snapshots of social history can not help but appreciate an underlying sense of comradeship and community. These are not the histories of famous persons but of ordinary working people whose lives, aspirations and experiences provides us with an interior view, a first-hand authentic record.
'...long overdue since it catalogues the stories of miners and their
real experiences in coal mines.' - Steve Kemp, National Secretary, National Union of Mineworkers
'These personal memories provide a unique and vivid record of the Yorkshire coal industry.' - Professor David Hey.
'Authentic voices from the coal mining industry add immeasurably of how working miners viewed their own lives.' - Dr Margaret L, Faul, Director National Mining Museum Caphouse Colliery.
'..a superb collection of mining memories ...' - Ian Winstanley, Coal Mining History Resource Centre www.cmhrc.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Price £9.99