When Coal Was King Timeshift

It's 1954 and the people of Yorkshire's West Riding

are about to see a very special show.

NEWSREEL: And here come the boys!

I beg your pardon, gi...I mean boys.

Believe it or not,

these ballerinas are actually miners.

It's hard to imagine any other group of working-class men

having the confidence to put on a tutu

and dance like this in front of their family and friends.

But the people we see watching, captured here on film,

were not the only audience.

Incredibly, footage like this was seen in cinemas all over Britain,

alongside the feature films of the day.

There's something about being a miner, being in the dark all day

that when you come out and you see the world,

you look at it with fresh eyes

and they express themselves in a lot of different ways.

Here are miners creating art

that wowed the London arts scene.

And here's a miner who writes plays.

NEWSREEL: It was Clarrie Stafford, who works at Steetley Colliery

and he was typing a play he'd written about mining folk.

We know about these extraordinary men

because the daily lives of miners

were chronicled by the National Coal Board's Film Unit.

It began filming them shortly after nationalisation

in 1947 and ended

just before the miners' strike in 1984.

Around 1,000 films

record what amounts to the final chapter

in Britain's long tradition of coal-mining.

Coal runs through human history.

It's always been both

a creative force and a destructive force.

From coal came some of Britain's

finest achievements and also some of her mightiest struggles.

The unit made every type of film imaginable.

There were dramas...

SHE SCREAMS

..documentaries...

..animations

and even quirky training films.

What's incredible about the archive is

they recorded every possible

technical, physical

advance in mining.

Then all the social changes that happened.

Everything from how they used their spare time

to where they go on holidays

and the things they do in their home.

Rarely seen in the last 30 years,

these historic films now offer us a unique window

into the lost world of coal-mining

and its remarkable people.

Britain was still recovering from the war

when the Labour government began its nationalisation programme.

On 1st January, 1947,

signs were fixed to all collieries,

declaring "This mine is managed on behalf

"of the National Coal Board

"on behalf of the people."

There was a sense of a need for

social renewal after the wartime struggles of so many.

Within months, the National Coal Board

set up its Film Unit.

NEWSREEL: Blairhall Colliery, Scotland.

Among these men is Tom Syme, miner.

Tom was picked for the British Ice Hockey Team at this year's

Olympic Games.

This is Dunfermline Ice Rink,

where Tom trained for 2½ years.

Who wouldn't - in this company?

And this was Tom's last practice game

with the Dunfermline Senior Team. Watch for number 12.

That's Tom.

Strenuous work after a day in the pit.

The Mining Review was a monthly newsreel, or cine magazine,

if you like,

which was about ten minutes long, a single reel of film

which went out to cinemas every month

particularly in all the coalfields across the UK,

but also elsewhere. We know

it was certainly shown in London, in the West End.

You would see Mining Review

before you went to see your feature film every month.

At its peak, in the 1950s,

Mining Review was shown in over 800 cinemas and watched by

millions of people.

The point of Mining Review

was, on the one hand, to reach the general public

an update them on the industry they were now paying for,

because it was a nationalised industry paid for partly

through taxpayer money.

But also to show them mining communities

at work and at play.

Each Mining Review generally followed a format,

beginning with technical information highlighting

the latest developments in the industry.

NEWSREEL: Williamthorpe Colliery in Chesterfield has been trying

out a new kind of pit prop.

Instead of being rigid, like the usual timber or steel supports,

this hydraulic prop is adjustable to different conditions.

This was followed by some light arts or music

featuring miners themselves and their leisure activities.

# We sing a song as we trudge along

# There's nothing finer than a song... #

And finally, promoting the various benefits

the Coal Board were keen to show

they were providing.

NEWSREEL: Dust prevention underground

is removing the danger of dust disease.

But thousands of miners already have dust disease.

The new act this July will give

fairer compensation and the Coal Board and the union

have been discussing other benefits.

I first came across the archive

when we were making the stage show of Billy Elliot.

We got in touch with the BFI

and they sent us some films.

The amazing thing about the Mining Review films

is the massive variety of subject matter.

NEWSREEL: One wet day, the pass to the loft was pretty muddy,

so Jack laid down

a lot of coal slack.

His pigeons started eating it.

And they've done it ever since.

The fame of Jack's coal-fired pigeons spread afield.

"Dear Mr Bramley," one letter went,

"I am not a pigeon fancier

"but I rather want to try the use of this on myself,

"to see if it will help my indigestion."

Another asked, "I wonder if you would send me about five pounds

"of this coal.

"It may be different to our local supplies.

"I enclose 20/-."

So these films shown miners and their families

involved in a wide range of leisure activities.

There's all the things you'd expect, like brass bands,

male voice choirs,

gala days, but a lot of stuff you wouldn't expect.

Not just sporting events but also hobbies.

There's quite a lot of eccentric stuff

going on in Mining Review at times.

NEWSREEL: These are the miners and sailors of Workington.

They're known as the Uppies and Downies,

originally the miners came from the upper part of the town

and the sailors down by the docks.

BELL CHIMES

There are no rules, no referees and no limit

to the numbers who take part.

The Uppies try to get the ball home

into the grounds of Workington Hall up in the town,

while the Downies have as their goal

a capstan on the dockside.

And these goals are two miles apart.

For nearly 200 years the game has been played like this at Easter

yet nobody's perfectly sure how it originally started.

And when it's all over, those on the winning side who aren't in

hospital have the right to parade the town with the man who scored

the goal, collecting free drinks in the pubs.

And they certainly deserve it.

I think as films there are some

really great documentaries, some of the early black-and-white

ones are beautifully shot,

just as works of art,

and also capturing an era that's gone.

People streaming out of the pit,

that Eisentstein/Lowry world

that no longer exists.

I started watching them as a bit of a joke, you think,

"That's going to be incredibly tedious," and actually they weren't.

There was some nobility and grandeur in it,

those great sweeps of the countryside

and the dignity of labour.

Then there was one called The Shovel

which I particularly like.

In a way it's the most boring film on earth,

and yet it's so portentous.

They talk about the "laying down of the coal seams

"and the carbonous material when the great mammoth walked the earth,

"and man invented the shovel to dig the coals with".

And you learn how to shovel coal really well.

NEWSREEL: The first is the way to stand.

Keep your shoulders in line with the movement of the shovel

and get your whole weight in the swing.

Stand comfortably.

You'll have seen a stance like this before,

that is, if you're interested in cricket.

It's the way a good batsman stands at the crease.

His shoulder is well forward to the line of the ball

and he puts his weight behind the stroke.

You don't have to be a Len Hutton to shovel well

but it's the same idea.

Which you start out in a way laughing at

but also there's something quite touching about them

they definitely capture an era that has now gone,

it's a civilisation that has gone with the wind.

At this time still common

for boys as young as 15 to go down the pit.

NEWSREEL: These lads are going to be miners.

But how are they going to learn the job?

Should they be sent straight down the pit

where they'll be in everybody's way

or should they go to college

where they won't learn anything of the practical side?

# The workmen in the Rhondda

# Are wonderful boys

# They get to their work without any noise

# They say through the Rhondda you never will see... #

I started in the pit when I was 16,

as my two brothers and my father done before me.

I went straight into the training centre, you could just walk into

the job in them days.

I didn't feel that I was a miner while I was on the surface,

to be honest with you.

Finally, when I went underground, I wished I was back on top.

# They say through the Rhondda you never will see

# A merrier lot than in Tipperary

# Too-re-loo

# Too-re-lay

# The best little doughboy that's under Jim Gray... #

The first time I went underground, and I don't mind admitting

I was a little apprehensive.

My father had worked the coal mines, he didn't want me to go down.

Uncles had told me the same thing,

so I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

It was fairly comfortable once I got down there.

Whitewashed roadways,

I could see everything that was going on

and I thought, "This is not so bad.

"I'll just continue on like this."

Later, when I was at the coalface,

that was a different world altogether.

Instead of walking in heights of eight or nine feet

along roadways, you were down to 3'6".

And it was ordinary wooden props,

setting steel bars

and the moving forward, having filled off

a stretch of coal anywhere between

three and six yards of coal.

# Oh, talk about hauling It's nothing but fun

# To do it on the level as well as on the rung

# To hook her and sprag her and holler, "Gee, way"

# I'm the best little doughboy that's under Jim Gray. #

When I left school, it was the Thursday before Good Friday.

It was in the days when school leaving

had just been put up to 15.

So when I got home on Thursday

before Good Friday,

My mother says, "Michael, your tea's on the table.

"By the way, you're starting the pit on Tuesday."

They may have been barely more than children,

but they were expected to work as hard as any adult.

My most embarrassing moments down the pit,

and I only had about a yard of coal to fill off,

which is nothing, really,

so I'm filling away

and all of a sudden I sees this figure

filling away with my coals.

"Who the hell are you, what are you doing?"

and it was my father.

My father was a deputy on that face

and he said, "I've just come to give you a hand."

After that I got all the flack from the fellas -

"He's got to get his bloody father to come and help out!

"Wahey, Kirky, man, you're hopeless."

So I told them, "Never again.

"It doesn't matter if I'm struggling, just stay away."

# I'm the best little doughboy that's under Jim Gray

# Too-re-loo

# Too-re-lay

# The best little doughboy that's under Jim Gray. #

For the Film Unit's crew,

who weren't used to working underground,

filming in mines was a challenge.

The real difficulty about filming underground

was that fireproof regulations were so strict

and we were limited - first of all,

the camera couldn't be electric

so we used a clockwork Newman Sinclair camera

which you wound up like this, laboriously.

The lights were not made for filming

and they were very heavy.

It was very different from filming on the surface.

The room you had to move around in

was very much more limited,

but you became used to this.

The newly nationalised coal industry

was hugely confident

and the Mining Review films

trumpeted its expansion and modernisation.

NEWSREEL: Within 100 yards,

is a coal mine that's been there for years.

Now, a five-year reconstruction plan is to win more coal

from under Manchester,

much of which will be for the city itself.

Coal carried many of the hopes of post-war Britain.

There was a pride in these nationalised industries,

particularly coal mining,

this can be seen very much in the animated film King Coal,

made shortly after nationalisation.

King Coal is stirred from his slumbers underground

by the cries from homes and factories for more coal.

And he comes to the surface and is seen bestride

the nation and there's a wonderful sense of movement

and colour and vitality

from this Technicolor film.

# Old King Coal was a merry old soul... #

It serves both as a recruitment film and a piece of general propaganda

for the coal industry in Britain.

King Coal allowed the National Coal Board to speak directly to

the public, reminding them of the key role played by coal

in the life of Britain.

In fact, the NCB was so buoyant about the future that it was happy

for miners to user its Film Unit to air work-related issues

such as the argument for a five-day week.

Can we afford it?

Well, Al, I'm all in favour of the five-day week.

We shall benefit physically from having a long weekend rest.

We may lose in production

but eventually will recover it.

We're all for it, Arthur,

but I definitely know this,

to ensure five full coal production days,

we still need an extra day,

and we shall need volunteers to do this.

Get the double pay for the extra day,

same as they get it on Sundays now.

I don't think so, Harold.

Production is bound to drop.

Granted, the five-day week must come to the pits

because they already have got it in other industries.

As was typical in the Mining Review series,

the film ends on a singsong.

# Hellfire, son of a gun

# Stand by, don't push

# Plenty of room for you and me

# Here's not an arm just like a leg

# A lady's leg... #

Along with the debate about the five-day week,

the early Mining Reviews highlighted improvements in the health

and welfare of miners and their families,

from the creation of new homes...

NEWSREEL: This is a great day for the Wilkes family.

They're moving in.

Instead of one room for all purposes,

they have a sitting room, dining room, kitchen and three bedrooms.

..to the development of health centres...

NEWSREEL: Every day of the week, the health centre is full.

The doctor's wife, herself a radiographer,

has the job of X-raying each miner every six months.

..and improved access to higher education.

NEWSREEL: This year dozens of young miners from all over the country

went back to school.

They had won university scholarships given by the National Coal Board

for training new mining engineers and administrators.

In May, 1949, the Film Unit was sent to record the visit

of the big American singing star Paul Robeson to a mine in Scotland.

Paul Robeson was intending to go to an Edinburgh colliery

and to sing to the miners in the canteen.

And we turned up and filmed him, I think that afternoon,

talking to the miners, walking about,

erm, and then we filmed the singing in the evening.

and he sang I Thought I Saw Joe Hill Last Night

which is an American song.

Joe Hill was a legendary American trade union activist

before the First World War.

# "I never died," says he

# "I never died," says he

# "In Salt Lake City, Joe, " says I

Him standing by my bed

# They framed you on a... #

Paul Robeson was very popular at this time

amongst mining communities in particular,

partly as a result of the feature film in which he starred,

The Proud Valley, from 1940,

in which he played an heroic and self-sacrificing

miner in South Wales.

He had strong sympathies for the underdog

and this earned him great respect amongst working-class communities.

To the miners, it must have been quite something,

in their everyday canteen

to be visited by someone who was a huge celebrity then

and for him to sing there such a song,

it must have been both moving and thrilling.

# Went on to organise

# I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

# Alive as you and me

# Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead

# "I never died," says he

# "I never died," says he

# "I never died"

# Says he. #

Into the 1950s,

increased mechanisation lead to greater productivity.

NEWSREEL: Here, 31 men have been averaging over 230 tonnes a shift

with a bigger output possible if they can get it away quickly enough.

That's pretty good going,

and the coal's not all small stuff, either.

Things were looking rosy for both the industry

and the miners and their families -

there's a real glow to the Mining Review films of this period.

Most of what miner's did in their spare time

focused around the local welfare or social centre,

which offered a range of sports, leisure and educational activities,

funded by the miners themselves.

NEWSREEL: The centre cost some £120,000 to build.

It was provided by the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation

and the miners and their families from Bilston Glen

and other surrounding collieries make full use of it.

And at the time, every miner

paid a one penny levy

to the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation

and they organise most of the welfare things that were going on.

First of all, they supported outdoor facilities

as well as indoor facilities.

NEWSREEL: Young Abe is a busy man.

Not only has he this swimming bath plant to look after,

but he also has to make sure that nothing goes wrong with

the tea-making apparatus

for that's what keeps the ladies happy while the men enjoy themselves.

And within them Welfare Institutes,

you had libraries,

and in them libraries,

there was books of all sorts,

where people educated themselves.

What a beautiful room this is.

It's bought and paid for by the people of this community here.

Paid it out of their wages.

This cooperative spirit

was frequently captured in Mining Review.

THEY SING A HYMN

All the films articulate

that sense that you don't live your life alone.

You live it with other people

and for other people.

Lee Hall

is fascinated by the social dynamics of the old mining communities.

He's come to the British Film Institute

to explore documents relating to the Coal Board's Film Unit, which,

like the films themselves, have been archived here for 30 years.

The Rolling Miner.

I have no idea what this could be.

13th year.

It was only after writing Billy Elliot,

with its story of a miner's son who wants to be a ballet dancer,

that Lee came across evidence mining and ballet had mixed before.

This is brilliant. Obviously,

I'd written Billy Elliot as a kind of fantasy,

and then when I was working with the Archive here,

they showed me this amazing film

of these stocky miners,

there's all these shots of them down the mine

and there's Jim Turner, the fireman.

NEWSREEL: Fireman Jim Turner,

underground worker, Jack Fish,

Colin Plant, clerk,

and storekeeper, Israel Downton.

They're all working underground and then they come up

and they did this mad

sort of ballet dance.

NEWSREEL: And here come the boys.

I beg your pardon, gi...

I mean boys.

They danced Coppelia

for the delectation of the village

and it's just absolutely hilarious and charming.

Typically in mining villages,

entertainment was a communal activity,

something participated in with neighbours and friends.

The biggest communal event in the miners' calendar was the gala day,

or miners' picnic,

and music was always central to these events.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

The Miners' Picnic in Northumberland was a huge

family celebration. Families came from all over

the Northumberland coalfield

to get together for a big party day.

Every pit would have its own brass band

or they would have borrowed one

if they didn't have their own, for the day,

so there would be a wonderful atmosphere.

Competition was important at these gatherings.

The local colliery bands would all compete for the title

of Best Brass Band.

NEWSREEL: The adjudicator, Mr Oliver Howarth, of Manchester,

is locked in a room and no-one must have contact with him.

When he hears the band playing,

he doesn't know which one it is, he can't see it.

Next band, please.

Right, Mr Howarth.

The adjudicator is now ready.

Every miner had sixpence deducted

from his wages by the Miners' Union

to pay for the brass band.

And there were 165,000 men in the Northern Coalfield

in 300 pits in the 1950s.

If you think about 165,000 sixpences every week,

you can see why it supported 150 bands.

TRUMPETS DRONE

It gave children a great opportunity to learn music,

and it was a source of pride in every family that they had somebody

playing in a brass band.

It was a great educational thing as well as being something that

cemented the community together and gave them a sense

of pride in having a band that was able to win competitions

or simply just appear at the gala.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

NEWSREEL: After the contest, in the afternoon,

all of the bands march down to the picnic field.

Brass bands themselves are kind of seen as a sentimental thing,

largely because of the Hovis advert.

But there's something quite powerful and Wagnerian

about the swell of this big load of brass coming up,

and the way a Yorkshire brass band plays,

and I know this because we've been looking into brass sounds -

completely different from a New Orleans trumpet

will flare and blare,

whereas a Yorkshire one does this Wagnerian swell.

There's something majestic about it,

it's not just whimsy and nostalgia,

there's something quite powerful about it.

What seems most significant is it was a band,

it wasn't about individual virtuosity.

It was about coming together and each playing your part

and you create this glorious sound.

Before the end of the day,

the judges had another winner to appoint.

Who was the prettiest girl?

The mining industry encouraged its pretty young ladies to come forward

and represent the collieries and the coalfield communities

and we developed Coal Queens.

Over the years, it became more than just a little local event,

it actually became a national competition.

And I had the privilege in 1982 of representing Northumberland

and that was huge fun.

Some of the prizes were more than a week's wage,

so it was a big deal

to win these things.

But one musical tradition was on the wane,

the mining folk ballads.

# I wish your daddy may be weel

# He's langly comin' frae the keel

# Though his black face be like the De'il

# I like a kiss frae Johnny... #

In the mid-'50s,

Mining Review became part of an initiative to revive and record

this dying folk tradition.

We often tend to think of folk song in terms of

Merrie England, dancing round the maypole,

a rural version of folk tradition.

But there was just as much a tradition

of industrial folk song

which is deeply embedded in the coalfields around Britain.

Now, AL Lloyd

a folklorist who published a book in the 1950s called

Come All Ye Miners: Songs & Ballads of the Coalfields,

and he actually used Mining Review as one of his research tools.

In Mining Review Fourth Year, Number 9,

there's a very interesting story called Miners' Songs

in which Lloyd appears on camera,

appealing to miners and mining communities

to dig out songs from their local folk tradition

that he could use in his research.

We want to collect them before they disappear

so we're having a competition with prizes.

If you know any of these songs of the coalfields,

please send them to me.

My name is AL Lloyd

and you'll find full particulars in the May issue of Coal Magazine.

The 80 or so folk songs collected

by AL Lloyd in his book

Come All Ye Bold Miners

form an important historical record of the ballads

of the British coalfields.

There's a famous song called The Blackleg Miners.

This is the version in the AL Lloyd book.

"Oh, early in the evening

"Just after dark

"The blackleg miners creep out and go to work

"With their moleskin trousers and dirty old shirt..."

# Oh, it's in the evening after dark

# That the blackleg miner goes to work

# With his moleskin pants and his dirty shirt

# There goes the blackleg miner... #

It is a sort of comic song about strike breakers,

but I think that's typical of the salty,

ironic way that these writers use that experience.

# It's in the evening after dark

# The blackleg miner goes to work

# With his moleskin pants and his dirty shirt

# There goes the blackleg miner... #

Now, several years after Lloyd

had published his book of mining songs,

there was a spin-off back into Mining Review,

because in 1957,

Mining Review ran five stories

as part of the regular issues called The Songs Of The Coalfields.

These were all taken from Lloyd's research,

using Isla Cameron, she's singing the Sandgate Nursing Song,

and using particularly Ewan MacColl

singing a number of songs

from north-east England, Scotland and Wales.

# One morning when I went to work

# The sight was most exciting

# I heard a noise and looked aroond

# And who do you think was fightin'?

# I stood amazed and at 'em gazed... #

That in turn led to an association between Mining Review

and Ewan MacColl in particular and Peggy Seeger

and they supplied some songs for use

on some Mining Review stories later.

# It's because it's my intention

# To let me see whether you or me

# Is the best invention... #

A lot of what the songs are about

are the problems of property, the industrial conflicts

there were going on in the coalfields.

The corpus of songs in the north-east

it's a sort of 200-year-old litany

of this, of the hardships and the political and social struggle

that these communities had to face.

# One old kid sent his notice in

# Just to mix the maisters... #

It's just a song that a friend of mine asked and it's called

The Working Man. It's about a miner

starting work at 16

and then finishing at 65.

It's just...

# It's a working man I am

# And I've been down underground

# And I swear to God if I ever see the sun

# Or for any length of time

# I can hold it in my mind

# Then I never again will go down underground. #

That's the gist of it.

Actually, my husband loves it, it's his favourite song.

# Pray tell me the cause of your trouble and pain

# And sobbing and sighing, these words she did answer... #

Fatal disasters had been part of life for coal communities

ever since mining began.

Some of the most powerful songs collected by AL Lloyd

are about such incidents.

This one commemorates a disaster in Scotland,

The Blantyre Explosion.

# The explosion was heard All the women and children

# With pale, anxious faces They haste to the mine

# When the truth was made known

# The hills rang with their moaning

# 310 young miners were slain... #

Despite improvements in mining safety in the '50s,

fatalities continued to occur.

I've been where there's three people

in my life down the pit

been killed from me to you.

Next to me.

With fall of stone,

and different things happening, and that was

a frightening thing. Never slept

for at least a fortnight,

thinking about him being killed right beside you.

-And could these accidents have been avoided?

-Yes.

I was in a rescue team

and we had to go to a private mine

in Tonyrefail,

and there was a fatality there.

This fella had got buried

at about three o'clock on the Monday afternoon.

And we didn't get him out of there until

about one o'clock the following day.

When we carried that guy out of that pit that day,

it was a beautiful, bright, sunshiny day.

His wife was wailing.

That really grabbed you by the throat, that did, mind.

That was not pleasant.

But, like somebody said, "That's mining, innit?"

Mining communities have a special way of burying their dead.

Any tragedy,

the funeral

was something to see, you know,

they felt it.

And they'd walk a certain length behind the hearse

and they got in the cars when they were out of sight,

towards the cemetery.

It was respect.

They had respect for each other.

The women, including myself, there's a funeral,

you stood there and you just watched.

All the men in their suits and ties

and all that, they all followed the hearse.

It was a sight to see and you'd be crying

even if you didn't know who it was,

because it was so moving.

Watch out, prop!

One of the things about the way miners work

is that they have to trust one another,

they have to be responsible.

You're expected to consider your fellow man.

Individualism, in a way,

is outlawed by the very nature of the task.

So when you do come up,

there's a great sense of release

and things are enhanced in a strange way.

When you came out the pit,

especially in the summer,

it was a brilliant thing to come up

into the sun,

because you sort of knew what you had missed -

that nice feeling of being in the sun.

This quickened sense of life

and the chance to be an individual again when above ground

led to a flowering of artistic expression.

A group of miners who painted were filmed by the Mining Review

in 1959.

NEWSREEL: These are the eyes of Oliver Kilbourn,

a salvage drawer at Ellington pit in Northumberland.

He's worked there since he was 13.

In his spare time, he paints.

I think there was a general belief that the arts were for everybody,

and that you couldn't live a properly fulfilled life

without having some cultural and artistic expression.

Oliver Kilbourn is a member of a group

started in 1934

to foster artistic appreciation.

It wasn't long before the members

decided to do some painting themselves.

Back in the early 1930s,

the Ashington Group came together

as a result of a workers' education initiative.

They'd studied all kinds of different subjects beforehand -

history and politics and all kinds of things -

and although they couldn't find a lecturer that they

wanted for their particular subject, this year,

they had the option of doing art appreciation.

So, not being one to shirk

a challenge, they decided to give it a go.

Working from a YMCA hall in Ashington,

they pursued their interest in art by employing Robert Lyon,

an arts academic from Newcastle University.

When Robert Lyon arrived in Ashington,

it must have been a complete culture shock for him.

He thought, "This will be a doddle because I've done it

"a thousand times before

"and we'll give them this, this and this

"and we're home and dry, they'll be happy."

Well, they weren't.

They were probably more knowledgeable

about the history of art

than he anticipated they would be

and therefore in an endeavour to try and move it on,

he tried to look at more practical aspects of art

and then realised that they were not susceptible

to being formally trained as artists.

NEWSREEL: The group believes

that the amateur shouldn't try to copy the professionals.

While expert techniques may be beyond their range,

they can still express what they see and feel

as directly and simply as possible.

Jim Floyd, left,

has been 47 years in the pits.

He's working alongside Len Robinson

and he's putting the finishing touches to his Easter Wedding.

But the men themselves

would have been all dressed up in their Sunday best,

but painting with whatever came to hand.

There wasn't money to spare frivolously

on buying paints and canvas,

so they would paint with wall paint,

they would use bits of hardboard that they had,

bits of wood, whatever came to hand.

And usually whatever colours came to hand as well.

I do believe that some of the colours that are on the wall

perhaps started off with a culinary origin.

SHE LAUGHS

For these miners, painting the classics

had no relevance.

For they, like Fred Laidler,

here on the left,

wanted to paint what was important to them

such as their tool box.

Fred Laidler was my father.

He was always interested in drawing and in art.

The Open Drawer is the one picture I can remember being painted.

My father was a joiner.

He loved being a joiner.

He loved the tools,

they were just an extension of himself.

But, again,

typical of them,

he knew the history of tools,

he'd read about tools,

he knew where they came from,

what they were used for and he cherished them.

As was characteristic of miners,

they set up a structure, with rules,

which outlined how the group would work in detail.

It's the Ashington Art Group,

they made this rule book.

It's incredibly bureaucratic.

I think it speaks a lot about the importance

they put in any activity that they did.

Number five - new members

to be informed when starting of the following conditions.

A probation period

which shall constitute six consecutive meetings.

Two - that the group shall decide

at the seventh meeting by unanimous vote

whether or not the candidate shall be accepted,

et cetera, et cetera.

It seems kind of probably unnecessary

in order to make art.

One of my favourite paintings in the collection

is one of Len Robinson's

and the lady is standing on the table in the kitchen

whitewashing the ceiling.

The man is just tending to a piece of stuff on the wall.

I imagine that's fairly typical, certainly was typical in my house

where my mother would have done the stronger bits of work

and my father, if he'd been allowed

to do anything at all,

it would have been something menial or

he would have been chased out of the house altogether.

Wives and mothers are often conspicuously absent as subjects

in the Mining Review films.

This goes against what we know about how pivotal

women were in making pit life work.

Men were doing the work, they were going down the mine,

but at home we had to be very strong.

Because they worked such long hours,

that the wives had to see to most things.

My husband didn't know what shopping was until he retired.

He didn't know how much a pair of shoes were.

So the women had to be strong and do a lot.

Everything in those days.

-They didn't know which drawer their socks were in, did they?

-No.

-We nearly sugared their teas for them.

-We did, that's right.

When husbands and sons arrived back from work,

the women were expected to have hot food on the table

and hot water to wash in.

This was further complicated

if the men in the house worked different shifts.

If you had a family, perhaps a husband and two sons,

and they were working in different shifts,

you had men going out, men coming in,

they all had to be fed at different times,

they all had to get their sleep at different times,

they all had to get bathed at different times

when there wasn't pit baths so water had to be heated.

And, of course, in the early days,

they didn't have what they called the pit baths,

which was where they got bathed

and they had to come home dirty and you had all these dirty

clothes they'd been wearing,

you had to clean all that lot,

and get ready for them for the next day

which wasn't very easy as you can imagine.

My first two children didn't know they had a father.

He was in what we call "four shift"

and he used to go out at 12 o'clock at night

and by the time he came in, the kids were away to school.

In spite of these long and exhausting shifts,

some miners still found time to write.

NEWSREEL: Miners returning home in the dark hours

often heard the click-clack-click of a typewriter

coming from a house in Whitwell in the Midlands.

It was Clarrie Stafford and he was typing a play

that he'd written about mining folk.

It was accepted by the Chesterfield Civic Theatre.

Some men would make a fuss o'er owt.

Maybe so but I bet you never had

your carbuncle poked with a stick.

SHE GROANS

It was called Dear Strikers

and was about the day the ladies went on strike.

Well, this is a comedy.

But ever since I saw a man hacking away at the coalface,

I wanted to write about the miners.

That was in 1929

when I was 14.

And a miner's life lends itself to humour,

drama and sometimes tragedy.

And, so, 12 months ago,

I decided to write this play about the only people I really knew.

It's a moment of tension,

even for the old-stagers, as curtain-up approaches.

But Chesterfield soon made up its mind.

They liked the show and they made their appreciation felt.

One miner whose writings came to national prominence

during this period was Sid Chaplin

from the north-east.

His stories often focused on the rural nature of the pit village.

"From boyhood, I've loved the long, winding valley

"with the Pennines, hazy and half-seen in the distance.

"It was then that the countryside grew upon me.

"The micro-cosmos of the village, the fields and farm,

"the river and the woods provided new wonders every day.

"When the sun shone there was open country to run wild in."

Ah...

this is Sid Chaplin.

He wrote these incredibly beautiful stories about

working as a young man in the mines,

but also about the world of the pit village,

kind of what it meant in this period

of huge change.

Even he's talking about how the big modernised, streamlined

industry was taking over,

this small industry...

The idea of the pit village,

they were very often very small communities

and what people don't perhaps understand

is that they were very often close to the countryside.

I was born in-between Weardale and Teesdale

and the pits.

There was this splendid moorland landscape just the doorstep.

Just at the end of the street, always you had the pulley wheels.

And I graduated from that kind of landscape,

600-feet underground,

into an entirely different landscape, a man-made landscape

and that fired me as well.

I think this is very much Sid,

when he writes, "My work and background is more important,

"the place and the people where I grew up."

I think what he manages to do rather brilliantly is to

use his own life to tell this bigger story.

NEWSREEL: What's important is this.

You have a nice high tea,

Heinz soup, half a pound of cooked pork,

with a little of the crackling for body.

You languorously climb the stairs and have a nice, hot bath,

water up to your chin.

For this is Friday night

and you want to sweat clean, if you have to sweat,

and it's ten to a penny you will before the weekend's over.

Then you shave yourself with real precision,

brush your teeth, cupping a hand over your mouth,

blowing your breath up just to make sure that the old womanising

breathing is sweet.

Then you pull on a clean shirt

and feel your skin tingle, pingle, tingle.

That's the way it should be

and has been for a thousand nights or more.

The 1950s had been a good decade for the mining industry,

with coal production peaking.

But the 1960s would see a prolonged period of contraction.

In 1963, Mining Review produced a short piece about the closure

of a pit in Wales.

It began with a song by Ewan MacColl.

# Come all you gallant colliers

# And listen to me tale

# How they closed the Aberaman pit

# In Aberdare, South Wales

# It was in 1842

# That coal there first was won

# She's yielded 40 million tonnes

# But now her days are done. #

Coal was starting to be seen as a dirty fuel

and an industry that belonged in the past.

Many people associate the '80s

with a real period of decline

of the mining industry,

which it certainly was,

but it wasn't the first time that mass closure of pits

had happened.

The '60s was a period when many thousands of miners

lost their jobs and communities were either destroyed or uprooted.

The National Coal Board had to adopt a different approach

to attracting new recruits.

Teenagers were no longer so keen to go down the pit...

so its recruitment films, now made in colour,

like this one from 1965, Big Job,

had to work much harder to make the industry seem appealing.

NEWSREEL: And to get the most out of the machines,

we need more men,

young men who want to learn the thousand skills a miner must master.

Behind the bravado of Big Job,

it's clear that this is an industry in decline

and that true confidence is beginning to diminish.

This is seen in the tone

and style of films made from the late 1960s onwards.

CHEERING AND WHISTLES

Health and safety animations, like this one,

still had a practical purpose.

The tone, though, is plainly more trivial.

SLEAZY MUSIC AND CHEERS

The problems threatening coal-mining

were about to become fatally divisive.

But the films just weren't able to reflect this.

At one point they got really cheeky and asked for a budget

for some dolly birds and made a sort of Carry On Down The Pit

kind of thing or Confessions Of A Pit Man kind of thing,

getting a little bit saucy.

One of the interesting things about these films

is that the trajectory of the NCB's film-making history

kind of reflects the trajectory of the coal industry in general.

And as we know, of course,

in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s,

this was an industry headed towards a crisis.

And the films take on a slightly desperate kind of triumphalist

tone in an attempt to try and convince the viewer

that the mining industry has hundreds of years of glorious

future ahead of it.

NEWSREEL: And it is upon them, they who implement the tools

and the decisions,

as well as upon the mining engineers

who will continue to devise and execute their dreams of the future

that we shall all continue to win our essential

energy from under the earth,

not only for the next 40 years but for the next 400.

I think it's very telling that in a film made in 1978,

they make a point of ending on the conclusion,

the resounding conclusion,

that there are 400-years' worth of coal underground.

And that was true and to make that point at that time

is quite significant and perhaps they knew

there were forces at play

that meant they were under threat and they might not be

around for that long.

The NCB Film Unit,

which had been launched in 1947 with pride and much fanfare,

making films that were seen by millions in Britain every month,

now quietly stopped production

as the coal industry began to be broken up.

The very final Mining Review,

36th Year, Number 5,

which was released in April 1983,

so just before the miners' strike began.

To me, this is one of the most moving films ever made.

NEWSREEL: Only coal, exemplified by the impending birth of the new

Selby coalfield and its vast reserves,

can guarantee us a supply of energy for centuries ahead.

Selby is a forerunner,

a blueprint for the other great coalfields of the future.

There must, and will be, a light at the end of the energy tunnel

and, born of coal,

it will dazzle us.

The very year the Film Unit closed,

the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike for the last time.

The strike ended in defeat for the miners

and led to an extensive closure programme

and the eventual privatisation of the industry.

There are now less than a handful of deep coal mines in Britain,

employing just a few thousand people.

In most of the former mining communities,

the remnants of the coal industry have been erased from the landscape.

If you look around Ashington now,

or if you are a stranger coming into Ashington for the first time,

there's very little evidence

that it was ever a thriving coal-producing town.

It was inevitable, I suppose, but nevertheless,

it changed the whole nature

of the town, it changed the people, it changed their attitudes.

My granddaughter, she's 16 now.

When she was about ten, I took her

to where was I was working and there was a boiler house full of coal.

When she saw the coal, she said, "What's all them stones?"

She thought it was stones.

She was about eight to ten years of age.

She's 16 now, so she didn't even know what coal was!

So there we go.

That's how far a distance we are from it now.

# It stands so proud

# The wheel so still

# A ghostlike figure on the hill

# It seems so strange

# There is no sound

# Now there are no men underground. #