Riches beneath the Earth Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone

My interest in the mining business stems from when I was a small boy.

A lot of people don't realise that in this village just down the road

there were about nine collieries of one sort and another.

There were once a company called the Darcer Lever Coal and Terracotta Company

and most of the people who owned these pits lived in this area. This were the posh end, you know.

The bit down the road they used to call Dolly Tub City, cos I

think they took washing in, you know, to subsidise the poor money they got.

There are no less than about nine collieries down there

and when I were a small boy I used to go howling bricks down the shafts

and unless you've whizzed a brick down a mineshaft...

very unbelievable noise. Boom, boom, boom.

When Fred Dibnah was a lad, coal was king and Britain still had a flourishing mining industry.

Mining and all the engineering that was involved always fascinated Fred.

The basis of it must have come, because it was born out of the skills

and the sheer toughness of the miners,

almost like a glamorous profession to Fred.

He'd look at a miner as being some kind of larger than life hero and he had great respect

for anybody such, as Alf Molyneaux, who had been a miner in the past.

To Fred, that was the definition of a proper man -

somebody who could do something that required a great degree of violence

and skills and tenacity really, and being a hard man.

Those things were important to Fred.

Getting down to the coal face always excited him and before the miners' strike

and the pit closures of the Thatcher years,

there had been plenty of coal mines for him to see around Bolton.

This is Astley Green Colliery near Manchester

and I've visited this site on many occasions over the years

and the very first one was 20 odd years ago,

when it were still actually going, it were in the throws of being closed actually,

and into that engine room over there and I must say it were quite a fantastic sight.

Watching the engine revolve at great speed, you know, when it still had ropes down the 1,000-yard deep shaft.

Then, on the second visit after that, dereliction, you know, the scrap man had been and all the windows

were broken in the engine house, and the rain were going in at one side and out at t'other and they'd nicked

all the brass off the engine and it looked very sad and only beat the scrap man by the skin of its teeth.

Now, of course, things are looking up for it.

There's the dedicated body of enthusiasts and grants from here, there and everywhere.

They had a lot of bother in 1908 when they sunk it.

-The water...

-Water, yeah.

-It's seven eighths lime with cast iron tubbing, innit?

Yeah, I've rode this shaft. I worked here for a spell at '60s.

Yeah, this was coal mining shaft this and I believe they're in process of getting monies together

to get it repainted and refurbished properly.

Better hurry up, you can see a few holes in it!

Being as it is it's the last one in Lancashire really, you know, it's got to be worth...

-Its worth saving, innit?

-A big grant from lottery people to keep it stood up, you know.

If you wanted to open a ballet school there'd be millions for it, you know,

but nowt for paint sommat like that, which has kept a lot of families in bread and butter for a long time.

Hardly 20 years ago, there used to be

the most modern pit in Europe, Mossley Common.

What they did, when they closed it,

they just buried everything and hearsay is

there were millions of pounds worth of stuff under there.

Today there is very little trace of this great industry other than

the remains of collieries like Lady Victoria near Edinburgh, which now houses the Scottish Mining Museum.

Yeah, this is the area of the pit where the maintenance men did all the stuff, you know.

On this level, they got all the locomotives down and all the bits and pieces.

And this is the bell that did the signalling.

I don't think anybody will come no more though.

This is the bottom of the great head gear here,

and then, of course, the top of the shaft,

which went down, I think, for 1,500 feet

into the bowels of the earth.

All very quiet.

And round here, this is where everything got sorted out, you know,

all the coal got sorted out and some went to the washeries

and some I suppose got loaded up onto trucks and sold around the town

and the immediate neighbourhood.

This is a bank of eight Lancashire boilers that once generated the steam to drive the winding engine.

Of course, when they were first installed in here they would be hand fired with coal, you know.

Now at a later date for economy's sake it's just coal dust which were actually blown in with a fan system.

So really it all run for nothing other than the maintenance of it all.

Each one of them is eight feet diameter and 30 feet long and weighs about 35 ton,

lot of scrap iron, really.

In fact, it's a miracle that they haven't gone because it's one of the few places left

where there's such a big bank of these things still intact.

Once it would be the scene of unbelievable activity

with a million number ten coal shovels flying about and now it's quiet and peaceful.

I think I'll go and look round the back, see if there's any economisers

or wear pumps or anything mechanical of such nature.

All me life I've been interested in, sort of, the mechanics of it all and the history of it all.

How like the mineral like coal and lead and tin and slate were extracted out of the ground.

-Can I have a go?

-Well, I'm not going to stop you. You're too big to fight with.

Can you get up?

I can't get bloody up! How much did you pay a week for this?

Nowt, you're on nowt today.

Freemans.

The other thing Fred brings over is the comradeship amongst the people.

It was the people

that made this industry what it was

and Fred's programmes don't just focus on the archaeology,

but he brings to life some of the people as well.

DRILLING

Can I have a job? LAUGHTER

What do you mean it's not too hard? You've only done two minutes. What about the next seven hours?

'Fred always admired professions'

where the ordinary sort of workman had quite an arduous task.

The harder it was, as in mining,

the more he admired the men who had to do these jobs.

The danger as well, the fact that these men had to go underground for eight or ten hours a day

and every day potentially they might be killed during their working day.

They had a very arduous job to do, a skilled job.

Not very long ago, England once had a vast mining industry, you know.

It's very sad to say it's practically nearly all gone, you know.

There's still lots of places, like Caphouse Colliery here,

where you can actually still go below ground and see how it used to be, you know.

It's quite exciting.

Still got a wooden head gear, you know, which is wonderful to me.

WHISTLE BLOWS

-Now then, David.

-All right, Fred.

Aye, not so bad. See you've still got a wooden head gear.

Aye, we have. It's one of the only ones left in Europe now.

Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. What year were this made?

This engine was installed in 1876.

-Yeah.

-And regularly used until 1979.

Yeah, and it's still running.

Aye. And the indicator there tells us roughly whereabouts the cage is in the shaft.

As I start to come towards the top now, I start looking at

the side of the drum for me marker so that I can stop to the inch.

I'm looking for the letter T coming round. There it is look.

That means that the...

-little lines in the cage are level with the...

-That's right, aye.

If you leave a step in it, they're not long in asking what you're playing at or words to that effect.

I read in a mining book, near us in Wigan,

winding coal they actually went at 57 miles an hour, the cage in shaft.

When you looked at pictures of it, the size of wheels on top of head gear and it's about 34 diameter.

Big wood, that were a woodener.

All very sad really, innit, that's it practically all gone.

Well, it is, aye.

-Aye, Lancashire, there's no pits left at all.

-No, no.

-No, they're all shut, yeah.

Yeah, anyway we're due for a trip down into the bowels of the earth.

Yeah, we'll go and have a look at our mine.

Right, this is a pit bank, Fred.

Oh, this is it, where we descend.

This is the brass riding check, so we know how many people are underground at any one time.

-So if anything terrible happens, you know where I am.

-That's it.

Right then, off you go, Fred, in you go.

Obviously, people in mining did understand the industry, because

it was their living, that's how they made their living, of course.

But people from the non-mining areas,

I think he did raise the profile, as it were, tremendously, yes.

And his understanding of mining engineering was tremendous.

And around here we've got some of the drilling machines that we use, Fred.

You can see there's a very early hatchet one.

-Aye, I've got one of them.

-Hydraulic and compressed air ones.

This one's the portable electric drill, it's the miner's equivalent of the Black and Decker this one.

You get it up there, one chap would hold it up here on his shoulder

and you'd have about three of them shoving at the back, aye.

And that were all instead of one of them fancy props.

Set off with a drill like that, that sort of length,

then finish up with one about eight foot.

Get the haul in, powder in, strim it up.

-Is that metal?

-No, that's just rolled in the bit at the end,

-that's tungsten tip at the end.

-Yeah, yeah.

Just put a bit of wire through there and that holds your bit in.

Don't leave it down the hole!

-Right, we'll move on then, Fred.

-Right, come on.

-See on the conveyor belt at this side, Fred?

-Yeah.

The coal that we've got on it and if you have a look at this,

you can see here...

They used to throw that away in the olden days, didn't they?

Yeah, but that's what they want at the power stations,

so we alter the discs on the machine to give us that type of coal.

Fred had a real enthusiasm for mining.

Up until Fred made his series of programmes,

people all saw stereotypical mining areas

as dirty places where people used to come to work for 12 hours,

go home, have a bath in front of the fire.

I think what Fred did, he raised people's awareness of the fact

they're actually fascinating places and the enormous amount of industrial heritage that we've got

and the archaeology that was there, where the remnants of these places have been left behind.

So I think really Fred's raised the interest of people in so much as

they now understand that they were fascinating places to work.

Now then, Fred, this is the business end of the job,

that's the shearing machine and that's your disk there.

-Now that's designed to give us small coal for the power station.

-Yeah, it's like a grindstone.

Just grinds it up into powder here and you can see the powder on the conveyer.

That machine cuts your coal off, goes right down to the end of the face,

turns that cowell over, comes back up this way, putting the bottoms up there.

As it cuts that up, leaves a gap there at the front of the face side

and we've got to move these roof supports over then into that gap.

I'll just show you what type of noise that machine gives off as we go down.

LOUD ROAR

That's the noise that's going off all the time.

Sounds like my wireless when it's gone wrong.

'We're getting well over 100,000 visitors each year,'

likewise the Welsh Mining Museum, they're approaching 200,000 people they get through their doors.

It's purely because people such as Fred are raising people's awareness of our industrial heritage.

People are actually now starting to find it interesting.

What happened at the back here when, you know, all this lot's advancing along?

Once that had moved forward, everything at the back caves in,

that's solid cave-in, total cave-in we call it.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Now the colliers, they liked it to drop, flush up, flushed right up to the back.

They didn't like to be able to look back there and see a football field hanging up.

-An awesome sight, waiting.

-Certainly was, aye.

And when it did break, just sounded like an express train coming down the face.

-Millions of tons of...

-All coming down at once, aye.

-Like a steam hammer.

Colliers were all trying to get off the face at the same time.

Get out the way, let it settle before they come back.

And the amount of dust that it displaced as well, couldn't see your hand in front of you.

No, no. Yeah, it must have been quite scary if it didn't all come down fairy early, you know.

-Bet some of them had a day off work in anticipation.

-Oh, aye.

Afternoon shift would ask day shift if the gob had broken

and if it hadn't, they'd think, "Shall we or shant we?"

And they were all a bit nervous about it.

-Superstitious lot, the miners.

-Certainly were.

-The old stories about Mondays and Fridays.

-Oh, aye, yeah, yeah.

I don't think I would have ever liked to be like a hugher of coal or like a miner,

you know, sort of the technical term is.

But I would like to have been in on the sort of

the beginnings of sinking a big pit like this one here behind us, you know.

The shaft 1,000 yards deep and 22 feet diameter and all the problems that they had, you know.

Half of this shaft is lined with cast iron tubbing, you know,

like a big cast iron tube in sections, a bit like the underground in London.

I do believe they actually froze the ground around to keep the water back

while they got through it into the more solid stuff down below.

I think sometimes industrial history, engineering history,

is played down too much. People get excited about kings and queens,

but not necessarily about the great men and women

who made Britain the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution.

And when he takes us to somewhere like the coal mining museum, he shows us how coal was essential

for steam production and that was essential for steel production,

and the whole thing fits together and suddenly your eyes are opened.

This is Big Pit here in Blenavon and here you can actually see how

coal and iron industries altered the landscape of the South Wales valleys.

Blenavon iron works is situated just behind me over there and it was the growth in iron production

that led to the great increase in the demand for coal.

If you look behind me over there, you know,

all them pit heaps, 100 years ago, it must've been an unbelievable site of, you know, the mining industry

and then you look a bit further sort of south

and you can see where the iron works were, you know.

They were definitely all there to feed the hungry mouths of the blast furnaces on the iron works.

'A lot of people think that Fred'

was just a hands-on sort of approach type of person.

Really Fred was quite well read

and any information he could find out on any subject that took his fancy

he would pursue avidly, sort of thing.

Often, when I worked at the mining museum,

I'd carry out a bit of research for him on different aspects of engineering and mining

and he just soaked up any new knowledge, really keen.

-After you.

-Right.

This originally had a wooden head gear.

How long has this iron one been here?

Well, since 1922, it was changed from wood to iron.

But it's like anything else, like us all, all getting older.

It used to be repaired and kept in good order, shall we say.

-Nice windy day you picked anyway.

-Yeah.

-I wonder how many pits there were over there when you think about it.

-62 I think there was at one time.

As well as levels, loads and loads, hundreds of levels.

When did they actually disappear, you know?

Well, they've been there for a long time, you see.

The coal is right near the surface,

came along scratched in and had what they wanted.

Yeah, just did little drip mine and all them little coal heaps.

All them heaps where people have been busy helping themselves to some coal.

-Here we are then, Fred, welcome to my world.

-Aye.

-It's exciting stuff up here, isn't it?

-That's right.

Here we are on top of the winding gear of the Big Pit in Blenavon, you know.

-What diameter are these wheels?

-I'd say about 16 feet, Fred.

-Yeah.

I know you were telling me earlier you're going to have to lift them up to put some new bearings in.

Going to change the bearings, yeah. That'll be a nice little job.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Up the ladder.

What sort of gear, what will you use?

-Oh, couple of lifting box.

-Like just chain blocks?

-Yeah.

Whenever you had to get one down, you know, they had to force...

-A crane I would think, yeah.

-Yeah.

Bit awkward to get a crane up here, but we'll manage I suppose.

I wonder how they went on, you see old pit head gears and there's no...

-None of this.

-Yeah, no gantry over top, you know, and yet they got the damn things up, didn't they?

-That's right.

-Must have just have had fair poles.

-You have the one half, I'll have the other.

-Be a ton or two in one of them.

Ah, few ton, yeah.

Because of Fred's personal interest in the coal mining industry,

it's been really good the way Fred has reminded people

how important our mining industry was, sadly recently lost.

So Fred has highlighted what remains around the country

and obviously the building of his mine in his own back yard,

in a sense, that shows you the extent of his enthusiasm.

And that interest really has spread wider,

widely to people who didn't really know much about mining history.

It is really a bit unusual to have a pit head gear in your back garden,

you know, especially if you live in a reasonably residential area.

Not everybody got one, you know.

The thing is that I've got a grand plan and this pit head gear is part of it.

I've got this plan to actually build a replica coal mine

in me garden which I've had for a long time, you know.

I hope, you know, the powers that be will let me do it.

This idea sort of gradually emerged that Fred would obviously

like to have a mine of his own and Fred said he needed an illustration

of a traditional pit head gear, a wooden one,

say about 30 foot high, that possibly he could duplicate.

I tracked one down of a colliery at Blackrod near Bolton.

I showed it to Fred and he was very excited.

He said, "Oh, yeah, I can make one of those."

-And off he went and made a start.

-Wherever you went to a preserved colliery that had shut

and they'd decided to make it into a museum,

it weren't really quite like what it were like,

because they didn't wind coal any more

and there were always violent activity at the top of the shaft had nearly all gone.

So he wanted the pit, that sort of thing,

but he wanted it moving as well. He wanted a tub of coal

come up the shaft, go onto an haulage system,

run down the hill, in the tunnel and back up the shaft to show something actually moving.

It's when very sad when you go to all these preserved collieries and

you look at them and they're like a shadow of their former self, you see.

The top of a mine shaft in the olden days,

when they were winding tubs up, it were very violent, you know.

There were unbelievable action and really quick

and a lot of bell ringing and clanging and what have you.

Boom, boom, ding, dong, dong and gone!

What I want to try and create is a scene like that.

We've got all the ingredients, we've got the fans, we've got everything we need, really.

We've got saws for sawing pit props up,

we've got saws for, you know, doing everything really,

and our own metal working machinery which, of course, will help with all the...

Every good colliery had its own blacksmith's shop

and mechanics shop where them men were second to none.

They could build you anything you wanted, because it were necessary.

It's a great shame what happened to our coal industry, really, now we're breeding a nation, I'm afraid to say,

who won't even know what them men did, they've all gone.

It's going to break now.

A few months ago and this were all a dream.

I didn't really think we'd have got on so good in a way.

Got a good team.

Yeah, I know. Real mining men.

I'm in me best waistcoat here.

Should have a bowler hat on really.

To me a bit.

There's lots of good pictures of shaft sinking like this where they're all stood around, you know.

There's always one old guy with a big belly and a waistcoat with a gold watch chain.

I'm in charge.

We have one of them.

Aye, I know.

I think Fred liked to see himself as the colliery manager,

sort of stood there with his waistcoat on and overseeing operations really.

-Hello, my love.

-'And we were sort of his miners, in a sense.'

I weren't answering because I was working with Fred and we're in a very difficult situation.

I think it's fair to say that the only time

that Fred was truly happy is when he was in his garden.

There was just so much that he wanted to achieve here,

certainly in the last year of his life, when he started wanting to dig his pit.

It's a great pity really he didn't the get chance to finish that.

I wasn't very happy about it at first, I must admit.

When he came up to me with the idea of digging 150 foot in our back garden, I was absolutely terrified,

because it's only several feet away from the back door.

I consider myself I might be in a position where I woke up one morning and the house was sliding down,

but, of course, Fred had all this great engineering capability and skill,

and he had many friends who were ex-miners

and I think it's fair to say that if he'd accomplished that, carried on to do it, he would have been OK.

I don't think we'd have had any major landslides.

We started really in secret to sink the shaft.

Me wife initially kicked up a bit of a stink,

but she just thought, being a woman, you know,

I was just going to dig an hole and not support the sides and the garden would disappear

and the house would disappear, which is a load of nonsense, you see.

I've got about three sets of mining management books, you know,

from the great days of when they actually did it

and at the bottom of all this brickwork,

there's a big iron ring that's got an hole in it the size of the inner diameter of the brickwork.

The modus operandi, that means how you do it, I think,

is to get the ring, set that up at ground level, like we did here at the top at first,

and then lay about two foot of brickwork on it.

And then dig down about three feet to lower the ring into the ground.

It was the graft, sheer hard graft that was important to Fred. If you could do that...

Like when he started digging the pit outside,

if I'd have showed willing and gone down there

and shifted several tons of earth, I'd have been in his good books.

But digging the mine shaft wasn't just hard graft.

Fred enjoyed the challenges the project presented and he came up with his own unique solutions,

like his method of surveying how deep the shaft would have to be dug.

There's only one important measurement that we haven't got

and that's the difference in height in between the garden down there and the river.

-Oh, right, yeah.

-Where the tunnels going to go. I've had a brilliant idea.

You'll like this.

-If we get a bow and arrow...

-A bow and arrow?

-A bow and arrow, yeah.

-Go on!

-And a plank, and we get the plank and we mount it up

so it's like a theodalite, you know, all these surveyor fellas have them.

This is surveying in its crudest form,

and we level up the plank in garden facing out over the valley and then we get the bow and arrow

with a ball of string and we fire the bloody string over a tall branch down in the valley.

-Thinks he's bloody Robin Hood!

-What you laughing at?

-Go on!

Yeah, I reckon if we get the ball of string,

I've had a little practice with it,

it'll come off there really, really fast.

We just undo this bit of slack what's not wrapped on it proper.

Right.

-That'll come off there, I reckon, really easy, you know.

-Yeah.

First job is the arrow.

Now the grand plan is to fire it

as high up to that limb that's going out over river as I can,

and hopefully, the arrow will come down somewhere in the middle of river.

-If there's nobody, you know...

-I have every confidence in you,

-as long as I'm this side of bow.

-Wait a minute, that's it.

Now there's one man across river in cemetery digging a grave,

wait till he's dug it before you fire.

You nearly bloody shot us.

-Where's it gone?

-There!

You nearly shot us.

It's tied a knot round there.

Well, that's cos you had it over top of string. Eh?

We'll have another go.

But the thing is, it's not like a projectile, is it?

There's no weight in it.

You want a nut squeezing on end of there, you know.

-Let's have a look at size.

-Yeah, yeah.

-There's I think...

-Quarter sommat.

-Well, we'll all look and then we might find one.

-A quarter.

Definitely not heavy enough.

Done it. Brilliant.

And it's going down, going down.

Going down, it's doing the job.

Ha-ha! Success!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2006

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