Father
It seems looking back that for many years father was unemployed. None of the iron ore pits worked at all during the slump period and very few of the coal mines either.
Father took two small fields (rented them) and tried market gardening. He bought a horse and cart and took his produce to Whitehaven market. Not for long was he able to keep going, he was too soft hearted and he was just as likely to give half the stuff away as sell it to the poor people who had hardly a shoe to wear. Many of the children in Whitehaven didn't have shoes. One can hardly believe it now, but it was so. The people or a lot of them were close to starvation. Anyhow Dad soon lost heart and had to give up his venture.
It was a number of years before the pits really started to work again (very few of the pits ever started again, Winscales one of the few) and Dad was getting on then. The nearest pit was six miles from home and they were six gruelling miles across the moor. I think he had had his fill of pits. He told me of a number of occasions when only for the grace of God he had not lost his life.
I was too young to remember many of the occasions. One incident I do remember when I was about ten years old. It was setting off with mother to meet him after he had been "fast down" Winscales Mine for four days. I can remember the men from the rescue team calling at the house at various times to tell mother he was alright and it would not be long before they got him out. By God's grace they got him out, and mother and I met him on the Moor above St Bees, a meeting never to be forgotten.
Father sank the shaft of an iron ore mine called Pallaphlatt at Bigrigg and another at Egremont called Oreghyll. He also sunk a coal mine shaft in Ladymouth at Kells. It was at Ladymouth during his shift when they were a few hundred feet down that the shaft caved in, all the thousands of tons of bricks and rock.
Dad and two other men, Rickarby by name, two brothers, were working about 100ft from the bottom on a scaffolding when it happened. The kibble ¹A large iron bucket about 3ft across and about the same deep, that carried them, and the dirt, up and down the shaft hung at about their level by the side of them, together with an electric light. They all three jumped for the kibble as thousands of tons of rock fell past them, knocking it first to this side and then that, and again by God's grace nothing fell into it. The electric light burned all the time.
They were unable to signal to the top by pulling the wire signal rope, which they couldn’t reach. I believe some time elapsed before the winch men on top realised something was wrong. During this time Father and the two brothers swung madly in that hell of falling debris. One brother went mad and had to be forcibly held from jumping out.
Before they eventually got to the top the other had lost his voice, and Dad when he got home had also lost his voice with the shock. There had been seven men working in the shaft and only the three of them came out alive.
Dad told me of this when I was quite young, it was part of his way of keeping me out of the pits. There were other incidents over the many years he was a miner or sinker. Some took place in Johannesburg in the gold mines where he worked as a young man before he was married, others in pits at home.
He was an ardent socialist and was I think the first socialist County Councillor and Town Councillor in West Cumberland. Born I think somewhere in Yorkshire of Irish parents. He left school at eleven years old. For all that he spoke very well and was chairman of the Parliamentary Socialist Party and Chairman and Treasurer of the local Bowling Club, and was greatly respected and widely known throughout West Cumberland. A fine man, I could say.
But this is Dad's life and I set out to write about my own.