Chapter 75

It was a really busy penultimate week of term at college for Malcolm and I.

I also took a pretty severe hit in the brownie points department, of which more in a minute.

After only five hours sleep, Monday was going to be a long day anyway – not that I regretted our quick flit to Bristol for the concert at all – but it was pretty depressing anyway in the second week of December to leave home in the dark, and not return until after nightfall again. I consoled myself that it was only another fortnight to the shortest day.

Our twice-postponed coal mine visit finally took place on the Tuesday, so we had to fit five days of timetabled laboratory work into three-and-a-half to make up the time. Who said that the third and final year of a degree programme was the easy one?

'Prof' had apparently gone to some considerable trouble to rearrange the trip after an industrial dispute had forced the cancellation of the original date; he had told us that he especially wanted us to experience the extraction process for ourselves, so that we'd genuinely appreciate the technological and human endeavours behind the supply of our raw materials, and therefore try and be economical with them.

(I'd heard on the tearoom grapevine that he was also trying to persuade the North Sea Oil firms to make a film he could show his students; even with his enviable network of connections, there was little chance of us getting a quick coach tour of the Brent field anytime soon! Yeah, we'd seen the promotional ones explaining the basic concepts of exploration and exploitation at sea, and they had the odd scary shot of an oil rig in stormy seas, but we had no real impression of how genuinely difficult it was, nor of the risks involved. We knew that most crude oil pollution came from transport from tankers – heck, it wasn't yet eight years since the Torrey Canyon had tried to take a short cut to Milford Haven and piled itself up on the tip of Cornwall, causing the biggest oil spillage in history with 100,000 tons of Kuwaiti crude blighting some 200 miles of coastline in Cornwall, the Channel Islands and Brittany, and killing thousands of seabirds. The 'clean up' had made the problem even worse, with emulsifiers having toxic effects of their own, both the Fleet Air Arm and Royal Air Force receiving ridicule for missing a bloody great stationary super-tanker with a quarter of the bombs they dropped to try to set the oil on fire, and the government rightly getting a lot of stick for its mishandling of the crisis.)

As instructed, we wore old clothes which would easily go in the washing machine when we got back – we'd been warned that we would get hot, sweaty and dirty – and we took a towel and soap for a shower afterwards.

After a quick breakfast of tea and toast, Julie kissed me goodbye pretty thoroughly, almost as if she expected to never see me again – she insisted that they wouldn't get her going down a coalmine for a million quid. Not that she was normally claustrophobic, but the thought of all that rock above her was just too much.

(She told me that she'd taken one look at the photos on the Caving Club stall at the Athletics Union fair, and briskly walked the other way. I totally agreed with her on caving; I couldn't see the point of scaring yourself shitless by getting wedged in a cold wet tunnel three miles below the surface, even if the stalactites were incredibly beautiful – after all, remember what had happened to Winnie-The-Pooh when he visited Rabbit in his burrow... )

In the morning gloom, Malcolm and I walked briskly up to the coach which was parked on Park Place, opposite the Union, and it set off through the rush-hour traffic at 8.30, headed for Neath. It was not a branny-spanker luxury model, but at least the heating worked – almost too well, as it quickly got stuffy. The velour plush seats reeked of cigarette smoke, though of course that was quite normal in those days. Malcolm and I shared a seat half-way up the bus; a couple of our fellow students had instantly bagged the long back seat and were already horizontal with their parkas as pillows, trying to use the journey time to get a bit more kip.

I chuckled at the sight. Dad had told me that one of the best things he learned from his National Service was the ability to sleep anywhere, at pretty much any hour of the day. He had said that it made up for broken sleep when on guard duty, and was also the best way to deal with long, noisy and uncomfortable journeys in military vehicles. Sadly, I hadn't yet got the knack, besides, I always enjoyed seeing where I was going. For December it actually wasn't a bad day weather-wise, so I hoped to get views of the Valleys and maybe the Brecon Beacons to our right, and possibly the Bristol Channel and Exmoor to our left.

At least the coach radio wasn't working, so we were spared a few more plays of the record that was heading to be the Christmas Number One, 'Mud' with 'Lonely This Christmas'. (I'd slightly preferred the previous year, which had been 'Slade' with 'Merry Xmas Everybody', which was just a little bit less corny. If I remembered correctly, the year before that had been the ghastly teeny-bopper Jimmy Osmond with a mouthful of unfeasibly sparkling white teeth and 'Long Haired Lover From Liverpool'; but the Christmas before that, Jen and I had never tired of 'Ernie'. We'd personally boosted Benny Hill's chart ratings by buying the single at the end of the school term, not even waiting to see if we got any Record Tokens from Father Christmas or one of our grandparents.)

Once we had reached the M4 and were cruising steadily westwards in the slow lane, our lecturer stood up at the front of the coach, called for our attention, and tried to use the microphone, which of course didn't work. Cue some fiddling around with the public address system, and some shouted suggestions about perhaps turning the mike on. Nothing doing.

After this false start, he moved towards the middle of the coach, spoke up, and explained again that we were going to visit a modern National Coal Board 'super pit', the Abernant Colliery, which had been first developed in the 1950's, and which now produced 300,000 tons of top-quality anthracite coal a year with a labour force of 900 men.

He reminded us that we were visiting an active industrial works with unguarded machinery where there were many potentially fatal dangers for the unwary, and that there was to be no mucking about. As these were the same rules as we were used to obeying in the chemical laboratories, there were no objections or groans as he repeated the warning – we'd had several fairly gruesome lectures on industrial accidents and their consequences, complete with some scary illustrative slides, so that we knew quite how much damage and suffering they could cause. For twenty-year-old students, we now had a pretty responsible attitude to life, and we knew when to switch into 'serious' mode. Today was going to be one of those occasions.

(One of the saddest events we'd been told about in our lectures was the 1947 Texas City Disaster, when a ship loaded with 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate fertiliser caught fire in the docks and eventually exploded, flattening the port and killing nearly 600 people, including 27 out of the 28 members of the local volunteer fire brigade who died while bravely doing their civic duty of fighting the fire. It made our more recent home-grown Flixborough accident look almost minor with 'only' 28 deaths in total.)

As we passed the massive expanse of steelworks at Port Talbot on our left, he pointed out again the huge area of land required for such a primary industrial operation, and the complex transport infrastructure needed. The coal, pig iron, steel scrap and limestone tended to arrive by train, with much of the iron ore now coming in on ships from overseas mines with higher quality ore. The finished steel – and the slag and ash – again departed either by rail or sea, although we could also see the odd steel lorry leaving or joining the motorway. Much of the finished steel was eventually destined for the great car factories of the Midlands – especially the massive British Leyland Longbridge works in Birmingham – that is, when the infamous agitator shop steward 'Red Robbo' hadn't got the 20,000 workers out on strike yet again.

The M4 crossed the River Neath by the big new bridge at Briton Ferry, with great views of the Bristol Channel to our left, and after another couple of miles and a crossing of the River Tawe, we left the motorway and headed up the valley to Pontardawe. Even though it was only a local road, it was a good size, obviously having been upgraded for HGV traffic, and our coach had no problems negotiating the twists and turns.

We were stopped at the gatehouse; we were expected, the lecturer handed over a nominal roll of who was on the coach, and a guide quickly joined us, directing the driver around the site so that we could see what was involved in the logistics after the extraction process. The coach PA system still wasn't working despite some tinkering by the driver, so the guide too had to stand at the front and talk loudly. Mind you, he'd obviously had this problem before – he made us all move forward and closer to him, so he didn't have to project his voice all the way to the back!

The site was huge! I'd expected a couple of winding towers, a few office and amenity buildings and a large area of railways sidings, but in fact, according to our guide, on the surface alone it covered eight square miles and now had 40 miles of tarmac or concrete roadways. There were vast stockpiles of coal, long conveyor belts stretching into the distance taking waste rock and spoil to the slag heaps, and several freight trains being loaded with the anthracite.

We got some historical background; the first digging of the shafts had begun in 1954, and by 1958, at a cost of some £10 million, the North or upcast shaft was 837 yards deep, and the South shaft was one of the deepest in the South Wales Coalfield at 987 yards, to reach the Peacock anthracite seam at 792 yards underground. Much of this had been mined out in the first decade, and all production was now from the slightly shallower Red Vein at 692 yards below the surface.

He also explained that Abernant used 'retreat' mining techniques, where the underground roadway was driven to the limits of the exploitable seam, and then the coal was removed steadily back towards the shafts – it meant that any roof collapses due to undermining happened where the anthracite had been taken, and no men or machinery ever ventured again - and of course it also had maintenance benefits, because as the conveyors got older and more in need of repair, there was less of them to inspect and replace. Of course, this technique was only possible where the geological conditions were well known, so that the initial tunnelling was in the correct place. One reason Abernant's precise site had been chosen for such massive investment was that there were many former mines nearby, and the underground strata in the area were extensively documented and, where necessary, could be more cheaply proved by borehole.

The coach paused for a few minutes alongside a vast open storage area, full of huge metal objects that reinforced the sheer scale of the enterprise; steel joists that took up a double railway wagon, massive coils of steel wire with the grease thick on them, and a scrap heap of thick poles and hydraulic rams, buckled and bent by the enormous pressures they had confronted.

Our tour of the surface concluded with a quick look at the Coal Preparation Plant, more commonly known as 'the Washery'. Here, the rough coal brought up to the surface was washed and the more obvious lumps of other rock and muck were removed – there was quite a pile of bent and broken equipment as well, which had presumably been thrown onto the conveyor as the best way of getting rid of it from the working area. I was surprised to see long-handled axes and pickaxes in the pile; our guide explained that the machinery only worked in straight lines, and up to 30% of the seam would be wasted if there wasn't any manual extraction as well. Apparently the men who wielded the pickaxes were still known as 'hewers', and paid more than most of the other underground workers.

To one side of the room, there was a stack of beautiful fossil trees and leaves, their form if not their structure preserved for the last 350 million years in the hard black anthracite that had formed from the plentiful tropical vegetation of the Carboniferous Period. Our guide said that the best examples were sold to collectors or given to museums, but that we were more than welcome to take a small piece as a souvenir. We all did, although my piece of fern leaf went missing years ago. I think Malcolm still has his; he got it mounted in resin as a paperweight, which is probably why it was more robust than mine!

We trooped back out to the coach with our little piece of history, and I had a long look around the site as we were counted up before the coach set off again.

Okay, so a planned investment superpit was bound to be better laid out than one of the older mines that had just developed piecemeal over time, but it was all remarkably logical and well-ordered. The humans were kept well away from the more mechanised (and more dangerous) processes, with the conveyor belts for both coal and waste rock segregated behind wire fences. Not that the curious and foolhardy found it easy to get onto the site, but apparently a couple of kids had been badly injured while trespassing on another NCB site, so fences had gone up everywhere. I supposed that if you lived in a mining village, then it was only natural to try to wander round the works when you and your mates were looking for something to do.

I was impressed with all the other safety procedures to protect the miners. There were signs everywhere exhorting care and safe working practices. Okay, these days it was also about avoiding prosecution, lost working time and hefty compensation payouts, but it was good to see the correct emphasis. I remembered how one of our lecturers, discussing broad economics, had told us that Her Majesty's Treasury counted the cost of clearing up after accidents in their figures for Gross Domestic Product, so someone getting hurt was good for the figures of the United Kingdom Limited, because it provided employment and increased consumption of goods and services...

While I was musing about the perversities of economics theory, the coach had pulled up outside a two-storey building marked 'Pit Head Baths'. There were very few other people about, as the shift had gone underground several hours earlier, and we were led into the adjoining canteen where there was a large diagram of the mine on the back wall. A big notice at the entrance to the canteen told us that up to today, the pit had worked 213 days without accident. We gathered round the display and our guide pointed out where everything was. He'd clearly done this explanation many times before; it was clear and concise, even in the sing-song South Wales accent that as an Englishman I'd initially found slightly hard to understand, until I'd been properly introduced to it by Vee, look you, boyo.

(There are some aspects of the Cardiff vocabulary that I still don't, and probably never will, understand, the chief one being that the slightly old-fashioned English word 'pal' meaning a friend has a much more aggressive, even threatening use in South Wales, as in 'listen here, pal' which suggests that the speaker is rapidly losing patience with the other man.)

Anyway, the distances shown on the colliery plan were surprising. Even with the vast size of the surface facility, much of the underground workings shown were well outside the boundary of the site. Some of the coal faces being worked were a couple of miles from the shaft, and there was an underground tram line to take the miners closer to their work place – in the old days, miners sometimes had to walk, crouched down in the low tunnels, for an hour or more before even starting their work, arriving knackered and less than effective. We were told that we would be using the tram, and that we were to remain seated with our heads well down below the protective rails. We were also told in no uncertain terms that riding on the conveyor belts was strictly forbidden, and that we should keep well clear of them, as if your clothing caught in moving parts, you were probably done for unless someone reached the emergency cut-off switch in time.

Our guide started talking about contraband – those articles which it was strictly forbidden to take underground. He told us of the dangers of firedamp, and of course we all knew about Sir Humphrey Davey's safety lamp and the historical use of canaries in coal mines to warn of the dangerous build up of methane, carbon monoxide or other gases. We were happy to hear that new electronic gas detectors had long replaced the canaries, and that Abernant had an excellent safety record – probably because so many of the earlier small pits in the area had suffered fatalities from explosions, so the danger was treated as ever-present and therefore taken seriously.

Then it was on to the locker room. Our guide advised us all to take a piss first, and most of us did.

We were issued with thick brown overalls, sturdy boots with steel toecaps, wide leather belts and hard hats, being given lockers for our own outer clothes and other belongings. The smokers amongst us were told in no uncertain terms to leave all matches, lighters and smoking material in the lockers, and we were reminded that we would be patted down for contraband. One of my mates had brought along his Kodak Instamatic with a flash cube – that went straight into the locker, containing as it did a fulminate primer and either magnesium or zirconium foil, both well capable of initiating an explosion! Mind you, even aluminium foil for wrapping your sarnies was considered contraband!

Next we went to the Lamp Room, where we were given (and shown how to test) an electric lamp which slotted into the front of our hats, with a thick black rubber lead connecting it to a heavy battery pack which attached to our waist belts. Each of us was given a brass tally engraved with a number, and told not to lose it – the National Coal Board and the Law were both well capable of jumping from a great height upon any colliery manager who could not prove on a snap inspection exactly how many people were underground.

And then it was time to go down the pit.

I don't think I shall ever forget the experience.

We all handed our brass tally to the Foreman Lampman, and our guide gave him the written list of our party, so that he knew how many visitors were underground. He then checked us off against the list, matching the tally numbers to our names. There was a final pat-down for contraband, and then we went down the covered way to the lift shaft.

"Now you boys all stay together. No wandering off on your own. If you have to stop, like for retying your bootlace, sing out and warn me, so that we can all stop and wait for you."

Luckily our party could easily fit in one cage rather than be split into two groups, although as we stepped into what seemed quite a ramshackle arrangement of battered and bent metal on top of the shaft, it didn't seem quite as solid as we might have wished with a good furlong of nothing directly below us! There were a couple of worried faces as the two concertina grilles were clashed shut, one from outside and one from inside, and then the bottom dropped away as the huge winding wheel yards above us took the strain and started to lower us down to the working levels.

It seemed to our inexperienced stomachs that the world had dropped away beneath out feet. The guide looked bored; several of our party looked almost terrified. Wire-cage-covered lamps flashed past at regular intervals, and there was a steady rattle of vibrating metal from the cage around us.

"How fast are we going?"

"About six feet per second. It'll only take a couple of minutes. This is a pretty quick winding wheel; some of the older ones can take ten minutes to get down."

It was a long three minutes until the wheel operator slowed down the descent, and we felt more weight on our knees. With a bone-shaking wrench, the cage abruptly stopped at the bottom of the shaft, and we saw a well-lit hallway through the grille of the gate. Our guide pushed open first the inner, and then the outer, gates, and led us through into the hall before turning and closing both gates so that the cage could return to the surface. He counted us again.

"Okay, everyone ready?"

We pushed through a resisting double swing door, the heavy weight caused by the brushes which tried to seal the aperture to make it draught-free – we could feel the warm breeze on our faces as the air pumped down into the mine tried to escape back up the natural chimney formed by the lift shaft.

We found ourselves in a low roughly-cut tunnel, brightly lit near the doorway, with other lamps on the tunnel wall in the distance. There was a miniature train waiting for us, and we all piled into the low-slung seats and kept our heads well down as instructed. There was a lot of rattling as we set off with a jerk, and we could feel the air rushing past us – not because of any great speed of the locomotive, but because there wasn't much room in the tunnel, so the displaced air was under some pressure to get through. We bounced along for what seemed ages, but was probably no more than ten minutes, with the infrequent lamps on the tunnel wall showing us that we were moving at a steady pace. Eventually, the train slowed to a stop, and our guide came along gesturing for us to get out. We stood at a junction of a couple of tunnels, and he counted us yet again before leading us off at right angles though a double door.

After about thirty yards, he stopped just before yet another double door.

"Okay, boys, we're going to walk alongside the conveyor now to get to the face. Don't forget, the conveyor is bloody dangerous if you get caught up in it, so don't get close. Any more questions while it's quiet?"

There were none, so he pushed open the door and held it with his back so we could get through. Crikey, did the noise level rise suddenly or what! It was hard to distinguish at first between the clatter of the conveyor belt taking the coal to the upcast shaft, the sound of compressors and pneumatic drills, the chomp-chomp-chomp of the blades of the extraction machinery cutting into the seam, and the crunch as the hydraulic props were pushed into their new positions to support the cutters. It certainly wasn't going to be easy to hear any normal speech.

It was also much brighter; not only did all the face-workers have their lamps on, but there were heavily-shielded floodlights on the cutter and on stands behind, although they cast deep shadows elsewhere. There was definitely dust in the air; although the aim was to get the coal cut and away as soon as possible, you can't break up solid rock without some of it disintegrating into fine powder. We were told later than while large coal was originally prized because it made it easier to move by hand and use domestically, the emphasis now was on smaller pieces which better suited augers and mechanical handling – apparently the new coal-fired power stations preferred coal dust, which was blown by fans into the furnace and burnt almost instantly with virtually no ash.

God, it was hot and humid down there. Well over 90% humidity, despite the flow of pumped air from the surface 600 feet above us, and getting towards eighty degrees Fahrenheit – that's thirty degrees in new money Celsius. The sweat was dripping off us.

A lot of the miners were dressed in boots, singlet, shorts, belt and hard hat. A couple of them had even discarded their vests. They were wiry rather than muscular, and several had tattoos on their arms. Most gave us grins as they saw us, the white teeth flashing in the grubby face.