Black Diamonds (34 page)

‘General Situation,’ it reported, ‘No change’:

5th Infantry Brigade was ordered at 12.00 hours to commence as soon as possible the move by road to Northern Command. 5th Brigade H.Q. and 3 Battalions proceed to Catterick, 1 Battalion to Beverley. The units are due to arrive on the night 5/6th May.

1st and 2nd Battalions, Scots Guards, temporarily at Pirbright Camp, have been ordered to return today to London.

2nd Battalion Black Watch have been ordered from Fort George to Stirling.

HQ 8th Infantry Brigade, 2nd South Stafford Regt, 2nd Hampshire Regt, 1st Wilts Regt and 14/20th Hussars all under orders to move at 24 hours notice.

The country held its breath.

23

Two hundred miles north of Whitehall on the afternoon of 4 May, Billy Fitzwilliam was playing polo in a field in front of Wentworth House. The clipped cries of cavalry officers, the soft applause from polite, white-gloved hands, were noticeably absent.
Broad Yorkshire
dialect echoed across the pitch: ‘C’m on, Tartar, you bugger.’ ‘Eh up, Walt, o’er here.’ ‘Put one in’t bakka’t net!’

Billy, his horse towering above the others, was teaching his miners to play polo on their pit ponies. Some of the ponies were barely taller than a large dog. Twenty-four hours earlier they had been shackled in pit gear a quarter of a mile underground; in their heavy bridles, the bonnet fortified around the eyes and along the nose, they might have stepped from the Bayeux tapestry. Freed of the harnesses, the ponies skittered and scrambled across the field. A tall man could stand astride the smallest, a Shetland called Caesar.

The last time the ponies had come up from the pits was the previous summer. Year round, except for two weeks in August when the collieries closed for the holidays, they were stabled underground. Caesar was one of the miners’ favourites. At New Stubbin colliery he had saved many a man’s – and a boy’s – life. Arthur Eaglestone was working underground with the pony the night his reputation was made:

Caesar had been restless for something more than an hour and a half, wandering hither, thither (within the limitation of the place), swinging his head slightly from side to side, and turning sharply well within his own length. The rattle of chains, the clinking of metal, had exasperated us. ‘Damn thee,’ said Sturgess the trammer, ‘damn thy hide! Be still! Did ye ever see sich a hoss in all thi life? A bloody clothes hoss ud make a better pony nor ’im!’ ‘He’s put out about something,’ I said. ‘He’s strange. He may be ill for all we know. It may be belly ache.’ ‘Belly ache be buggered, if ’e’d belly ache ’e’d roll abart an’ make a noise. Be still – damn your rags.’

Seconds later, the props cracked, bringing down the roof, tons of dust and rubble falling like sand, burying the two men and the pony. Luckily, a rescue party was on hand to dig them out.

Billy had organized the polo match between Elsecar and New Stubbin collieries. The players, boys aged between thirteen and sixteen years old, were the pony drivers at the two pits. The voices of the younger ones had not yet broken; many still wore short trousers. All their faces were bleached. It had been a long winter on the day shift. Six days a week, they had gone down the mine before dawn and come up after dark.

It had been Billy’s idea to teach the boys to play polo. The previous evening, he had ordered the ponies to be brought out of the pits. In the past, when the ponies came up for their annual rest, they had always been let loose in fields outside the Park walls. Breaking with tradition, he had instructed that for the duration of the strike they were to be put out to grass in a field alongside Wentworth House itself.

Early that morning, hours before the polo match began, a line of upwards of thirty boys stretched along the edge of the field, feeding the ponies bits of carrots and turnips pinched from allotments, or titbits they had saved from home. Every boy had his own pony, the one he worked with day in and day out. Some of the boys had whistled or called as they approached and their pony had come sprinting down the line. ‘
The horses knew
the boys not by their features,’ one miner recalled, they had only seen them with blackened faces; they recognized them by their ‘whistle, voice and smell’.

The polo match and the decision to put the ponies in a field within yards of the house were symbolic gestures on Billy’s part: a signal of unity and solidarity with his men. ‘My father adored his miners,’ his daughter Elfrida remembered. ‘He was passionately interested in mines and mining. It was more important to him than anything else to do with the Estate.’

Billy depended on his miners; it was where his money came from. But he also had a genuine empathy and understanding with them. Most of the boys working at his pits had started work in the mines the first Monday after their thirteenth birthdays. As Billy knew, the drivers and their ponies had a particular place in a miner’s psyche – and in his heart. In the first decades of the twentieth century, pony driving was the first job a miner did down the pit, one of the ways he learnt his trade.

For every miner, the first shift was a rite of passage, a descent from childhood that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Jim Bullock was one of the few miners to write an account of what it was like to be a pony driver at a West Yorkshire mine in the early decades of the twentieth century. Two months after his thirteenth birthday, in the spring of 1917, he said goodbye to his mother and set off up Princess Street to Bowers colliery, a coalmine employing several hundred miners in the village of Bowers Row, near Castleford: ‘
My mother
put her arm around me and said, “Be careful,”’ he remembered. ‘I was the only one she had left. All my brothers were fighting in the First World War.’

The time was 8.45 p.m. Jim’s first shift was the night shift; his wage, 1 shilling (5 new pence). Wearing a pair of shorts and a new pair of clogs, he was barely five feet tall; he carried a two-pint Dudley filled with water and a snap tin containing two rounds of bread and dripping, his food for the night.

‘When I went to work that first night,’ he wrote later, ‘history was repeating itself, for generation after generation of Bullocks had made the same journey. They had all undergone the same experience, but whereas most of them had made their descent into the depths of the earth in the comforting presence of their father, I went alone.’ The advice his father had given him, as hundreds of others had given to their sons before him, came in the form of a poem. Jim had learnt it by heart:

If the mice
move out, move out with them
If the rats run, your life is nearly done.
When the roof begins to trickle,
Father Time is sharpening his sickle
When your pony baulks, then death stalks,
If your lamp goes out, don’t muck about.

No one spoke to Jim as he went down in the cage. When he reached the pit bottom, a group of older boys jumped on him and dragged him into a ‘passby’, a small enclosed space set back from the main tunnel road. ‘There used to be all sorts of tricks played on young boys. When we first went down the pit we all had to go through our initiation ceremony, during which they used to pull our trousers down and examine our little sparrow. The size of that was very important. If we were well endowed, we were looked on with great respect; if we had a poor weedy little thing, they used to cover it with fat and make fun of us for days, or they used to paint it and hang a bit of bank on it and all sorts of things.’

‘Bank’ was muck and shale: a new boy was told that if he hung it on his penis, it would make it grow.

It was the dark, not the older boys, that scared Jim the most. From the pit bottom, a Deputy, a senior official at the pit, escorted him along a warren of tunnels to the place where he was to work. ‘Despite everything I had been told, I was still not prepared for the overwhelming darkness, the stifling atmosphere, the deathly silence, the unusual creaks and the cracking sounds that broke the silence.’

The darkness could – and did – send men mad. ‘There is no night so dark above, that the outline of an outstretched hand cannot be seen before one’s eyes,’ Arthur Eaglestone wrote,

but down below the world, all darkness here is utter, final and controlling. Let your lamp go out and in IT floods upon the dying spark, overwhelming in intensity and volume. The blackness swims around you, thick and fluid almost, takes you by the legs, the throat, the eyes; presses with a sinister intention upon your shoulder blades; it seems to flurry in your hands; engulfs your body wholly, and drives your little soul upon itself in the remotest and most secret of fastnesses … Pinch your cheek if that is what suffices, touch your empty eyes, then, pull your hair … It is all of no avail – of no avail …

Jim followed the Deputy through the tunnels for more than thirty minutes, stumbling to keep up. The roads were not flat or straight; there were twists, turns, inclines, places where the height of the roof dropped, so that not even Jim could stand. Corve rails, for moving the tubs of coal, ran along their length – easily traversed by an experienced miner, but for a small boy who had never been down a pit before, the sleepers, set two feet apart, were perilous in the dark. There were other hazards: the roads were strewn with debris from the sides and roof, and in places, wooden pit props jagged, buckled by the weight above.

The Deputy did not tell Jim where they were going or what he would be asked to do. Two miles from the pit bottom [the shaft] he stopped by a line of empty tubs and a mound of dust. What followed, Jim remembered for the rest of his life. ‘
As soon as
the Deputy had showed me where I was to work and how many tubs I had got to fill with dust, he said, “Oh! you’ll be interested to know that this is where your John Willie got killed.” I can never, never forget that. As he went away and I saw his light slowly going into the distance, I was left completely alone.’

Purposely, to inflict the maximum psychological terror on the thirteen-year-old boy, the Deputy had taken Jim to the exact spot where, five years earlier, his much-loved elder brother had been crushed to death by a fall of rock. Jim was eight years old when he was told what had happened to John Willie. ‘He had finished his own job and he was actually on his way out of the pit when another miner who was just going to set a girder said, “Give us a lift, John Willie, will tha?” And John Willie being what he was, immediately took his coat off and was just walking towards the girder when the whole place collapsed. The fall instantly killed him and the man whom he was going to help, as well as two pit ponies. There were two hundred tons of rock on top of them, and this all had to be shifted before they could bring the bodies back to the surface.’

The morning John Willie died, he had been due to take Jim and his younger sister to Scarborough for their annual summer treat. The two children were woken by a knock at the door at the house in Princess Street, a few hundred yards from the colliery. It was the first time Jim had seen his father cry. ‘
When my father
was told that John Willie was trapped, we heard him breathing heavily and then a sort of half-stifled sobbing, and him saying, “Oh Lord, it is hard, help us now. If ever we needed Thy help we need it this morning, but if it is Thy will, if it is Thy will, then let Thy will be done,” and then he stumbled up the stairs. He passed us in our bedroom without even seeing us. Tears were running down his cheeks and he looked like a man mortally wounded.’

As Jim worked alone on his first shift, shovelling the coal dust into the tubs, two miles from the pit bottom, the only light coming from his flickering oil lamp, he was terrified. ‘I have never known a night that lasted as long as that one; I thought it would never end. I was frightened to death. I had John Willie’s face in front of me that night, as plain as day. I kept thinking, Good Lord! if he got killed here, what might happen to me. I dared not hang my lamp in case it toppled over, I dared not put it on the floor in case it rolled over, I dared not turn the wick up, in case it smoked, I dared not turn it down for fear it went out.’

It was six hours before the Deputy returned to take Jim back to the bottom of the shaft. Leaving the thirteen-year-old new boys alone in the dark on their first shifts, the bullying and the terrorization were common to all pits – an underground baptism to toughen the boys up. They were never warned; no one told them it would happen. It was something that had to be endured; to talk about it would have been to express fear, a sign of weakness, a failure of manliness.

Jim did not tell his mother anything of his night, though he remembered the horror of it for the rest of his life. ‘
When I got
to the pit top, I handed in my lamp and rushed home in the darkness. My mother was already up, cooking the breakfast – only that morning, instead of bread and jam, I could smell bacon and eggs. I thought that now I was really a man. As she fussed over me, I looked with pride at my black body and legs. Nobody – and I mean nobody – could persuade me to get washed until I had been outside to let all my younger mates see me on their way to school. I felt really superior – they were just school kids whereas I was a worker. I had arrived. I was important. I was a contributor to the family exchequer.’

From shovelling pit muck, Jim graduated to pony driving, a job given to all the new boys underground. Two weeks after he started down the mine, he was taken to the stables at the bottom of the pit shaft. Bowers colliery had 150 ponies; each had its name over its stall and any rosettes it had won at local shows. They had come to the pit wild from the Welsh hills to be broken in by the boys themselves. Underground, they were not ridden, but driven by verbal commands. Jim’s family had been pony trainers at Bowers Row for generations. ‘The ponies were put on a long rope and taught all the ordinary commands, such as “Whey!” (that means stop); “Get on a bit” (go forward a bit); “Come over” (step over one set of rails to the other); and “Back a bit”. At “Come here” they would lift their legs up and spin round in their own lengths, because the roads were too narrow to do anything else. When we said “Back, shuv”, the pony would put its bottom against the back end of the tub and start shoving it back. This was called britching. They were also taught to open doors with their heads, which was called trapping.’