Infra Tourism: Big Pit Coal Mine, South Wales
“You were brave, wearing white shoes to a coal mine,” quipped our ex-coal-fitter guide as we boarded our cage to ascend to daylight. Although I had been planning my visit to the Big Pit coal museum for weeks, I was underprepared. I had misjudged the Welsh summer weather by neglecting to pack a jacket. It was 8 degrees cooler in the mine than the already brisk 18-degree day outside. My cousin’s husband kindly obliged with his coat.
A friend recommended the Big Pit coal museum, the national coal museum for Wales, given my book research into the global decline of the coal industry. It was a working coal mine from 1880 until it closed in 1980, reopening as a museum three years later. I was surprised when my cousins accepted my invitation to visit in a heartbeat. While I am a military museum connoisseur, it appears their tourism thing is mining.
I arrived in Bristol to blue skies overhead, with random bursts of grey and rain. “Now this is Wales,” my cousin announced as we crossed the bridge from England to another country.
South Wales was one of the major coal mining regions of the UK, employing 250,000 miners at its peak in the early 20th century and supplying one third of global coal exports. The Big Pit mine employed 1,300 people at peak, as well as 72 horses and an opera of canaries[i]. Among our guides were former mine workers from across Wales, who had joined the museum’s workforce out of an affinity to the mining industry, and “for the bants”[ii] a few days a week.
Equipped with a head torch, our phones were confiscated to avoid explosive battery situations, and we were ushered into a cage (“this is not a lift!”). We descended on a pulley system into the mine 90 metres below, pulling the second cage up as it fell. This mine was shallow – one guide used to work in a mine that was seven times as deep. It struck me that our tour group was packed tightly into the cage descending into the depths of the earth for fun. People once made this journey every day, eking out a back-breaking, “widow-making” living until their early demise, sometimes perishing within the mine itself.
Once we arrived, we were shown a lump of rock, in this case steam coal. It has sulphuric infusions, which makes it burn less hot and less cleanly than anthracite, but was ideal to power steam engines during the industrial revolution. As we stooped to pass through the tunnels of the mine, we stepped over rails that used to guide the “drams” (wagons) of coal from the mine to be lifted to the surface. Before mechanisation, these drams (a “journey” if several were strung together) were pulled along by humans, who demanded lower wages than horses. Coal would later whizz by on these rails with a rudimentary buzzer system to warn the operator that it was coming or going.
Men, women and children all worked the British coal mines, to the delight of the little ones who joined our tour. Our guide dissuaded them of any illusions of fun. Children were good workers because they could be conditioned and controlled from a young age. They had them manning (childing?) the ventilation systems of the mine in complete darkness as “trappers”, opening and closing doors when the drams passed on rails. They would tie themselves to the doors so that they would not wander off or get distracted by the endless darkness, which they endured for 12 hours at a time. Our guide wanted us to turn our headlights off for 10 seconds to simulate the disorientation of total darkness. A panicked tourist turned theirs back on after just 3.
Following an accident in which 26 children died, the general public learned about the poor working conditions over 200,000 people faced in Britain’s mines. Women and children under 10 were prohibited from working in the mines in the Victorian era, but at least for the women this was not a purely humanitarian act. Women and men worked side-by-side in the mines doing strength-intensive work in a refreshing example of gender representation and trust in a woman’s capabilities[iii].
But the sight of a woman wearing practical and scant clothing horrified the Victorian establishment, as did their inability to tend to their husbands at home if they were in the mines all day. The policy was not necessarily in the interests of the employees, nor the private mine owners. The owners wanted to employ women, because they were cheaper than horses at the time, and women in general wanted to keep their jobs and some independence. This law took them out of the mining workforce for over a century, except for those who continued showing up to work disguised as men while the mine owners turned a blind eye.
People were generally not treated well in the mines, at least in the early days. Explosive deaths were common (no wonder given people wore cloth flat caps with open-flame candles fixed to them while doing their work), as were silent-killer deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning. Some people used to walk over an hour underground each way to start their shift, eating into their productive time.
Meanwhile, resuscitation kits were available for canaries, who were deployed because they could detect gases that might be harmful to humans. Horses retired to greener pastures above ground for their retirement, while some men often died in their forties from black lung, caused by dust inhalation, dedicating their entire lives to the mines. My mind drifted to Zoolander’s “black lung” cough as we continued our wander underground.
Water trickled merrily throughout the mine, and fungi had overtaken the roofs like the villainous cordyceps from The Last of Us. We quite literally were at the coal face, able to touch the sparkling seams. Pumping water out of mines was a herculean effort that led to the development of the steam engine. When engineers got it wrong, some people met their subterranean demise by drowning rather than suffocation. Luckily for this mine, it sat above the water table.
At our final stop, we talked about the risks of suffocation and fire, and on cue, the air left my lungs. Even in the modern day, cold British weather can render the mine un-tourable because of depleted oxygen levels. We passed an homage to gas lamp methane detectors, invented by a philanthropist called Davey. He covered the cloth-hat-candles with gauze to ensure that they wouldn’t set fire to ambient methane.
Once above ground, we moseyed over to a “King Coal” simulation, where a Welsh miner (we later learned he was merely an actor) talked us through modern operational methods. What stuck with me here was chatting to a guide after the tour. He worked as a collier, directly mining the coal, and though he was made redundant in 1989, he would “go down again in a heartbeat”.
The “camaraderie” was unparallelled, he reminisced. He is still friends with his mining buddies and meets them annually at a reunion. “It gets smaller every year.” The actor-miner said the media “makes us miners sound down-trodden, even though we are proud.” This guide’s son completed an apprenticeship to work at the museum himself, carrying on the family tradition as ex-mine workers retire.
We also stopped at some museum exhibits in the mining baths, “a gift for the wives as much as the husbands,” where posters announcing the great union organiser, Arthur Scargill, still hung on the walls. The effects of miners spanning more than one hundred years were on display, including some who started as child miners and worked their whole lives underground. Near these exhibits were machinery relics, including the violent widow-maker machine that cuts away the coal underground.
At the highest point of the mine grounds, we looked back over the valley, admiring the rolling artificial hills (“spoil tips”) created by the waste from the mines. One of these tips tragically collapsed in the 1960s, falling like a grey avalanche on the town below and killing over 100 children and adults at a school. Mines remained open in the area for decades.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of the stories at the Big Pit and I will return to interview the coal miners that work there. Yet the challenge of understanding the coal industry in the UK is immense: this is just one mine out of over a thousand. The Big Pit museum is a humbling and surprising reminder of what life used to be like in Britain, and how we fuelled our industrial revolution and modern lifestyle.
It is also free to visit and not far from London – any takers for a follow-up visit should reach out 😊
[i] A group of canaries can also be called an aria.
[ii] One guide literally said ‘for the banter’ and I was thrilled.
[iii] Only 2,000 women out of several hundred thousands of men, roughly 1% of the workforce