Friends from the Wemyss

When I was fourteen, I left school and started looking for work and there was a man just lived a few doors from us, Mr Hynds you called him. He said he could do with a young lad to work with him in the Mine, and it was in Benarty Pit, which was a fair way from Kelty. A good mile and a half to walk, and Peter Penman said, " It's pretty far for you to walk, even if you got the job, and if it was raining when you were coming home, you would be soaked through before you got home". Because in those days there was no transport to these places. He said, "Wait on you may get a job somewhere else." I heard about a lad that lived up the road a bit, he had a contract in the Aitken Colliery. I went up to his door and knocked, and asked if he was employing anybody, and he said, "Yes I could do with a boy, you can start on Monday". So I got all the required equipment, Pit boots and moleskin trousers, and piece box and tea flask, and I went down to the Aitken. At that time Kitch was working in the Lindsay Colliery, and he was driving a pony, and he seemed to like it there. Him and his mates, in the morning, used to go over the gardens and steal all the vegetables, and take them down and give them to their ponies. I started in the Aitken, and this seam they called it the Bank seam, it was in Ramsay's Mine, and it was very wet. The seam there was on an incline, and the air was very bad and in these days you just used the tallow lamp. If you moved your head too quickly the flame used to shoot away it was the bad air that was in the section. The seam would be about two feet six inches high, and the job I had was to go underneath the low part, what they call the brushing, and throw the coal out, and then fill it into a skip. A wheeler then came and took the skip away, and brought an empty one and that's the job I had to do. There were about fourteen skips a day to fill, and it was very wet, and I wasn't very big but I didn't have room to kneel. Sometimes you had to sit on your bottom and throw the coal under the low bit, then fill the skip, and you were soaking wet because there was always water on the pavement. However I stuck this for about nine months, when I worked with Jock Kirk, and he was I tight bugger he wouldn't even give you proper tools to work with. His shovels and that were no handles on them, and I worked away for a while. I think I was getting two and sixpence a day, that's like 25 cents in present time, what could you do with two and sixpence.

However Peter Penman said "I think you're better coming away from there, I'll go along to Lossodie Mine, and see if I can get a job for you. So he went to Lossodie, that's about two miles away, walking along the railway. However he got a job, and we got started there and I was doing pretty well for a while there, doing the same sort of work. Peter prepared all the wall and undercut it, and shored it up, and then when you wanted some coal you just removed one of the shores or gives, and he threw it out to me, and I put it in the skip. Then the wheeler, came just the same principle as the other Mine, and took the coal from you. We worked for a few weeks then Peter Penman wasn't feeling too well this morning and said "You go along to the Pit," and his Uncle was the fireman or deputy as they call them, and he said "You see him, and he will probably let you work the place on your own," and I was only about fifteen at the time. I went and saw Tom Penman you called him I said, "Peter's not coming in would it be alright for me to go to work on my own?" He said, "You should be safe enough, you go in and I'll call round later". So it was a long time before he came, but I had four skips filled. Then in came another man, Lyle you called him, and he came from Kelty. At his place, the roof had caved in, and it was unsafe for him to work in, so the deputy had sent him to work with me. However at the end of the day I didn't get any more skips. I filled four for myself before he came, and after that he cleaned all the coal out that Peter Penman had prepared, and he didn't give me another skip When I went home I told Peter Penman and he said "Oh that's not going to do I'll see the Union when I go back". He saw the Union and explained it all, and I got another seven skips, which was a very good wage at that time. I was only fifteen, on my own down the Pit.
Peter Penman and I got on very well there for a while, and he got to know the under manager and he said "Look I need a man to go with old Tom Blair who was a Stone Mine driver. I'm going to drive a Stone Mine into an old section, and he needs another experienced man to go with him You go Peter with Old Tom, and I'll get another job for Ted, I have a job in the Pit bottom that will do him lovely." When the cage came down, I pulled a catch and knocked the empty skip off, and pushed it away to the haulage road. It was a very good job, but the wages weren't so good as when I was working with Peter. You could sing up, shout up, the shaft to the girls that worked on the Pit top, and one day, the onset, the bloke who put the skips on the cage, he had forgot to put the sneck down, and the cage was half way up and we heard a bang bang bang. The skip was bouncing from one side of the shaft to the other, and eventually when it came to what they call the low doors, it got clear of the cage and came right down the shaft and by the time it reached the Pit bottom the only thing you could see were the wheels, the rest was smashed to pulp. There were none of us injured and no damage to the shaft. In these days there were only wooden slides in the shaft. It could have done a great lot of damage however it didn't.

After a while the Mine we were in, there was another lower section below us. Peter Penman was working with Old Tom, and they bored their holes this day, and they charged them all up and they got down the Mine a bit, and went and fired the shots. When it broke through, it broke into an old section that had been lying there for years, and it was full of water, and the water rushed down the incline right out the haulage road, down to where we worked and down the shaft to the Pit below us. There was a terrific lot of water carried all the rails and sleepers and everything in front of it. It was about a week before we could get working properly. Had we been in a Mine where there wasn't another section below us, we could have been all drowned, because there was a hell of a lot of water in this Mine, in this old Mine.

1918

The War in Germany was coming to an end, and Peter Penman said when the War finishes we're getting out of the Mine for good. On the eleventh of the eleventh at the eleventh hour the Armistice was signed, and the manager had warned them at the Pit top, that when the War was finished, they weren't to send any word down the Mine about it being finished. However there was no communication no phones, you had just to shout up the shaft, and they could shout down. It was a very shallow Pit, and when the War was finished, of course some of the girls shouted down the War was finished, and everybody dropped tools and went right home. Peter Penman was as good as his word. In a couple of weeks time we left the Mine, and he says now we'll have a holiday.

However we stayed there till the job was finished, and then by this time my brother Jim was back from the Army. Peter Penman and him went down to the Aitken Pit, to see about a job, and there was a contract that needed a lot of men for this new section, and Jim and Peter they signed the contract, and about thirty or forty men working. So Kitch and I we went there and got a job too. We were what you call drawers, You pushed the skip from one place to another, down an incline then down the haulage road, and then to the Pit bottom. So that's the job we had and we were called drawers they call them wheelers here in Australia. We did very well there for a long time. The wages hadn't been very good, but the Sankey Commission were deciding whether the Miners should get a rise or not, and we got a fairly good rise and it was backdated for a few months. Peter Penman and Jim had been employing a lot of blokes, from different sections, and when the money came through for the blokes who had been working, they couldn't trace them all, with the result that there was a lot of money left. Peter Penman and Jim got it all and said "We'll split it up" and they couldn't find some blokes, some had left the colliery, and one thing and another, so there was quite a lot of money, so Kitch and I got our share. Another time Peter Penman went and drew the pay line one day and when he looked at it he said "Oh there's something wrong here." There was about three hundred and fifty pounds too much on the line. So Peter said to Jim "What will we do? If we report this, the clerk who put this through, will get the sack for good, so we'll put it on top of the wardrobe, and kept it there for a couple of months to see what happens." At the end of that time nothing had been said about it through the books, so Jim and Peter divided it up and Kitch and I got a little bit share, which was pretty good for us.

Eddie is far left and his Kelty mates. Kitch is fifth from left at back
c early1920s