Mining, pride and suffering

Text 1: A Day Underground, by Walter Pinnock

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I descended the Hollinwell pit on Thursday in company with the under-manager, a man of few words and fewer teeth, who assured me as the cage dropped that nobody had been killed in it for a twelvemonth. The cage fell for perhaps a minute, though it seemed an hour, with the walls of the shaft streaming water past my face, and I confess I took hold of his sleeve. He did not remark upon it. I suppose every visitor does the same.

At the bottom, the world was black and hot and full of sound. We walked, and then crept, and then crawled along a passage scarcely higher than a kitchen table, until we came to the face, where the hewers lay upon their sides in the dust and struck at the coal with short picks, naked to the waist and glistening like seals. Every few yards a child of eight or nine sat alone in the dark beside a wooden door, which it was his whole duty to open and close for the coal tubs. One of them asked me if it was daylight still. I told him it was, and he nodded, as though it were news of a foreign country.

What surprised me most was the men’s good humour. They mocked my coughing and my soft hands, and one fellow, seeing me flinch at a crack in the roof, told me cheerfully that the roof always talked before it fell, and that a man learned to listen. They spoke of the seam as a farmer speaks of his field, with contempt for its difficulties and pride in its yield. I came up into a grey afternoon that seemed to me the most beautiful I had ever seen. I do not think I could do their work for a week. I am not certain they would let me try.

Text 2: The Last Shift, by Dennis Hollins

An original twentieth-century memoir.

My last shift at Ashby Main was on a Friday in October 1993. I went down at six with the same men I had gone down with for twenty-two years, and for the first hour nobody mentioned that it was the end. We worked the face as if there would be a Monday. That was the only way we knew to do it.

People who never went underground imagine it as a kind of punishment, and I understand why. It was dirty, deafening and dangerous. My father coughed for the last eleven years of his life and died with coal still in his lungs. I have a scar across my knuckles from a roof fall in 1979 that killed a lad called Steve Archer, who was twenty and engaged to be married. I am not going to pretend any of that was noble. It was just what it cost.

But you cannot understand what we lost unless you understand what it gave us. Underground, nobody cared who your father was or whether you had passed your exams. You were judged by one thing: whether the man next to you could trust you with his life. I have never felt that kind of trust since, not in any office or factory. When the cage brought us up for the last time, somebody started singing, badly, and then we all were. Then we handed in our lamps and walked out through the gates, and the silence afterwards was the worst thing I have ever heard. I would not want my son to go down a pit. I would give anything to go back down myself.

‘Both writers present mining as a source of pride rather than suffering.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the miners’ work in each text
• explain how far you agree that both writers present mining as a source of pride rather than suffering
• compare the ways the writers present mining and the miners.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.