In a spirit of anthropological research, American writer Kellogg Durland spent several months in the Fife mining community of Kelty. His descriptions of miners’ work and lives read like an explorer’s revelations.
One morning the gaffer met me at the bottom and told me that I must go on to the drawing. Drawing was the hardest work in the pit according to the men, so that I received my orders with a slight qualm. On long wheel braes, where there is a distinct gradation, the endless cable system is used for running the hutches back and forth, up and down, and on long levels where it is possible ponies draw the loaded hutches in long trains or races. Drawers push the hutches one at a time from the face where they are filled to the main levels or wheel braes where they are formed into races and sent to the bottom.
There were forty ponies in the Aitken pit, and wonderfully intelligent beasts they were. Many of them came from Norway. Once taken into the pit some of them spend all their lives in the darkness. They become accustomed to the roads they travel, and in a very short time are able to go trotting over the roughest places at a smart pace which occasionally breaks into a gallop. When they near the bottom they are trained to leap aside at the moment they are freed from the hutches and let the heavy load rumble past at a rate that would mean death to the animal that delayed the fraction of a moment in stepping over the rails. But most wonderful of all are the thieving ponies, that show their fondness for food and drink by learning to open the piece boxes of the men and eating the bread and jam or cheese; or the still cleverer ones that uncork the flasks and drain them to the last drop. When I first heard these stories I was sceptical but it was not long ere I was convinced of their truth. One man lost his piece box, and after accusing his neighbours of playing him a mean, practical joke, went home hungry. The next morning a pony was seen to leave his stall with an empty piece box which was duly dropped at the very spot where on the previous day the victim had left his breakfast.
It was to a part of the pit that was new to me that I was directed for the drawing – a walk of ten minutes through a much used level where long races of hutches rattled from one end to the other, the ponies guided by reckless boys who delight in shouting their warning at the last moment and make the dismal passage ring with their piercing voices high above the clatter of the hoof-beats and the thunderous rumbling of the heavy hutches. At the point where I left the main level there was a blast of air so warm and for the moment overpowering, that it seemed vitiated. The man with whom I was to work appeared, and I followed toward the ever increasing heat for nearly two hundred yards where the men were working naked to the waist, their streaming bodies streaked and begrimed with coal dust which permeated all the atmosphere till they seemed little like men. Breathing was an effort in spite of the current of air that passed through the passage. The monotonous click of the picks against the resisting coal fell on the ear like sounds from an unreal world, while from a distance the men who crouched or knelt before the grim wall, which they attacked with the brutal force of automatons, looked like creatures damned for their sins, the muttered ‘T-s-s-t—t-s-s-t, sish-s—sish-h, t-s-s-t’ coming from between their half closed teeth with machine-like regularity.
An empty hutch weighs nearly five hundred pounds. In appearance it is like a small railway coal waggon. An average load is from half a ton to twelve hundred pounds of coal. Fourteen or fifteen hundred pounds is a fairish load for a muscular man.
I started on my first trip. First a dead level, followed by a slight rise, another short level then an abrupt fall, not sufficiently abrupt to be characterized as steep but so inclined that it would have sent an unrestrained or unbalanced car forward at so bounding a rate that it would have left the rails at the first bend, of which there were several. It took every particle of my strength to mount the first incline and with a sense of relief I felt the forward end drop as I gripped the other to hold it back. An uneven bit of rock caused my foot to trip over a sleeper, the hutch gained in speed till I was jerked off my feet. The hot air cooled as I was dragged on with quickly increasing speed, faster and faster. I struggled with might and main to hold back, but it was useless. The thing had gained a terrible headway, by great leaps and bounds I went stumbling into the nothingness ahead at a mad pace; my lamp was blown out before twenty yards had been covered and there flashed a picture of the one hundred and sixty or more yards to go; clinging desperately as if for my life, my weight hanging all too loose on the end of the runaway hutch barely balanced it to the rails. If I rose to three quarters my height I knew I would crash against the stone roof with terrific force, if I let go, a hard tumble would be inevitable. Not knowing what was in front was terrible, and the thought of reaching the end of the level where men, ponies and long races were passing with every few seconds, was sickening, as with crouching leaps we – hutch and I – went careering on, till with a joyous thrill I found it coming more and more under my control and at last it rolled gently on to the switch as if the whole run had been just as usual. Every muscle in my body felt pulled out and my tongue was cleaving to the roof of my mouth like dry leather. There was naught to do but relight my lamp, get behind an empty hutch, and laboriously push it back to the face. How my legs stiffened and ached under the strain! My breath came in wheezes and every pore seemed a tiny spring. With greater determination I started upon the second trip, when to my unaffected horror it was the same madcap rush over again, only worse. My fingers would not act, my strength seemed to be running like the sweat from every limb. How the hutch kept the rails throughout that breathless, perilous run I shall never know. The heat was cruel. With violently trembling hands I grasped my flask and swallowed a mouthful of tea, lukewarm but refreshing. My lips were like blotting paper.
Until now my mate, a broad shouldered fellow with Herculean biceps and chest had not spoken a word, but as he passed he said lightly: ‘After my first shift on this job I thought I was dead.’