Many individuals and organisations deserve my thanks for their help during the course of the five years of research and writing of this book. Special thanks are due to Rupert Harding and Simon Fowler at Pen & Sword Books for their patience and support and to Susan Last for copy-editing the text. Thanks also to Ian Helliwell for typesetting and design. The curators and librarians at our three excellent national mining museums have been extremely kind and helpful. Grateful thanks are due to Ceri Thompson at the Big Pit, who has responded to numerous queries on both Welsh mining and mining in general; and also to Robert Prothero-Jones at the National Waterfront Museum. I am indebted to staff at all of the national organisations consulted for supplying and/or directing me to information, and special thanks are due to the British Library’s staff at Colindale when I was working on newspaper sources during the early stages of research. Author Geoffrey Howse deserves thanks for his kindness and hospitality when I was at work in London.
For the research section, several hundred regional librarians, information officers and archivists responded to my requests for information about mining sources via letter, telephone, email and website enquiry form; and many read and approved relevant entries, though any errors and omissions remain my own. Many thanks to them.
I am grateful to the Masters and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge for permission to quote from the Munby archive; and also to the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall (Manchester City Galleries) for permission to use a Clayton image from their collection. Thanks are also due to the Big Pit/Museum of Wales for permission to use extracted material from their GLO magazine. Most of the illustrations used in this book are largely from my own picture collection unless otherwise credited. My friend, Ian Winstanley, founder of the online Coal Mining History Resource Centre, has been a constant source of support whenever needed; as have many family history societies and family historians that I have met at meetings and events over many years; indeed, several of them were even kind enough to supply case studies relating to their mining ancestors. Michelle Hassall and her son Tommie Hassall were kind enough to allow me to reproduce an extract from the award-winning essay, ‘A day I shall never forget’. Aspects of my work on military, census and other related family history information received much appreciated specialist help from Jayne Daley and Andrew and Fiona Featherstone.
‘Shag’s Main’. Impromptu outcropping such as this 1912 example was also common during subsequent strikes and lock-outs: Midhope, Sheffield.
Great thanks go out to the many miners and mining family members whom I have met and interviewed over many years. Without their help the book would not have materialised in its present form. And finally a huge thank you to my wife, Angela Elliott, for putting up with me and my seemingly never-ending shift-work in my study over such a long period of time.