Simon's Blog

Coal is just another creation of the geological process that can be clearly explained by geologists the world over.  They can predict where the coal measures are to be found and mining engineers can predict just how much of the coal can be mined.   Economists and accountants can then calculate just how much of a profit or not can be made from extracting the coal.  However, none of them can explain what coal means to my generation – the last of the generation brought up with coal running through our veins  clogging  our lungs and blackening our fingernails.

I’m a child of the sixties and seventies and grew up in a mining village.  Not one of these Johnny come lately mining villages of the Welsh Valleys  or south and west Yorkshire Ridings.  The hewing of coal has been a drum beat for the village  for hundreds, most probably thousands of years of the village where I grew up.

To my generation the National Coal Board (NCB) was woven into the very fabric of everything we did – orange donkey jackets with the letters were seen throughout the village.  Even the gave yard was effected by mining – with major subsidence shaping the contours of the land into which many of the miners, that had directly contributed  to the subsidence, were laid to rest.  Whilst my family didn’t directly work for the NCB they benefited from the money that coal mining brought to the area.  All of  My friend’s fathers,  coal mining was an institutionalised male occupation, worked for the NCB.   My uncle worked for the NCB and so on.   The wheezing of the old retired miners as they slowly climbed the hill to the village post office to collect their pension still echoes through my imagination.  Everything was about King Coal.   Now it is all gone.   And my generation were the last to be formed by Coal.

This is not to argue that the mining industry should have been saved or that this way of life had any value over other ways of life but rather it is a recognition that it no longer exists   and probably will never exist again.  It has gone the way of the Neolithic hunter/ gathers who took up a more settled and agricultural life – although the destruction of the hunter/gather live style may have taken generations to change whilst this happened within 5 years.

I now occasionally visit my old pit village and much has changed.  No longer is there the smell of soot on the winter’s morning as coal fires were stoked  – all employees of the NCB received a free supply of coal –  the smoke and soot slowly rising up the chimneys to pollute the air.  Now it is all about the morning commute to Birmingham or Nottingham or the school run.   The old slag heaps are now part of the of the National Forest and are insulated by a thick blanket of Mountain Ash.  Other pit villages in the area have had the pit yards turned into modern housing estates – for more commuters to inhabit.  Gone is the all pervasive blackness caused by the burning and mining of coal.

So one day we will be gone, some of us already have, and all this will be a distant memory that our children will tell to their children as to how their fathers and mother would tell tall tails of their childhood growing up under the flag of the NCB and the overlordship of King Coal.

All this from touching a sculpture made out of coal, not some fine figurative piece but rather just a primitive block of hewn Barnsley Black.  Who says that modern art has got the power to move the soul.