Last updated 09:16, Saturday, 24 May 2008

I recently recall reading in the News & Star that Haig Pit, at Whitehaven, was for sale and it made me think back to a time in my youth when the west coast of Cumbria was lined with pit heads.

Miners at Siddick pit

Travelling on the bus to school from Workington to Hensingham in the Sixties, the coastline seemed to be busy with working pits and black mountains of coal. There always appeared to be trains with hundreds of wagons, heaped with coal, always on the move.

Looking out of the bus window towards the sea at Parton, with Lowca in the distance, there seemed to be just one big coal mine dominating the skyline.

In the other direction, from Workington heading north along the coast, the road used to pass very close to Siddick Pit, which almost seemed to spill onto the road.

Just a couple of miles further on and through the village of Flimby was another pit (I’m not sure what it was called – possibly Risehow?) but they were just known as Flimby Pit, Siddick Pit and so on.

The lads that worked the mines were a common sight of an evening. Walking down the streets after a hard day or night’s graft, their hard work showed in the blackness of the coal-dust that covered them from head to foot. A lot of people in those days worked either in the pits or on the steelworks at Workington.

With the miner’s, steelworkers, coal-men on delivery down the streets, road-sweepers too (a man with a brush in the gutters) it was all heavy industry in those days and dirty work. Even the newspaper industry that I worked in back then was “hot metal” and I would come home covered in printer’s ink from the type that I worked with. That took some scrubbing off.

I remember my dad, who was also a compositor at the Workington Star office, rolling his own fags and everyone thinking he used liquorice papers because they were black. But it was only the ink from his hands that made the roll-ups black – think of all that going into his lungs.

But despite all that, ironically the world seemed a “cleaner” place. Hard work to be sure, but everyone grateful of a job and prepared to get their hands dirty for a weekly wage.

The coal faces have all been grassed over now, landscaped into the countryside, leaving no trace, in most cases, that they ever existed.

For all its “muck” and pollution, I still look back on those times as honest and innocent somehow. A harder but less complicated life.

We are constantly told that we are living in a “greener” world and undoubtedly in most respects, we are. I see the pit heads replaced along the coast with industrial windmills and factories such as Iggesund which run the length of the Siddick coastline.

We are repeatedly told that the ice caps are in danger of disappearing due to our modern day pollution of the planet.

Today drug abuse is reluctantly accepted as part of our modern day culture, the internet is now a necessity in our daily lives with almost anything available for a price.

How much cleaner and greener are we really?

n Do you remember the pits? Did you work in them? Let Timeline know your memories.