I tried for a job at Ifton Colliery and was successful straight away. I was 15 and I had only just left school. An awful lot of lads of my age went to Ifton that year from Oswestry, Cefn Mawr, Acrefair and Chirk, which is where I lived at the time.

The training started at Gresford colliery, which was the training colliery for the whole area. You learnt quite a few of the basics there before going to Wrexham Tech, the college of mining and engineering at the time. I enjoyed my time there.

After that we went to our designated collieries, mine being Ifton. It was 1963 and I wasn't quite 16 years old so I had to bide my time on the surface until my birthday when I was old enough to go down the pit.

I worked with ex-colliers at that time, men who had given up work underground because of injury or chronic diseases such as dust. They were relegated to working on the screens and the creepers and pulling things off the cage.

Many of these older blokes had worked down Black Park colliery, as my father had done. He worked there until it closed in 1947. They used to tell be about the cockroaches and rats underground and how they used to have pit ponies. There were ponies at Ifton too but by the time I got there they had been replaced by machinery.

After my 16th birthday, I got my kit ready to go down to the colliery. I can remember going along to the hatch and getting my first pair of boots and my helmet. It was quite exciting and I was looking forward to it.

I started off as a haulage hand. You always started at pit bottom doing various jobs, pushing the tubs onto the cage or on the points or the squeezer.

Even haulage was dangerous. Once, when I was uncoupling the journeys, which was a simple job that the young lads did, I had my foot on one of the thrower-ons and crushed it. I was off work for a few weeks with that.

I left the colliery in 1965 but I missed the pit and the camaraderie so I went back. When I went on to face work, the dangers changed.

The faces at Ifton were notoriously difficult to work. They were all on an incline because of the strata. There were so many faults.

I remember one incident when I was working on 27th face. Somebody started up the coal shearer and a fault came down very close to me. Instead of just the seven feet of coal, the strata above was very loose and had come down with it. The girders they had put in to try to hold it weren't strong enough. I couldn't see anything for about five minutes because of the dust. That was very scary but danger was a way of life.