Ted Mckay on the Roy Noble show on BBC Radio Wales
I can remember going to the pit for the very first time to get a job. There were not careers offices or anything in them days. You left school and you went to look for your own job.
I can remember going to see the Underground Manager, Herbert Evans. He didn't ask for any qualifications or if you'd passed any exams. He said to me 'Can you get up early in the morning lad?' and I said 'Yes sir.' 'Start on Monday.' And that's how I got my job at Point of Ayr.
Point of Ayr was the only pit in NE Wales that actually worked under the sea and there were certain restrictions because of working of that. We worked coal faces using a method that hadn't changed for over 100 years. The coal faces were 12 feet wide and you had to leave pillars of coal. It was always said that you had to support the sea bed.
To begin with we were supplying coal for the railways and they wanted big lumps so we were hand filling. All our coal was hauled out by ponies in them days.
When the railways' orders went and we had to go over to supplying power stations they needed slack, so we had to change our mining methods and our faces went from 12 feet wide to 100 or 200 yards long. In this type of method you take a strip off, you move all the supports over and you let the roof fall in behind you.
We'd never worked this method and everybody was a bit apprehensive about seeing the roof fall in.
I was working with a chap called Will Brown Cow. What his proper name was, I have no idea. He was always known as Brown Cow, and all the family were Brown Cows! We were doing the first wastes, letting the roof cave in. Nobody was saying anything but everyone was a bit apprehensive about the sea bed. I can remember him saying to me very dryly 'Don't worry lads, but if you see any fish, run!'
That was the type of humour you had in the pit. In the most difficult situation underground you always had somebody who'd come up with something humorous and break the tension.
The war had just finished when I left school so we only had an elementary education and in those days people like us weren't expected to amount to anything. So I went, with very little education, to the pit to work with men who had even less education than I had. This was a well trodden path. What amazed me, even when I was young, was that some of these men we worked with were poets.
Our fireman, Einion Evans, you couldn't get into his house for bardic chairs! These people wrote strict metre poetry and they would tell you about the great poets of history. People with little education, but people who were members of the choir - we all had choirs in them days. They would tell you about operas and arias and singers - wonderful knowledge.
How they amassed this knowledge I don't know. They might not have had much education but they were scholarly, knowledgeable people.
