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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 17, 2023 15:00:42 GMT
Eeek -- scarily realistic! That must have startled many a passerby.
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Post by whatagain on Sept 17, 2023 15:57:54 GMT
Close to home a minute nûment to a French general wounded at Wavre and who helped repel the Dutch in 1830.
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Post by mickthecactus on Sept 27, 2023 15:11:36 GMT
This was a huge haystack probably set alight by kids. 3 days later it’s still smouldering.
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Post by kerouac2 on Sept 27, 2023 16:17:41 GMT
Kids will be kids. I remember enjoying burning things, but I was much less ambitious.
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Post by lugg on Sept 27, 2023 19:55:08 GMT
Crikey ...what a waste
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 28, 2023 2:37:07 GMT
Really! I hope it was insured. All that work of growing then getting the hay in, then the little thrill-seeking bastards do that.
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 2, 2023 22:14:04 GMT
Came across this photo when I was looking for something else. A bit of a shock. It's not often you come across something that as you were growing up, you understand influenced your character and personality. On the left dropping down the hill you can see some terraced type houses - we referred to them as rabbit hutches. I lived in one for many, many years. They were built by the National Coal Board to house miners and their families. In typical fashion, even though every miner received a free coal allowance, these were built to be all electric. This is near enough to the view from my bedroom window with the pit dominating the hill in plain sight. So close at times it seemed like you could reach out and touch it. At night it was lit up (for safety reasons) and three shifts worked twenty four hours. You had to have thick curtains if you wanted total darkness. Even if you didn't look, you could hear it, though it actually wasn't intrusive. What you did hear in fact were the trains on the spur line shunting to be loaded with coal. In the quiet of the night and with the wind in the right, or wrong, direction you could hear the individual carriages being loaded from the elevated hoppers as the coal was suddenly released to drop into the steel wagons. When I couldn't sleep I would listen to a train come in, count the wagons loaded and trundle out again. Sometimes the trains would have to be shunted back and forth to make room for another one. That sound, the shunting, I realised years later I missed. Where I live now there is a train line nearby, but not close. In the night the non-passenger freight trains go past but because it is a built up area and to avoid too much noise pollution at that time, they go quite slowly. Hearing it, it is quite comforting. In a seeming twist of fate, when we left this house I was nineteen and we moved a couple of kilometres away. That house my parents lived in until they died. Apart from three years, my father worked down the mines from 1951 until 1990. Would you believe it but across the Miners Institute playing field, several rows of other terraced houses and a couple of farmer's fields, was another pit. My father, unluckily enough, didn't work at either of them but one about 20km away. You couldn't see it directly but the sky was lit from the lights every night. And every night in the background, blow me down, I could hear more coal wagons shunting. That pit closed down in 1990, as did quite a few others but whenever I stayed back at my parent's house until then, the sound of the pit working lulled me to sleep.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 3, 2023 3:35:38 GMT
I've often read about the housing around a mine and about the nearby pit(s), but now I see what I imagined was nothing like reality.
The part where you talk about the sound of the trains shunting is lovely.
What did your father do in the three years when he didn't work in the mines? How was it that you all moved to another house after living in the first one for so long?
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 3, 2023 3:52:29 GMT
The French mining (and steel mill) towns looked pretty much the same. The row houses are called "corons" in France. I had a great aunt who lived in one.
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 3, 2023 6:23:42 GMT
What I didn't point out is that as the road has bent to the right it then does a kink to the left, under a railway bridge. That line was built to go to the pit but for some reason fell out of use while I was living nearby and a different route was used. The old lines were eventually taken up and it became a footpath I often used whilst courting as the quickest way when you were too young to have a car or motorbike to my then girlfriend's house was down it.
Bixa, long answers to a short question - my father finished his training in East Africa to be an RAF pilot just as fighting ended in WWII. He latterly in his career was posted to England where he met my mother and they married. They went out to Kenya where he was born to stay with his family but also to find work when he was demobbed. They lived there for several years but my mother missed England and they came back to the area she was born and lived in. By then it was more or less too late for him to get a piloting job so after a few different ones he had to settle for working for the major employer of the area and headed down the pit as a temporary measure that became permanent - mainly because they later then had two children and changing jobs to get somewhere untrained at the same wages was not an easy thing.
For obvious reasons my mother didn't want him there but knew there was little alternative. They hatched a plan though and after a period of training, began to run a pub. This was the three years and a bit of change missing from always working in the dark. They were unsuccessful in their endeavour as neither had a business head on them, as some don't and I don't. I've always preferred working for someone else where I can "clock off and fuck off". His only alternative again was going down the pit and as a trained miner he was given a job straight away.
Whilst living here my mother developed arthritic hips. The house was a council house that we rented. As can be seen, it is on a rather steep hill and my mother had to have both hips replaced. She couldn't go up or down so we applied for and eventually got another council house on flatter ground. That's why we moved and whilst in the second one the Thatcher era came upon us. One thing she did was sell off much of the council housing to the occupiers who got a special cheap rate which my parents took advantage of. Quite a few years later I noticed the standard of living of my parents was going down and down and understood/discovered the mortgage payments were becoming more and more onerous. I found out from the Building Society how much they still owed to completely pay off the house and after a year or more of me madly saving all I could I eventually totalled with my original savings enough to walk back into the Building Society and write them a cheque to pay off the outstanding amount.
To say my parents were happy when I presented them with the Deeds is an understatement.
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 3, 2023 6:30:11 GMT
K2, these row houses were not old and so were reasonably comfortable and more of a modern version of the old type I was born in with the toilet out in the back yard. We had a driveway and a little garden and I more thought of living there as 'cosy' rather than claustrophobic. It could have been worse.
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Post by lugg on Oct 3, 2023 19:07:29 GMT
Mark - some where I have a commemorative plate that shows all the Notts coalmines from their inception . I will look it out and post a photo as I suspect you will be interested in it. It was a gift to my FIL from the NCB when he worked there. Loved reading your recollections
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 4, 2023 2:02:48 GMT
Thanks so much for that reminiscence and for letting us see so much of your family's life. As I read, I was thinking that your story typified everything I like about good historical fiction -- the window into other lives and the social/political background of those lives. Of course your account has the added attraction of being "from the horse's mouth" meaning there is no doubt that we're getting a true picture. At the same time, it could certainly be a great framework for an excellent novel!
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 4, 2023 5:36:05 GMT
Lugg, very big on commemorative plates and stuff the NCB was. If you come across it a photo would be nice, thanks. Where did your FIL work?
Bixa, regarding a novel I think D.H. Lawrence has set the bar a bit too high.
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Post by lugg on Oct 4, 2023 19:00:13 GMT
Lugg, very big on commemorative plates and stuff the NCB was. If you come across it a photo would be nice, thanks. Where did your FIL work? I will look it out tomorrow Mark and post re the plate . Re My FIL ...He worked across Notts, going to all the mines checking weights and measures I believe. A kind of auditor . I do remember him saying he was not popular
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 4, 2023 20:49:13 GMT
He certainly wouldn't be! I bet one thing he'd do is check all weights on the bagging wagons that distributed the sacks of coal to be delivered.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 5, 2023 11:56:37 GMT
I thought this was a bit different from the vocabulary generally used in adverts for banks.
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Post by bjd on Oct 5, 2023 13:37:21 GMT
Just goes to show that it's a lot easier to swear in a language not your own.
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Post by lugg on Oct 5, 2023 18:59:34 GMT
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 5, 2023 20:48:18 GMT
Perfect Lugg. Thanks. I shall look closely at that tomorrow but on first glance I've been to most of them.
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 5, 2023 20:51:17 GMT
Just hoping tha nobody has forgotten that the Image Bank is reserved for your personal photography. Not to worry, however -- giving links to other images is authorised.
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 5, 2023 21:59:55 GMT
I had forgotten but also for some odd photo here and there it can be difficult exactly where to put it, never mind the index Bixa laboured over. I'm wondering if there is a thread for completely random photos either gleaned from elsewhere or your own that you just want to comment on and have little connection to much else. If not, I may start one.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 6, 2023 0:24:25 GMT
Good point, Mark. Yes, please -- that kind of thread sounds good.
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Post by whatagain on Oct 6, 2023 6:14:56 GMT
Doesn’t blabla qualify ?
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Post by kerouac2 on Oct 6, 2023 10:05:59 GMT
I would have thought so, but if we are talking just about unclassifiable personal photos, there could be some sort of "bla bla images" thread. But if the idea is to also post photos from other sources, the Image Bank is the wrong place.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 6, 2023 16:06:38 GMT
What Kerouac said.
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Post by lugg on Oct 6, 2023 19:29:23 GMT
Perfect Lugg. Thanks. I shall look closely at that tomorrow but on first glance I've been to most of them. Looking forward to your thoughts
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Post by lugg on Oct 6, 2023 19:30:11 GMT
there could be some sort of "bla bla images" thread. That sounds a great idea
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Post by onlyMark on Oct 6, 2023 20:54:35 GMT
Lugg, many memories invoked. Whilst most miners stuck at one or two pits for many years there were few who got to go to more than that, and in some cases a lot more. Your FIL obviously fits in that category. I was a mechanic that worked in one place but at odd times had to visit sites for breakdowns. I also though for overtime/holiday cover drove the NCB buses that picked up and dropped of the men at the pits. It meant I regularly visited all but probably just two or three on those plates and I think I didn't visit them because they'd stopped working anyway (they say 1968). Over time you knew the bus routes but at first, if you didn't pick the first man up who then told you the way, you were stuffed. I also got to know the canteens at all of them and what was best on what day and when.
I could I suppose buy one or two from eBay, they're only 5 to 10 pounds but they'd look way out of place now and have little relevance apart from to an old pit man. Thanks for the photos and I see them with nostalgia but apart from the camaraderie and remembering the humour which I never found in any other place, job or time, there was little else that was good. I left because of many factors, not least the lack of advancement, the miners strike, the writing on the wall, the pay, the danger and even though I wasn't down the pit, I saw and was involved in a number of accidents both minor and some life threatening. I still have the (faded) scars and nerve damage. It was one of those "the best of times, the worst of times" ....errrr... times.
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Post by mickthecactus on Oct 7, 2023 8:53:06 GMT
Fascinating stuff Mark. Thanks!
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