Down a coal mine in the January of 1952

I have only ever been down a coal mine once.

It was the summer of 1972 and my future father in law who was the Chief Mechanical Engineer at Seaham Colliery made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Although a long way down, out under the North Sea and crawling through old tunnels to the coal face I was unconvinced that this had been a good idea.

But all their family were miners and even if I had chosen teaching as a career I just knew this was one decision that had already been made for me.

I survived and if truth were known rather enjoyed it, which I suspect would not have been the case if this was what I did every working day.

It is a memory that had long since been buried with the marriage and Seaham Colliery which along which closed in 1994.

But it resurfaced when I came across one of my old Eagle comics from 1952, which featured “a modern British coal mine.”

The article was one of those wonderful cut away drawings popular since the 1930s.

It could have been a ship, an aircraft, a motor car or in this case a coal mine.

The insides were laid bare and important features numbered and referenced back to an explanatory panel.

They were popular at the time capturing as they did an interest in all things technical.

Now of course they are a useful source of information about how the world worked back in the 1950s and 60s.

Picture; from the Eagle, January 11, 1952 from the collection of Andrew Simpson