Right, my name is Ernest Worthington and I was born in 1938. I've lived in the village all my life and when I left school I became an indentured apprentice in the electrical contracting industry. Then when I had served my apprenticeship, had to serve my national service in the Royal Air Force in 1959 to 1961. When I came out there I went back into the electrical contracting industry for a spell of about three years after which I was made redundant. I then decided to seek employment at Calverton pit as an electrician. The work there was different to contracting in all of my life so I had to start retraining. So I went back to college from the coal board while working on the surface. After about a year I went underground, still serving a training period under another electrician until I was qualified to work on my own. I then worked with other electricians on coal faces until I was deemed to be sufficiently qualified to work on my own on a coal face which I did. This coal face was to become one of the most productive coal faces in Europe. Calverton Colliery was one of the most productive coal minds in Europe.
It was the first Colliery to become nationalised. Anyway, this coal face I worked on there for about six years after which I became a district chargeman and electrician in charge of several electricians in one area of the pit. Subsequently I became the senior chargeman underground working on shifts for 23 years and people have asked me, "Did you actually like working underground?" Or, "You must have liked it to have worked underground." It wasn't like that. I found the work very interesting working with machinery and switch gear that ranged from 12 volts to 3,300 volts underground and learning how to supervise men working under those conditions was quite difficult but very rewarding. That particular coal face that I worked on was the recipient of many awards for the way that it produced coal in vast quantities.
Most of the coal at Calverton Colliery went to Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station. It was high grade coal and it was mixed with other colliery coal to become less high grade because the boilers at the power station would only take a certain grade of coal. Anyway, when the time came for me to finish I was offered redundancy after 25 years in 1989 and finished work there and went on to become a self-employed electrical contractor after that.
Can you tell us a little bit about the conditions underground?
I guess at Calverton and it was pretty good compared to some of the older mines because it's of its modernity. Conditions were not too bad. Some coal faces suffered with fractures in the structure of the earth around the coal and so there would be breaks in the seam of coal and that caused a lot of problems, a lot of difficulties, a lot of danger. I remember roof falls in these fractured areas were particularly dangerous and some men were quite badly injured and obviously that affected their future life at the pit because often they couldn't work in the same job they were doing previously, and I also witnessed a man who was killed, by a runaway mine-cart, which crushed him, and I rode out in the same mine-cart with him, but by then, he was dead. I remember particularly because his name was Burt Lancaster, same as the film star.
There was always circumstances where danger was present. Of course dust played a big part in the life of a miner and we were over a period of time because the Union insisted on it that we were given masks and ear defenders. The problem is with masks for miners particularly it was a hot sweaty environment and the masks were very uncomfortable so quite often they didn't use them at all. The ear defenders affected your helmet and so they didn't particularly want to wear them I thought. So afterwards miners did suffer particularly with pneumoconiosis and also damage to hearing which I have to a certain extent but otherwise I came through it unscathed.
Is comfort in a deep mine?
Yes. It's about 800 feet.
Right okay and it goes out from Calverton.
In all directions. Yes. There's also an underground link between the bottom of Calverton pit which was all worked out by the time I went to work there. The lowest team had a connection, a roadway through to Linby and then to Bestwood Colliery. That had to be examined every day although it wasn't used. It was an airway and an escape route but it had to be kept safe. And on occasions I used to go with a deputy and also a mechanic to examine the roadways through to Linby. We also, electricians also had to examine the shaft cables. And so on those occasions you would stand on top of the cage chained to it with a safety chain and go slowly down the mine on top examining cables and there were lots of cables and pipes that serviced the mine. Although it sounds very dangerous you were safe because you were anchored to the chains on the top of the cage.
So there was a lot about safety of men and machinery?
It was. Yes. It was particularly being electric and electrical equipment can trigger sparking as it does on the surface. You couldn't allow that underground. So all electrical equipment had to be flame proof which made it very big and bulky and very difficult to deal with. But yes, the voltage that went underground was 3,300 volts and it was transformed into various other voltages as it was distributed around the pit.
So you had like little substation at the time?
There were substations everywhere. Yeah.
What about the community as a whole? How did you see that?
Well before that it was a very friendly community but after that strike in 1984 when some miners and I have to include myself in that, joined a breakaway union and we then continued to go to work. And that came about because the mine works leader at that time Arthur Sparkhill chose not to ballot the miners of their views about striking or not. And in Nottinghamshire particularly we disagreed with that and felt that if we were given a vote we would have supported the strike but because it was done in such a way the Notts miners had decided not to support the union, the National Union, the fireworkers and started going back to work. And that caused enormous problems. Pickets were busting by the bus loads hundreds of them, thousands sometimes to try and stop those miners who wanted to go to work from going to work. So that caused breaks in the community which I'm afraid to say still persist into the next generation.
And there was a big police presence?
Massive. Massive. There were thousands of policemen busting as well from all over the country to protect the miners because you remember who was prime minister at the time Margaret Thatcher. And she was particularly disliked. That's a polite word by the mining community and unions in general because she chose to break the power of the unions which at that time was very strong. She made it clear that those miners who wanted to go to work would be protected by the police no matter how many and that's how it was.
So what about things like miners welfare, the Calverton and working men's club because a lot of people gathered there?
Yes, but also who joined the Breakaway Union wasn't welcome there anymore. So they just didn't go to the miners welfare. It came like the stronghold of the National Union and mine workers.
That was post-84.
But it was during the strike afterwards as well. I think it's probably softened that attitude has softened to some extent. And I think as one of the Breakaway Unionists I would perhaps be welcome now in welfare.
So did you go to the welfare before that because they used to do a lot of things for the community?
Not particularly one of those sort of many went to the welfare. In fact, a little aside, electricians always consider themselves to be the elite of the pit. And the men who actually got the call were the miners. We didn't consider ourselves miners. We were electricians who worked underground. And so when I bought my first house in Calverton, I lived in a semi-detached house on Mansfield Lane for five years before buying the house I'm now still living in almost sixty years later, and a miner said to me “I don't know how you electricians can afford to buy a house like that.” And I used to say to them. “I didn't go to the miners welfare every night, drinking my money away.” I saved it and did what I wanted to do. And that was to better my life and eventually buy a detached house, which I did.
Well, obviously I can remember Calverton before the pit became productive. And so it was a small mining village. One of my grandfathers was a tenant farmer and he was a tenant of a farm where Manor Road now is. And so I can remember that farm being there, a small boy. And eventually the Borough Council then was Basford Rural District Council. And they purchased that farm to build those first council houses in Calverton. Prior to that, my grandfather's fields had been where the top estate now is, with the co-op, with the schools, or were. And I can remember my grandfather having shire horses to do the work before he eventually bought a tractor. So I remember that with great fondness.
My other grandfather was also a farm worker, but he was a farm labourer. So he didn't farm the farm himself. He worked for a farmer. It was Robson's, yes. But anyway, he worked there as a farm labourer. And he lived in the cottage, as I was telling you about, my dad was one of six children. My granddad and grandma were both very little people. So I take after my mother's family, the Swifts. So my mother was five foot ten, which was quite big for a lady in those days, as was a sister. My grandfather was a grenadier guardsman in the First World War and survived it. So I remember all those fields before they were built on, and also at the bottom estate. And of course it transformed the village, changed village life completely, much to the discontented most of the old villages.
From my recollection, back in 1959, the top club was a wooden hut, which is now used by the St John's Ambulance Unit. And it was there, and men used to go in for a drink of beer, or two, or three, after they worked the shift underground.