In its heyday in the early 1900s, Derbyshire's 176 pits produced over 16m tons of coal a year and, from some mines, iron and clay as well. Markham in the north-east of the county, with ten working faces, as compared with the usual 2 or 3, was the biggest colliery in Europe. For this book, David Bell who lives on the Derbyshire border, has visited and interviewed many local ex-miners in an effort to build up a true picture of what life was like, both at work and at play. The transition for a boy of 15 from school to mine was a great shock although he was probably joining his father and older brothers. Mining was not just a job, but a way of life. The work was hard and the conditions were always dangerous. Comradeship was everything and nowhere was this more tested than during the 1984/5 miners strike, fought in an effort to stave off the threat of mass pit closures. The book includes many old photographs, some borrowed from private collections, maps of pit areas, a chart of each colliery's life span and a list of the numbers each one employed.
A5 (softcover) 126 pages
