Community Woodland for Llangennech & District  

Memories of Troserch

School Holidays - Summer of 1958 - Tony Williams

Working with my father in a private mine

I was just fourteen, when I began to work with my father at the mine in Troserch Woods. I can remember having to pass a tiny cottage before I got there. It was known as the Mill and situated about three hundred yards away from the mine. A family known as the Taylor family lived there at the time. Mair was the eldest of the two girls. Pat her sister was in my class at school. They had two younger brothers. Sometimes, I would be lucky enough to have a lift in the lorry as it headed towards the mine. I can remember the road being very narrow and bendy, the lorry just about managing to get past the cottage.

The day shift involved pushing the coal drams up a slight gradient to the coal face where my father would be working. The mine was worked into the ground and ran in for about two hundred yards. It was known as a level pit. There was no machinery or electricity, it was all shovel and picking work, together with explosives. We would put a carbon lamp on the dram. It gave us very little light, but there was just enough to see the bottom of the wheels of the dram. We used the "spraging method". This consisted of a piece of wood about eighteen inches long, which we used to sprag the dram, to prevent it from rolling back down, when it reached the working surface.

My father would drill the coal face with a large drill called a Nelson, which had a big plate on one end, which he position against his shoulder. The actual length of the drill was about four feet. All this was done by hand. I could see my father at work, stripped to the waist, his body black with coal dust and shining with sweat. After the drilling, he would use dynamite. It had a long fuse, which he would light with a match and run out to the surface, until the explosive went off. We would wait for about fifteen minutes, for the smoke to clear. We then took a dram in with us and my father and I would fill it. Once full I would take it down the slight gradient, spraging as I went along.

Colin the surface worker would help. It was tipped into a grid and then through a chute. The small haulage company, Evans Brothers, would reverse their lorries to the bottom of the chute and then shovel about ten ton onto the lorry. This was all done by hand two or three times a day.

When my father had cleared all the loose coal, he would pick at the face with a small pick known as a "mandrel". The depth of the coal, was only about one foot and six inches deep and about five foot of "bottom", in other words rock. All this had to be removed so that you could lay a road or rails for the drams. MY father had to drill the rock or "bottom". The same routine as loosening the coal with explosives was used again at this stage. Wait for the smoke to clear and then in again, so that the posts and flats could be put up, to hold the roof, to prevent it from falling in on us. Most of the rock bottom after the explosion would be packed to the side, like a dry stone wall. It was called "packing". Any surplus would go out to the surface and tipped to the side.

The experience of all this and all the memories of hard work and happy times will always remain with me. I received five shillings for my labour and enjoyed it.

During the hot summer months we would walk to work, about two miles there and two miles back. I would take a soap and a towel with me each day, so that I could bathe in the river on the way back home. I can remember on one occasion, being watched by some girls as I soaped my body and plunged myself into the water. They looked to be about eleven or twelve years old. Some years later, I met a girl who told me, that she was one of these girls, who stood watching on the banks of the river. That girl is my wonderful wife of thirty-seven years this month, November 27th 2006.

Troserch woods is very much part of my life. I have worked in the heart of it. I have fished the river that runs along it. I have hunted game there. I have cut the hazel and made unusual walking sticks, as I am a member of the SWSMC. It is there that my wife and I have enjoyed beautiful walks throughout the seasons and hopefully always will.