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George though he didn't work at
Silverwood knew quite a few men who did including his son Dean, George
knocked around with Tony Lawson [ Ex Silverwood Manager ] when they were
kids, and they both started their careers at Cortonwood. Later on in his
career he was to come into contact with Len Barlow who is also
featured on these pages.
The closure of Cortonwood in 1984 was
the incident that sparked the strike of that year, and George tells of a
little of his life both before and after that strike.
"I was a deputy at Cortonwood under Len Barlow, he gave me a lot of encouragement in my career, he once invited me to
his home to give me some mining text books which I still have and
treasure. While at his home he showed me a sailing boat he had built in his
back garden, I think he named it after his daughter.
I am sorry to read of his passing via your
website, to me he was a gent. "
I worked at Cortonwood from 26th Dec 1956 until it closed. When it closed I
was a Colliery Overman. After the the strike when we went back to work we
carried on mining for a short period to supplement production lost at
other pits where they were held up while they got their faces back on
stream. One of the reasons they closed Cortonwood was because they could not
sell our coal and here we were mining more.
After a while we stopped production and started salvaging, I was held back
to run one of the salvage shifts. Before salvaging was complete I was
seconded to The Small Mines Drainage Unit at Rawmarsh at the recommendation
of Guy Stevens a colliery manager who had stood in as manager several times
at Cortonwood.
At the Drainage as it was affectionately known one of our jobs was to close
down old pits and fill in the shafts, the irony of this was I had to go back
and supervise the filling in the shafts of the pit where I had worked for so
long but where my father Jack and my own son Dean had worked.
Just a bit of unknown history, the N.U.M. Cortonwood had asked for half of
one of the headgear pulleys [wheel] to erect as a monument opposite ' The
Welfare' at Brampton Bierlow, well some bright spark let them all go for
salvage so I was told I had to find another. I sent a team and a lorry and
we nicked one from Yorkshire Main and that is the one at Brampton.
Just another funny incident, we were later to close Yorkshire Main and we
were told to get the job done before March 97 I think it was so the Copey
Winding Towers could be demolished so there was no chance of going back in
there, I was told there was more coal take left at Yorkshire Main than there
was left in the whole of the Selby Coalfield, the closure was political to
beat the local miners and unions, these were the lengths that Tories went to
to humiliate the miners.
Well to the funny bit, in the absence of my manager John Brennan I was in
effect the manager of the Yorkshire Main site when I was there and he was
not, well I was on site with some of our lads recovering some of our own
gear and loading it on to a British Coal lorry when one of the Bosses of the
firm who had got the salvage contract saw us and sent the security men, who
we employed, to detain us while he called the police to arrest us for
recovering our own gear. It took a phone call to the area where our manager
was at a meeting to get the idiot sorted out.
© George Clement george.clement@tiscali.co.uk
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1900 - 1994