Hands - seen by Sid Chaplin
Series
- Series Name
- Mining Review 18th Year
Issue
Story
- Story No. within this Issue
- 3 / 3
- Summary
- NoS synopsis: Hands and the miner. Study of the miner’s work, ending with the modern machines that reduce heavy manual labour.
NCB Commentary - The faces of men at the end of their pit shift, the faces of men after a hard day’s work. A miner’s face is a map of his world. The world of darkness and the world of daylight. The world of work and the world he makes for himself.
No matter what kind of day it is, it’s a good day when you come out of the pit. Ab Melling speaks for miners everywhere when he says he likes light.
The dust streams away. No one minds the jostling.
From the pit baths onwards, the world opens up.
Hand and eye capturing the coutryside, trees, buildings, water or the pit where he works.
Light and the gulls stream behind the plough. The lenth of the furrow is three hundred yards - the very length of his working world down below, the coalface.
From the daylight world to the world of darkness, a world where faces are in shadow, a world where hands speak better than words. Hands hard at it, shovelling, filling a crack where the coal came out, keeping a roof over his head. In the age-old history of mining it was always the hands that had it, that took a beating.
In the odd moments of waiting, pitmen let their arms and hands hang slack to ease off the tiredness. Until one day, a man asked himself how to put power in the hands of the miner. This is the answer - power to cut and load, and power to hold up the roof - power at the fingertips. This way, the hands of the miner win, hands down. - Keywords
- Mining
- Written sources
- British Film Institute Databases
Films on Coal Catalogue 1969, p.50
Film User Vol.19 No.230 December 1965, p719.
The National Archives COAL 32 /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963
- Credits:
-
- Sponsor
- National Coal Board
- Production Co.
- National Coal Board Film Unit
- Commentator
- Sid Chapin
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