Learning on ScreenNottinghamshire - 50 Years On
Series
- Series Name
- Mining Review 19th Year
Issue
Story
- Story No. within this Issue
- 2 / 4
- Summary
- NoS synopsis: A National Coal Board training officer, Fred Draycott, looks back over his 50 years in mining
NCB Commentary - After fifty years of mining, Fred Draycott is taking his last ride up the shaft. He’s a man with no regrets. He’s ending his mining career as training officer at Sutton Colliery in Nottingham. He’s been in training for nine years now, after more than forty spent in the coalfield.
Go back with Fred to the year 1916. He was a boy of thirteen then and on New Year’s day he started at Ormwood Colliery. He left home at half-past four in the morning to get to work by six. The five mile walk was a fair stretch for a young lad. Then came a ten-and-a-half hour day, without meal breaks, working on the screens.
Six-and-eight a week was his pay, and his father - a grown man - only earned ten-and-seven a shift. It wass on the coal that the money wsa, just as it is today. Nobody trained you into a job; a son followed his father until he could carry on on his own.
Then came the depressions and the strikes of the twenties. In 1921, Fred Draycott was out twenty-six weekd. Half a year’s work was lost to him. Another half-year lost in 1926, and the pattern of insecurity was repeated all through the years between the two World Wars.
But since 1946, Fred Draycott has seen a new industry emerge out of the old. Modern power-loading machines have banished the pick and shovel; powered supports have taken over from timber and iron bars.
When boys come to see him at Sutton Colliery, he can talk to them about the industry from the depth of his own experience. He can tell them how the future will be plotted in mining in terms of men skilled not only in the traditional crafts, but in the techniques of today and of tomorrow.
Fred’s seen the social pattern of the industry change, too, and the growth of amenities undreamt of when he started as a boy. He’s seen the birth and growth of safety rules and proper training, and in all this he’s played his own part.
Mrs. Draycott knows the story too. She could never reckon up how many sandwiches she’s cut for Fred over the years, most of them sliced in the small hours of the morning.
It’s men like Fred Draycott, with long years of service behind them, who have helped guide the forward march of the mining industry of today. - Written sources
- British Film Institute Databases
Films on Coal Catalogue 1969, p.52
The National Archives COAL 32 /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963
- Credits:
-
- Sponsor
- National Coal Board
- Production Co.
- National Coal Board Film Unit
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