Bernard Everard he was, what we say, the managing director of the quarry…you could almost say he was the squire of the village. He controlled what people did in the village because a large percentage of the people worked at the quarry, and the wives– they had a great amount of domestic help in those days- and they worked in the house, it was a very big house. Bernard Everard was at one time High Sheriff, he involved himself in the church very much, he had a great say in the church, and they also built the church, built Bardon church, the Everards, and built the vicarage. Mrs Everard was very much involved in hunting and involved herself in a lot of charitable things. She was very keenly interested in the Women’s Institute and also the Nursing Association, this was of course when the district nurse was engaged in the village…and Mrs Everard did a lot of charitable work associated with the Nursing Association by buying houses, and made a lot of money available to further this.
It was 1926 I remember. I was 14 years old and went to work with my father. I worked in the pit bottom and he of course worked in a stall, that’s a place where the coal is hewn, three of four of them in one piece of coal face… We had no electric lamps in those days, we had safety lamps and the visibility was probably 6 feet in the stidgin’ darkness. The darkness you feel… My aim was to get with my father as a collier and it took me until having done all kinds of jobs in the pit from pony driving to tipping, to supporting roadways and I went to the coal face at the age of 17 years and 1 month…and he showed me, because he was a good collier, showed me how to get coal… So I worked with him right until 1944 when he had an accident. He was dragged up the shaft in a cage and he suffered an injury from which he never really recovered, and finished his work on the surface, on the screens… So many problems aggravated the coal mining industry but the physical part of mining is one that I always said should never be tolerated by workmen of any type, of any kind, if they could get jobs on the surface. It was too arduous, too dangerous…to work in the dark for 8 hours or more, to not see daylight during the course of a winter week, when you were working full time of course. I don’t think man was meant to work like that and I’ve said that.