I had to do a 6 month training course here in 1947 as the National Coal Board had taken over. I had only been there a short while when Andrew the boiler stoker took ill and as there was no one else who had any experience of stoking I was given the job. For three weeks I was paid Andrews rate of pay about three times my rate , I took it to the Manager Mr. Tristem who said I was to keep it until it could be sorted but although they put me back on my rate of pay they never took the extra cash back. At Cotes Park Colliery I flued the Lancashire boilers with my father and uncle every sunday morning, if at any time of the week pressure dropped any of us had to help the stokers, we generated our own power by turbines, D.C. of course in those days. The boiler at Hartshay was an old vertical single unlagged one that stood in the main pit yard, it had no covering at all and if it rained the pressure just fell away. the coal used to fire it was of very poor quality mined from just below the surface. One day I went through the airlock doors of the upcast shaft and got a shock, there standing about 4 yards from the shaft side was a huge D. C. switchboard complete with massive Knife switches and meters about 12 inches across, what a place to put an electrical unit. The chairs where both at the top of the shaft if my memory is right and I walked through one (must have been crazy). There were no ropes on the chairs as the winder had long since been demolished.
To top up the boiler with water one had to use either an injector or a lovely small bucket pump and it was this I always used as I could never get the injector to work.
All the brickwork from the old buildings was gathered and sent underground to use as packing material on the training faces. The downcast shaft had a huge girder across it and this supported a wooden covering that was opened now and then to check the water level in the shaft and I can well remember Mr. Jack Shawcroft the Undermanager standing on the middle of this girder with the large open shaft below him. The winding house for this shaft had been stripped bare and a concrete floor laid and we played football etc. in there. There were 2 other shafts lower down, now under the A38 roadway and when the lads were coming back after chiseling brick pillars down for packing they threw many tools down these old shafts as they only had a low wall round them and you could look down and see the wooden timbers that held the chair guides.
I had to stay many extra months until someone was found to replace me but I worked odd weekends at my own pit.
Many years later I went back but it had been closed down as a training center but the watchman let me look around, nearly everything had been knocked down and all that remained of the surface drift to the training faces was a grating and you could here water running into the workings.