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After I was fired from the buses in the 1950's, I looked round to see what options were open to me; and as I never had been nor ever intended to be on the dole, I took the first job that I saw. It was for a delivery driver at a coal company, not the usual 1cwt coal domestic coal deliveries but industrial deliveries to factories.
This seemed all right at the time, wrote Allan Huntingdon who was born in 1930. All we had to do was go to several pit heads, drive under a chute, fill up a 5 ton Bedford tipper truck and deliver and tip it into coal bunkers at various factories and mills etc. That was a doddle, or so I thought.
I found out that that job went to the oldest members of staff. The young ones, and I was one of them, had to drive to the local railway siding, which had already been filled with loaded coal wagons during the previous night, pull your Bedford up alongside the wagon and climb up with a very large shovel. We were expected to fill six five-ton loads a day and deliver to the mills in our area.
Hail, rain, snow or blow, the 30 tons of coal had to be shifted. I will say something for the routine: there was no surplus fat on any one of us. We were fitter than we had ever been.
The crunch came when there was a complete shutdown of the rail network. Everyone went on strike.
The stations were shut, the sidings were locked up and there was no coal to be had. It got to the stage when some mills were having to close because their machines were run on steam from coal boilers. It looked like we were going to be laid off too.
Then one of the company directors made personal approaches direct to the mines and suggested that we would come to the pit heads and collect the coal from their own railway wagons.
After some negotiation, it was agreed that if we came and did this, it would leave space for the stocks of coal that would accumulate if no railway wagons were removed.
That was the time when we all had to pull the stops out. We worked flat out from 6 am until 9 pm and sometimes even longer. We didn't have the energy to go out at night. I just had my tea and a bath and went straight to bed.
It wasn't easy waking up in the mornings either. I was so worn out that I could have slept through 48 hours without waking once. This went on for quite a few days and I can't quite remember how long but I'd bet some of you would remember that national rail strike.
I had acquired an old alarm clock from a junk shop some time previously and decided to set it up in my bedroom. I remember it had a large face with Roman numerals, no case, a swinging pendulum and a 5 inch bell at the bottom.
When that bell went off, I am sure it must have wakened the whole street. The first few times it went off for me, I was out of bed so fast to turn it off before I started a panic. Anyway, that kept me working till the strike was over.
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