Andy Boag Photographer

Savile Colliery - Closed August 1985

I came to work at Savile in 1969. I was a deputy here until 1985; the pit shut after the strike. I’ve been a miner all my life, with only four or five months away from the pit, so I have been quite lucky really.

About four hundred and fifty people worked here. When I first started there were three or four big families worked here, with forty or fifty people in each. When you asked for a particular person’s surname, looking for someone, they would say ‘which one?’ and go through a list until you got the right one. It was like a different world even though I only lived two or three miles away, they even talked a little bit different, with different words I’d never even heard before.

There’s no stigma attached to mining, you can’t hide the fact that you’d worked at the pit, you were proud of it. Most of the people I’ve spoken to wish the pits were still open.