Word: pitheads
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Hard Way to Shakespeare. When Aneurin (rhymes with a fire in) Bevan was a boy in Tredegar, South Wales, sickness and disaster were never far from the pithead. His father had been one of the founders of the Tredegar Workingmen's Medical Aid Society. Each member contributed three pennies out of every pound earned; in return, the society hired doctors and dentists to treat the miners or their families when they became...
British coal production was off about 55 million tons since 1937; in many old mines, the coal face was three miles from pithead...
...miners refused. Quite rightly, said Lloyd George, because the miners wanted the mine own ers to bear the full cost for installing the baths. "I've always heard," said the Duke seriously, "that the miners' wives didn't want baths at the pithead because washing their husbands' necks is one of their special prerogatives. They enjoy it, and they expect to do it every evening. They didn't want to be robbed of the privilege...
Three hours later the boy at the pithead heard the signal bell from the 141-ft. level, indicating that the three wanted to come up. Seconds later he heard the dread nine bell alarm, meaning DANGER, then a great rumbling roar. The walls of the shaft had buckled, the ground over nearly an acre had dropped several feet. Headed by Premier Angus MacDonald, most of Nova Scotia's Provincial officials rushed to the scene...
...every working pithead in the United Kingdom last week smut-faced coal miners voted in favor of a nation-wide strike, 409,351 to 29,215. Yet afterward, with the characteristic attitude of such leaders as Britain's proletariat has been able to find, Secretary Ebenezer Edwards of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, which conducted the poll, commented: "Nobody wants to strike...