“When they are blasting at the face of the mine, you can feel the air coming back, because it is like a big paper bag, it has no where to go, it has to come out. If you put your lamp out you would not see anything. It was so dark - black. Not like here at night where you have the light from the lamppost - in the mine there is nothing. The old miners were always there for you, and helped you out if you needed it.

“When you first start in the mine, you may run a hoist that is quite an important job, because you are letting down the weight of ten cars at a time. There was no indicator on the smaller hoists to tell you how far you were, so you had to count the wraps of rope around the hoist drum. Some places you had to let the break on or off as the grade changed. The rope rider would ‘ring’ you on the wires to let you know what to do. You have to be careful, because if a trip gets away from you, it is quite a bit of tonnage sitting there, it could pile up. Most men went from No.8 to Tsable River, but I went from Tsable River to No.8. Most miners, like the old guys, Harry Westfield and others worked at the face all the time. Most of those fellows had tickets, they are called loaders, and the rest of the people are on the haulage. Tsable River had a pull system on the 41/2 level, no electricity so they had a system where you would pull a cord and it lifted buckets of rock up and down beside the hoist man. A code system, the number of buckets meant different things.  

“There were three Bobs in our house, there was old Bob, young Bob and wee Bob and I was wee Bob. All my uncles worked in the No.4 mine where there were a couple explosions. Aunty Noreen’s dad was killed in the No.4 explosion. Uncle Sandy and Robert Robertson, his brother were killed in the Tsable River mine. Some of the old timers, like Bill Johnstone, can tell you a lot more than I can; I was just a young kid then. Puddin Westfield was a miner all his life; his dad had one leg. When he was just a little baby, his dad had an accident on the railway tracks, years and years ago. He had a crutch and he could really get around, it did not slow him down one bit, he could go like you would not believe. They called him Peg, everybody had nicknames, and they used to call me Mckye.

“Working conditions in many places were wet, water coming in continually, but you got used to it - it was just a job. My grandpa was in the mines for sixty-five years; he worked in the old country when he was a boy, and the only reason he finally quit here was that my uncles said they were not going to work anymore if he was. He worked in the No. 8 mine until he was seventy-five years old. Uncle Bobby and Uncle Alec started in the mines at a very young age and worked there all their lives. Uncle Bobby worked the No.7 mine that was right behind Bevan; it was a slope mine and he got his hand frozen on the main slope. He was riding the coal trip going up; he was a rope rider and got his hands frozen from the air in the winter, his knuckles turned all white, it really bothered him. Just like the No.8 mine, I worked at the shaft bottom there for quite awhile, and the air coming down the shaft was so cold in the winter, you had no protection at the bottom of the shaft, because the air was coming straight down. I used to go hunting with him out behind Cumberland and he always wore big gloves because his hands got so cold.

“There were no mules in the mines when I was there, but in the No.8 mine the stalls and everything were still there. You just had to go down the cage and go south towards Nanaimo maybe fifty feet, a road went up to the right and I walked up there some times when I was at the shaft bottom, when there was no coal coming on the afternoon shift. That is where all the stalls were for the horses and the mules; they all had their names on the stalls. When the mules were in the coal mine, my uncle used to look after them quite a bit, break them in if they got new mules and horses. Sometimes when a guy was on afternoon shift they gave him the same mule or horse that had worked all day; he could tell right away because the mule was miserable. My uncle said they just treated them horribly; today they would never get away with it. They often worked double shifts, big horses pulling cars all day, you know sixteen hours; they would get pretty tired and miserable after a while, just like a human being if you worked sixteen hours. My uncle said when you finished working a shift, and told the horse you were finished, he knew the way back to the barn and would always go back to the same stall.

“Most miners worked Monday to Friday but they always had a fire boss in the mines on the weekend. One person on each shift, in case the pumps stopped in different areas. They had to have pumps to pump the water out of the mine, so they had a fire boss on shift all the time, seven days a week, around the clock.

“I have some pay slips from working in the mine, some from No.5 and No.8. I have a few from my grandpa too, who worked in the No.6 mine in 1905. What we had to do is go down to the Collieries office in Cumberland on Saturdays, give our pay slip it to the girl, walk to the bank, where we were paid in cash -  a big white envelope with money in it - different thing than now altogether. “I have a bunch of school pictures of my classmates and me. You know, most of those kid’s dads were miners. Many of these people went on to become teachers, well most of them anyway. Not too many of my friends went into the mines, some of them went logging and a lot of them stayed in school longer than I did. It is nice to have these photos around. “I could have gone to school, there was always some money around the house for me to go, but I did not want to, I wanted to work. I have talked to people who say they would never go underground, and I say 'hey if you needed a job, and there was nothing else around, and you were not going to school, where are you going to go'? “When I finished working at the mine I did some logging in Campbell River, and then got a job as a line puller for BC Telephone. I got an apprenticeship through BC Tel; it took me seven years to complete my lineman’s certificate and I worked for them for thirty-five years.”