"…..a miner was able to tell how long he would be underground, and how long he would work by the amount his candle had burned down."

Bill Johnstone, author of Coal Dust in my Blood, is originally from England where his family history is steeped in coal mining. His grandfather, father, brothers, and uncles were all miners. One of his grandmothers had twelve children and they were all in the mines, as well as five sons in the First World War.

Bill came to Canada in 1928 to work in a coal mine in Alberta where he met his wife Dorothy, of sixty-nine years, and came to Vancouver Island in 1936.

Bill’s Story

"I started mining when I was fourteen years old and one of my first jobs in the mine was as a putter. I drove ponies from the miner to the landings, assembly points, to have another car filled. We were paid by the score, every twenty cars. They were eight hundred weight cars and each putter moved forty or fifty of them per day. The mine introduced a new design of car with a false bottom which was heavier (they held 12cwt), harder to handle but they did not increase the score price. The putters got two shifts of men in the pithead baths and refused to move the tubs - mine cars. One of the putters got up on a bench and emptied his water bottle out, which was a sign of discontentment and a strike was started on the spur of the moment.