“At that time, my older brother and sister were out of the house; they were in New Westminster working. I was the oldest one in our immediate family at that particular time; I was third down in a line of eight. All the rest of the sisters went to Cumberland School; they took the train from Puntledge when it was still running to Cumberland. I crossed the boundary and chose to go to Courtenay High School. I rode a bicycle; I was in shape that is for sure! It was a four mile run, and after a day of school and activities I had to climb Cooper’s Hill.

“I can remember playing soccer for Courtenay High School against the Japanese sailors who worked on the coal boats that came into Union Bay. It did not make any difference if we won or they won, we learned a lesson in ethics and cleanliness in athletics. We ran around and played soccer and got all sweaty and gunky. They used to invite us onto the boat for dinner, and when we walked into their dining room, we had to take our shoes off, and guess what? After playing a soccer game it was not very nice! The second time we went down we made sure we had a little a kit bag with clean clothes in it. We used to take gifts. They would give us little trinkets to commemorate the occasion, and we would give them little trinkets in return.

“All the houses were company houses and almost all of them had outhouses, very few had indoor toilets. We did have electricity and running water indoors. If you wanted to put in an indoor toilet it was at your own expense. The company would foot the bill for paint and wallpaper, and you labored it on yourself. I think maybe there was a phone at the store. It was a cruder way of living. The electricity was twenty-five cycle; all standardization was sixty cycle, but they had their own generating station, which is still down on Powerhouse Road. It used to generate their own electricity, but it was all old English machinery that was twenty-five cycle, so any electric motors like washing machines had to be twenty-five cycle. I do not know what they have over in England now but here everything is 110 or 220 volts, so we have sixty cycle power. The Powerhouse was converted over years ago and everybody had to convert their washers and things at their own expense. Canadian Collieries did not generate hydro anymore, they were bought out by BC Hydro, I guess.

“On the road from Bevan to Courtenay, at the crossroads now, there used to be a humpbacked bridge that went over the tracks at Puntledge. That main logging road that you cross that comes from Comox Lake used to be the railway. It used to go right through to Union Bay. The locomotive that hauled the coal to Union Bay hauled the logs to Royston too, same track, same engineer.

“Union Bay was a massive shipping point, which went hand in hand with Cumberland, Bevan, and Puntledge. That is where the mechanics and tradesmen were, Union Bay was actually the machine shops for Bevan and Cumberland. There were two doctors in Cumberland, Dr. Hicks and Dr. McNaughton. Skinny Banks was the mortician.

“I finished high school in Courtenay and graduated. In the mean time, I did pick up the odd summer and weekend job. One of the biggest jobs I had while I was still going to school was when we put the fish ladder in at Comox Lake. I was in the Air Cadets; I wanted to fly but I am coluor-blind. I had fair marks and I wanted to go in for medicine at one time, but then the mines went on strike. I had been working in the mines and staying at home to save money to go on in school. It never happened. The mines went on strike, and I told the family to use whatever I had saved up. When it was gone I said, ‘that is it.’

“The Dunsmuir Company was a tough company. We all knew the history of the Dunsmuirs, but the company was only as tough as the men made it - the supervisors I mean. We knew at that time that coal mining was on its way out. The railroads across Canada were going to heavy steel, and they were going to diesels, so coal was not going to be in much demand. I cannot say No. 8 was at its boundaries, but it was getting tougher and tougher to ventilate. It was 550 feet down, straight down an elevator. You did have an incline, a tunnel, that went down to the 1000 foot level, to the number 4 seam, but you went down the elevator for 550 feet and worked down there. But, you know, it was a job, and a good job. You never had to worry about snow or rain.

“Although Canadian Collieries sometimes had a reputation as not being a good company to work for, they did show good will toward us and our families. A four year old boy, Billy Huddleston, went missing one day; we think he was trying to get to Stokum Falls, because he may have heard us older kids talking about how we would go there. We do not know what time of day he left, but when he did not show up at suppertime we started looking. When the afternoon shift came up, the night shift did not go down into the pits. Everybody went and got their lamps and went looking for Billy, and this was in agreement with Canadian Collieries. The search party was about two hundred men strong. They formed a line, close enough together that they could reach out and touch hands, and combed every foot of the bush. If you had to go through water and swamp, you went through water and swamp. During the wee hours of the morning they found the young fellow, out toward Stokum Falls, tucked up under a huckleberry bush against a stump. He had been following an old logging grade. Cracker Weir was the guy who found him. Canadian Collieries paid everyone on this search and rescue; everyone was considered on shift to find the boy. I imagine the critical people went down into the mine to check on areas down there, but the main work force was out in the bush searching. Everyone pulled together and supported the miners and each other. The nicest part about this was after he was found everybody sort of gathered together.

Mining Methods

“When they surveyed the coal seams they drilled from the top, whether they were out in the middle of the swamp behind Bevan or down in the fields on the way toward Courtenay. They used to drill down in spots for directional guidance, so when they drilled they knew how far down they were. It was the same as drilling for oil now; you had crews all over drilling, and they new what the depth of the coal was, and they would know what our elevation was.

“What they tried to do in the mine was, they would run a railroad track from the shaft, both ways, and as it reached out they liked it to go uphill, so it was not as hard to bring down the weight of the coal to the elevator, to the shaft. The empties were light, but when you get two tons of coal in a car, and you have fifteen cars, you have thirty tonnes running on a just a little battery unit. So it was easier to come downhill and put brakes on than it was pulling that load uphill. It was a massive railroad under there, but the coal seams are not flat, they run on all angles, so they tried to gauge the tunnels. They wanted slow declines and inclines, and the coal seam was yawed, or tilted. If you went uphill they called them inclines, and if you went down they called it dips. We followed the coal seam upward, so they had an exploration crew that would just drive these tunnels up and when they got well up into the top, you had to put an airline up. There was no electricity down there; everything was run by compressed air.

“To explain ventilation, the haulage ways in the mine are like streets that cross. Say that Granville is your main street, and then you have Hastings which can go uphill or downhill from there. As you go along, you are traveling in spaces that were once filled with coal. Now, the one shaft going down the No. 8 was your hauling shaft, it is your main shaft with ventilation lines just like in your house. You have another shaft hooked up in a certain area, another shaft going down with a massive fan; probably forty feet in diameter, that is using hydro like crazy. A massive motor sucked air out of that hole that went down 550 feet and was connected to the hole you just went down in the elevator. This system gives you ventilation that goes around and then comes back up. When you mined the coal - the coal was mined out in the afternoon on the day shifts, night shift moved the machinery.

“Each coal seam was removed in a nine foot wide by two hundred foot long chunk. The coal seam in No. 8 was only four feet high, so you had to work on your knees. You had to provide your own knee pads, and I still have mine.

“A lot of times they took two feet off the top and two feet off the bottom, so they had eight feet to work in. A different crew drove in the tunnel for the return air, the alley we called it; we called them the duckbill crew, they were the road builders or the tunnel builders. They built the return airways and the main haulage seams. They called them the duckbill crew because the drill they used was a big chunk of steel on wheels that had sort of a long bill on it and they used to drill and blast the coal first because there was money in it. They moved it out in cars on a little railway. The railway was always important; they had a mini-railway with two tonne coal cars.

“When it came to ventilation, this is where Bill Johnstone and other engineers worked. When they engineered this, they measured the velocity in the different tunnels, which governs the distance that a mine can go. So your air is going down onto Granville Street, then up Hastings Street, and then on to other branches going off from there. They put doors in the tunnels between sections they were working on to control the air flow until they had good circulation. They used brattice cloth and doors. Lots of timber and lumber was used in mining.

“It is dry in the mine, but damp in some places. When you hit a drill hole that is wet five hundred feet above where they drilled in a swamp, the water drains and you have to plug it up. If it is not plugged up, it runs down to a small ditch, which is engineered to take it to a pump. That pumps it out to the main shaft and then it is pumped out like a sewer system. It was dirty, apart from the fumes you were always dirty because there was dust. There was a velocity of air going through the main coming down from the fan, causing the dust to circulate. There was a common shower available to use before you went home just like in a locker room.

“On the safety aspect, night shift took out the coal and replaced it with timbers. In the haulage mains, as well as the tunnels, you had to shore the rock up. Lots of timber was used down there. As you harvest the coal out, a big empty space is left under there, so how many millions of tonnes of earth are sitting above you? Eventually they call this a squeeze; the roof comes to the floor, it just squeezes down and presses down to the floor, which is natural force. Coal was mined in 9 X 200 foot chunks; it might take two or three days to get that coal out. All the rock was thrown to the side and we shoveled the coal onto the long rubber conveyor belt that took it from the wall to the coal cars. At one time they had a pan system that was like a piston on a train, and it had 200 feet of u-shaped pans that were set on a certain angle that would just shuttle all coal that the miners put on it. We used the newer belt system when I was there.

“I cannot say I have haunting memories, but there was always that cloud over you that said you could perish right now in an explosion. Coal dust is very volatile, and it settles all over the timbers. The night shift would bring down sacks of fine rock dust, like sacks of cement, to knock the coal dust down. They had a bucket of it and would just take it in their hands, stay upwind, and fling it all over all over the timbers. It would mix with the coal dust and drop down, get packed into the floor and then it was less volatile. Rock-dusting is important; the coal dust factor produces the gases. The rock dust curbs the combustibility of the coal. You had to really watch your buddies with smoking habits that they did not take any smokes down. Everybody was frisked going down by the shift boss. The only one who carried a lantern was a boss with a safety lantern. The only light you carried was a headlamp with a battery pack. You took a lamp and they kept a little tag with a number on it. If there was a cave-in, and that lamp did not come back, they knew it was you. That was your identification.

“Any kind of spark could set it off so all the power for the drills, jack-hammers, and coal cutters were run on air from compressors up above. The coal cutter had a machine like a massive chain saw with a nine-foot bar with teeth on it, and he cut a nine by two hundred foot cut where they were going to mine. Just like falling a tree, he cut underneath that coal seam, down on his hands and knees. On one side, nine feet was already gone, and he was cutting another nine to be taken out. Every second or third day we advanced nine feet, and that left behind the empty, mined out portion, called the gob, which had to be shored up.

“Workers are not as tolerant as they used to be. Safety is a bigger thing. Years ago, when coal was king, if you would not do the work because of safety - they would find somebody else who would. It was a groomed situation; that is the politics of everything.

“I never had any problem with the union; they were like good will ambassadors down there. Outside of work in the town they supported teams like basketball, baseball, and soccer which showed you a way of life other than work, and May Day was a massive celebration. You had diversions: clubs and track and field, baseball, and parades. We did have union sponsorship, and I think that sometimes they matched the workers on some things. I guess it depended on what they wanted done, if they wanted more coal out, I guess they knew that they had to give something. Nobody said you had to shovel fifty shovels-full a minute because you were paid by the hour, but if you had a good company you produced well.

“No. 8 Mine was paid by contract at one time. Paid by the hour, you would do the required tonnes as safely as possible. Working on contract, sometimes miners would throw safety out the window and caution to the wind to get the extra tonnes out.

“I worked for Canadian Collieries for about two years, from 1947 to 1949, and they were fair. I left Puntledge about 1950, before the mine shut down; the word was out so we knew to scamper fast. I turned to athletics. I moved on to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, as a hockey player under observation - I never was drafted. After that I had a short term with the BC Police force; they were absorbed by the RCMP, but I did not want anything to do with them. I could have joined the Army or the RCMP at seventeen years old, but I thought life was more than that.

“Jimmy Clarkson worked his way up to a third class fire boss. On the coroner inquests they had to have at the mine when somebody died, they always came and tried to get miners to help on the safety inquest. Jimmy Clarkson and myself and four or five others of us were called up twice.

“None of my children went into mining, but I have a grandchild who started at Westmin about a year ago; he is on the surface. He wants to go into aviation, but who knows, the wages today in mining might keep him there.”

In conclusion, John took time to draw diagrams on paper that helped us visualize how mining worked, and understand some of the different methods of coal mining. His love for hockey and his motorized-wood model carvings of boats keeps him very busy.