When poet and publisher Tim Fellows looked out of his bedroom window as a boy, he saw the local colliery in his former mining area of north Derbyshire. Men on both sides of his family had been involved in mining for over 100 years. In the dedication to the Crooked Spire Press anthology he has put together, he has named 14 of those relatives. Two of them died in mining accidents. The Fig Tree Coal Mining Anthology, named after the webzine that Tim publishes around six times a year, is a collection of 63 poems by more than 50 poets, and was launched to great acclaim in a church in Doncaster last Saturday, and again online a few days later. It comes at the tail-end of the two-year, 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which ended in victory for Margaret Thatcher’s government, and hastened the end of the industry in this country.  

Why did Tim Fellows want to mark that moment in this way? He says of UK coal mining in his introduction to the anthology: “It took 30 years but now it’s gone. I have strong views on this – not because I think it didn’t need to be wound down, not least for environmental reasons, but the way it was done and how the communities that were dependent on the pits and everything that flowed from them were left devastated with nearly no support. Even now, when the old collieries are covered by factories, warehouses, housing and country parks, the local economies have never properly recovered.  

“Mining was dirty and dangerous – even in the 21st century mining disasters continue to happen in countries where coal is still produced. In the UK this was particularly bad prior to nationalisation in 1947 ... my great-uncle's death almost went unnoticed in the tide of death and injury across the country, day-in, day-out.”  

The anthology includes poems by two poets, Sarah Wimbush and Claire Lynn, who have been shortlisted for the Forward prize. It is divided into the three sections – The Life, The Strike, and The Aftermath. 

There are poems about the absolute darkness underground, the blinkered pit ponies, working lives difficult to imagine if you know nothing about them: “My father walked six miles in dark tunnels / for two shillings and seven pence per square yard / to resurrect carbon asleep for a million years” (‘Coal’, by Jude Brigley).  

Plying picks and shovels in three-foot coal seams: “The thing I feared most was the heat - / the stripped men sweating in the dark // and the splintered props when they gave way and creaked.” (The Seam’, by Ian Parks). The number of school pupils killed at Aberfan in 1966 when a shifting slag heap buried them (‘116’, by Phil Wood).   

Bill Everley’s ‘The Return of a Miner’ concludes:  

 

     I’ve left that place now thirty years, for a more rewarding trade. 

     I often return to ask about mates, who’d shared that face Hell-made.  

     The answers I get, convinces me, they all suffered deeply -  

     a lingering death, or broken and old, for coal that was sold too cheaply.  

 

There are a number of poems about the 1984/85 strike, and about choosing which side you were on. Joe Williams, who grew up in Ashington, Northumberland, lists his 80s memories as an eight-year-old and sums up: “I saw the eyes of desperate men, / and even then, I think I knew / our town would never rise again / from 1984.”  

Claire Lynn looks at the aftermath through the eyes of a striker’s wife, able to shop again: 

 

     They both worked down the pit, her husband and son.  

     That whole year we had nothing. Nothing.  

     She remembers the first pay after they went back, 

     how she stood between the stacked shelves in Carrick’s 

     and cried, not knowing what to do with the money.  

             (‘A Small Jar of Coffee and a Packet of Teacakes’)  

 

Chris Sewart’s hard-hitting poem about how safety helmets have been exchanged for hi-tech headsets (‘In the Colliery Business Park Insurance Call Centre, 2004’): 

 

     I log a fifteen-minute break – push away my keyboard -  

     think hard, of those boys, that team, my mates.  

     Their shadows are still here: handing in metal checks,  

     doubling a red-eye shift, breaking output records, 

     swilling club pints, swapping filthy jokes in communal showers ... 

 

     Would they understand, that I’m now mining 

     another seam – meagre, worthless, hollow    

 

Tim Fellows said at the online reading that he began writing poetry when he first heard about the mining death of his grandfather’s brother. He was “very pleased” with the response to the anthology, and felt it was a very worthwhile thing to have done. I can only agree. Crooked Spire is a small, regional press, and just the kind of outfit prepared to take the time and trouble for something like this.     

At this point I must also declare an interest. I grew up in Surrey, an area not known for its mining heritage –in fact it has none, unlike its neighbouring home county of Kent. But I recently moved to Northumberland, and have become fascinated by coal’s legacy in the north-east. I have a poem in this anthology, about a photographic exhibition at Woodhorn mining museum that celebrates and commemorates Ashington’s former proud identity as a thriving, bustling centre of coal mining.  

There are poets from all over the country in this anthology. Tim Fellows plans to take it on the road, with high hopes for further readings in 2026, in Northumberland, Wales, and possibly Scotland as well. 

 

PHOTOGRAPH: WOODHORN MINING MUSEUM, ASHINGTON 

 

 

The Fig Tree Coal Mining Anthology, Crooked Spire Press, £7