Hi Fionn
I've just been Googling this subject to help my mother, Lilian Jones, find out if someone has written a book about being a nurse at the time of the pit disaster. My husband mentioned that he had heard about it on the radio, but can't remember the details, and I found your website.
It seems there were two pit disasters at Bentley; one in 1931, and one in 1978. The one my mother remembers is the one in 1931. She would have been 6 at the time. Her father, William Brown, was Night Overman, and he gave an account of the rescue which differs from the report in the Mines Department.
My mother has written a book about her family which includes this account, and I'm wondering if this would be of interest to your other correspondents (?).
Mum is 90 now, which is why I'm the one sending her message, but I'm using her laptop, so you can see that she is still quite in touch with the modern world!
Hoping for further communications
Best wishes
Cynthia Gault
Back in 2012 Caren Fox emailed me asking for information for a lady, Joan who was a nurse at bentley, she was trying to finish a book but she had Alzheimers.
There is also a book on Amazon:- At the Coalface: The memoir of a pit nurse Paperback – 16 Jul 2015 so too late for the Bentley accident.
This is the memoir of Joan, who started nursing in the 1940s and whose experiences took her into the Yorkshire mining pits and through the tumult of the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
Joan Hart always knew what she wanted to do with her life. Born in South Yorkshire in 1932, she started her nursing training when she was 16, the youngest age girls could do so at the time. She continued working after she married and her work took her to London and Doncaster, caring for children and miners.
When she took a job as a pit nurse in Doncaster in 1974, she found that in order to be accepted by the men under her care, she would have to become one of them. Most of the time rejecting a traditional nurse’s uniform and donning a baggy miner’s suit, pit boots, a hardhat and a headlamp, Joan resolved always to go down to injured miners and bring them out of the pit herself. |