Joe Kenyon was born in 1915 and started work in the mines in his teens. In 1930 he became the local scribe for friends and neighbours who were unable to read or write. Between 1960 and 1966 he worked as tutor organiser for the National Council of Labour Colleges.
Tramming was one of the most painful and soul-destroying jobs in a pit. Only pits like the two in our village employed trammers. Other, better maintained pits in adjacent areas had high, wide roadways and used pit-ponies to pull the tubs from the coal-face to the haulage, but our pits used muscle and blood. A trammer had to be fit, strong, broad in the back and short, in his late teens or early twenties, and, I might add, weak in the head.
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