“There is one funny thing about life - the good Lord never anticipated that mankind would go underground willingly. When mining started there might have been a tyrant in a country, who had a whole area of gold, precious metals, or coal and the easiest thing to do was to go to the neighbouring country, start a war and bring in a bunch of slaves to do the job, and that was the end of that. Slavery has stayed steadily inline in one form or another. Once outright slavery almost came to an end, it was replaced with company stores and company houses. The company would provide houses for the miners - but only as long as you were a miner. There was no compensation or anything like that. If a miner was killed and happened to leave a wife and seven or eight kids behind, it would not be more than three months after he was killed that the wife would get notice that she would have to leave the house, because they needed it for another miner. Not only that, with labour unrest anyone who lived in a company house and did not play along with company rules was told ‘okay, get out of here.’ That old song of Tennessee Ernie Ford, Sixteen Tons about loading coal, was right on the money! You were deeply in debt to the company store, because you ran an account at that store and that bill was deducted, before you got any sum of money for your pay. My old mother was a tremendous manager. Even with six of us in the family we never, ever went hungry on just three days of work a week. That was rank and file all the way through the mining community. If someone got hurt, the miners would take up a collection to raise fifty or a hundred bucks to help out, but it never came down from the management.

Teenagers in the Mine

“I was not quite seventeen, so I could not go down into the mine, but they gave me a job at No. 5 mine on the picking table. That was where the cars come out of the mine and the coal sorted. The cars were supposed to be full of pure coal, because it was more or less sorted by the miners, but you could get a big lump of coal that had a certain amount of rock stuck to it. Each car, as it came up the cage, was pushed into a turntable and turned upside down and the coal spilled right onto this picking table, which then shunted the coal along over about forty feet. Underneath this picking table were three sections of railroad track and there were three different cars for slack coal, lump coal, and waste rock. Working on the picking table was a poor job because you were going steady - the picking table never stopped and you had to keep up. I started out there at two dollars a day and the first chance I got, when I turned seventeen, in November, I applied to go underground for two dollars and twenty-five cents a day.

The first priority was to sink a ventilation air shaft that was equipped with a large fan to reduce the length of a tunnel leading to an exhaust fan, presently located to the west of Cumberland towards Comox Lake. This new shaft was located near Bevan Road half a mile from its junction with the old Cumberland-Courtenay highway, and that changed the whole situation completely. After that, it was not too bad at all.

“Anyone who is practically minded at all can figure out that there is a solution for every problem, no matter whether it is orthodox or not. You will find that, in a coal mine - all the different tricks. Two teenagers could lift a timber about three feet off the ground onto the top of a car just by working the laws of fulcrums and levers. The two would get on one end and jack it up a bit and then pull it up and move the fulcrum along until they had a balance. You had to get one end on the top of a car and move it over so the weight balanced on it. A very close friend of mine was killed in that process one night. They had rubber boots on for dampness, and in the process of lifting the timber, one guy got up far enough to put his shoulder onto the end of the timber to lift it up. The other guy was going to put a lagging on top of the car to hold the end of the timber up. The lagging was usually about five feet long, so it was quite a good lever, but with the rubber boots, he slipped and the log came down and killed him. Accidents like that happened on a regular basis in a coal mine.

“I moved from driving mule to what they call a roperider. A roperider is in charge of a certain number of cars, all hooked together in a trip, and a big electric hoist pulled the trip up the slope. In my case, it was an eight-car trip. My theatre of operations was in driving the main slope in its continuation, it finally ended up in Happy Valley, or Minto, at a point opposite where Fraser Road leaves Minto Road. I think that was the last location at the end of the run. The amount of work involved in being a roperider depended on the hoistman. No matter how old he was the hoistman was referred to as the hoist kid, and some of these kids were topnotch professionals. It was up to the roperider to try to keep everybody happy. If two men were working in one place, they only got an occasional car. For the biggest part of the time they were on the slope, they were waiting just to see if they could get a car or two, instead of the main trip going down into the landing further down.

“The landing is where you picked up an accumulation of coal cars, where the empties would go in a double track. There were two copper wires overhead about five or six inches apart on porcelain knobs and you would have a three-cornered file in your belt, usually with an umbrella handle or something on the end of it. This was your signaling device, and you had a definite set of signals for what you wanted to do. When the trip of empties went flying into the landing you just reached up and crossed both those wires with your file; that was the same as turning a switch on, and a bell sounded up where the hoistman was. We got so quick that the hoistman would just bring the trip to a sudden stop and as the cars came back you would get slack on your rope, throw it onto the loads, and then give him another signal ‘okay, take ‘er away.’

“When the rail cars went up a grade you had to have some means to prevent them from running away because if a rope broke, or something like that, you would have seven or eight tonnes moving down the track without any handicap to slow it down. It usually ended up in a big mess - most likely a cave-in. On the back end of a trip you had what is called a drag, usually referred to as a joke. This was a sharp piece of rail, pointed on both ends, and fastened on the top end was a hook and a link. You had to make sure that this was on the last car going up the slope, dragging behind the trip. The theory of it was that if the rope happened to break, the joke that was dragging along behind the car would dig into the ground and into the car thus upending the car. With the weight of the six or seven cars ahead of it, the end car would be lifted off the rails and most likely derail itself. That was the theory, but there was no process in which these drags were renewed, so the end that was dragging would end up all curved and shiny. The only way a joke would ever derail a car would be to dig into freshly laid ties, where the dirt had not yet compacted between the rails.

“One particular time the rope did break. The roperider had to be at the back of the trip as it was leaving, to put that drag on the end car. We had to either go over the cars or run alongside of them, wherever there was some room. There were not many places where there was much room between the car and the slope. At this particular time, I had put the drag on and I was running past the trip when the rope broke. Of all things, the drag did perform and there I was, in about a fourteen or fifteen inch space, between the cars and the face, and I could just see the cars piling up. If they had come towards me that would have been the end of the game, but luckily they went the other way. That is when I started getting a pretty deep faith in a Supreme Being because I figured ‘Somebody is sure looking after me; my number is not on the wall and I have got a hand on my shoulder somewhere.’ I have had that philosophy all through my life and it started there in the mine that day. I have had two brush-ups in the mine that made me think about just where I stand in life, and that is when I figured out that my life is all set, and whatever will be, will be. I have carried that philosophy all through my life, too.

“I can remember another incident very clearly. A rope-car had come off the tracks. When a loaded rope-car is off-track at a spot where any hoist-power wants to pull it further away form the track center, a five foot wood slab called a roof lagging was placed between the rope and the tunnel wall and hoist-power was applied to divert the rope-car towards the track center. This operation was called a Samson; forward motion was only two feet and movement towards the track center was measured in inches gained. This action took several moves to bring the car wheels against the rails. Most air powered hoists did not have precision speed control and one false move put everything back to square one.

“Every hoist-room had a pair of lights, four foot length rails called dogs. One flat end of each dog was put under a lead wheel of the rope-car and the other end of each was held onto its corresponding railway track by a retainer clamp. Everybody held his breath on the final Samson maneuver and God help the hoist-kid if he goofed! There is one silver lining to a situation like this and that is if production had come to a halt enough manpower would congregate to bodily put things back in running order.

“No. 5 was a shaft mine, and the shaft had three compartments. Each compartment was 8 x 8 feet, so the whole shaft was 8 x 24 feet. In the early days, two of the compartments were for bringing the coal up. As one car went down, another came up the other side. The third compartment was the return air ventilation for the mine, and that was completely sealed off from the other two. In any shaft mine, the air goes down into the main shaft and down the main slope, through all the workings and returns, by what they call a return airway, and is pulled up by a fan.

“In 1895, No. 5 shaft was located 4000 feet to the north of Cumberland. It intersected two coal seams: one at 275 feet and the lower one at 590 feet. As No. 4 mine, located at a distance of two miles, was a very productive mine in the lower coal seam, operations started in the lower seam of No. 5 mine. In the interest of safety, the provincial inspector demanded another escape route for this single-shaft mine, and in 1897 and identical shaft was sunk within the city limits of the newly surveyed townsite to be known a Cumberland. This new shaft intersected both coal seams and it became No. 6 mine.

A tunnel was started at No. 5 mine in the lower seam to connect it with No. 6, which satisfied the Department of Mines, but two major disasters occurred in the lower seam of No. 6 mine in 1901 and 1903, resulting in the loss of eighty men. Despite controversy regarding the tunnels completion, the date of 1908 is probably correct. Toxic water from both mines was pumped out of No. 6 mine to cut a path of destruction on its way to the Trent River. No. 6 mine was closed in 1917, after a third explosion with a loss of four men, but water from both mines was pumped from No. 6 for another ten years. Both seams in each mine had been in production but in 1921 No. 5 mine was closed until the markets improved. In 1932, with coal reserves in No. 4 mine being exhausted after forty years, No. 5 mine was reopened. No. 4 mine came to final closure in 1935 and No. 5 mine became the last productive mine in Cumberland, with all operations occurring in the upper seam in an easterly direction.

“In 1935, Comox Lake had broken into the workings of No. 4 mine and that was the end of No. 4 mine. No. 5 was a gassy mine and it was not very far below the surface. At that time, it would have been about 400 feet vertically below the surface where the main workings were. The gas was such a hazard at that time because during the eleven-year shutdown the airways had caved and were partially blocked, so we had bottlenecks all the way along the return airways. With the passes clear the ventilation was adequate, but certainly not the way it had originally been. The situation got to such a state that any miner who went into the mine did not know whether he would be walking out or coming out horizontally, but in 1931 we were in the middle of a depression so a job was a job - no ifs, ands, or buts. The possibility of a big explosion was there just because of the circumstances, not because of any safety hazard on the part of the company.

“In a coal mine, next to the methane gas, the biggest hazard is coal dust. When you get cars coming up against a strong air current going down, you have got dust following that thing, and on the top of every round timber you will find a cone of coal dust. When you get an explosion in a mine it starts to shake things, and all that coal dust comes into the air, and many times you will get a secondary explosion that can be as bad as the methane explosion. They used to get powdered lime from an outfit on Texada Island, the kind of lime dust that you use to fertilize your garden, and spread it around on the ribbing and timbers - wherever the coal dust was. The theory of that was that if an explosion happened and the coal dust got free into the air, the lime dust would dilute it and kill its effectiveness to ignite.

“Cumberland has had four major gas explosions: one in 1901 and another one in 1903 at No. 6 mine, in 1922 there was a bad one at No. 4 mine and just six months later, in 1923, there was a worse one at that same mine. There has been a tremendous loss of life through explosions, but just by the grace of God and the cooperation of everybody involved, No. 5 mine came through without any major explosions.

Production - Grades and Slopes

“Traditionally, there were two methods of mining coal for production which were pillar and stall and longwall. Locally, some background geology is in order. Two separate coal seams which were great producers were identified as the upper seam and the lower seam. The developer determined the type of operation his mine would do by the location of the seam relative to the surface. In 1871, two tunnels (the Pioneer Development) were driven into the hillside 300 feet apart and 125 feet above the valley floor, because the upper seam had come to an outcrop at the surface. Ten kilometres northeast, at Puntledge, a 100 foot shaft was required for No. 8 mine to reach that same coal seam.

“In 1888, one of James Dunsmuir’s top priorities was to sink a shaft approximately 750 metres from the tunnels to reach the lower seam which was a continuation of the highly productive Wellington seam in Nanaimo. He called this venture No. 1 mine. In 1890, just 750 metres from the No. 1 mine, this Wellington (lower) seam was discovered on the surface at Comox Lake and this was the portal of No. 4 slope mine. In summary, within a circle of 1500 metres, three different categories of operations were used together at two different coal seams. Within that same circular area, No. 2 mine used a shaft to get to the coal, but in production, No. 1 and No. 2 were connected to slope mines and the original shafts were used for mine ventilation. No. 5 and No. 8 mines were the only shaft-mine producers.

“Regardless of entry to the coal seams, precise engineering was done to determine the most efficient angle to penetrate the seam, for production depended on manpower, mules, or power hoisting gear. Layout of a coal mine can be compared to the circulation of blood in the human body. The main slope was the freeway, or main artery, which determined the direction of the mine. From the main artery, like arms and legs, branch-arteries would service large areas of coal reserves and each operation would become a secondary main slope. In each of these sub-slopes a power hoist was required to gather production for final haulage. However, to the right and left of these sub-slopes, other arteries were made called levels where production was handled by manpower or mules. From these levels, tunnels were driven into the coal seam for production by longwall or pillar-and-stall method.

“In this process of starting to mine the coal, one has to keep in mind the major problem of diverting the air ventilation through a maze of workings and into the main artery called the return-air slope, where foul air and gasses were returned to the surface atmosphere.

“Longwall production was used in No. 5 mine but a longwall had to be created by the pillar-and-stall method. From the main slope in the area, two levels were started (300 feet apart) and each would be wide enough for a two-track landing for a length of 150 feet, and then it would be reduced to a single track to continue onward. At this point there would probably be a door or brattice-cloth curtain for ventilation control. About fifty feet from the curtain, a cross cut would be started and driven towards each other to connect both levels and expose a coal face for the creation of a longwall. When finished, this would create a continuous coal face, 300 feet in length, on the same grade as the main slope. This would leave a large pillar of coal, approximately 200 by 300 feet in area to protect the main haulage slope. At some future date this pillar of coal would be reclaimed. A tunnel length of 150 feet is about the limit for circulation of air - which is the reason for driving the tunnels toward each other in creating a 300 foot longwall. The tunnel that was started at the top of the grade was called a dip and would require a mule or a small air-hoist to move a car. The lower tunnel would be on an incline called a slant, which would require a mule driver to put wooden sprags between the spokes of the wheels of a loaded car to control the rate of descent, because the mule was in front of the car. The safety of those poor mules depended on the muleskinners. A muleskinner knew down to a science how many sprags it took to keep control behind the mule.

“Concave pans of steel in five foot lengths, which were free to move on a stationary base, were hooked together in a 300 foot length. An air-powered machine moved this combination in a shunting motion on a downward grade, enabling the coal to fall off these pans into a waiting mine car. A workman, called a chunker would divert falling coal chunks to a preferred location in the car. Undue stopping of the pans was frowned upon.

“The progress of each level was maintained about 150 feet ahead of the longwall. The top level was used as a timber road where roof-support material was shunted down the walls on the pans.

“The longwall method production routine started with a coal cutting machine, which was on mobile tracks and had revolving teeth, like a chain saw, which  undercut the solid coal to a five-foot depth along the full length of the wall. This was followed by a driller who drilled holes along the wall. Then the pan men moved the pans closer to the face and the timber men would put in a closer stretch of roof support. The fire-boss then loaded the drilled holes with powder and fired the holes. There was no set time for a previously cut wall to be cleaned off and this depended on Murphy's Law which stated that ‘if something can happen - it will,’ especially regarding the movement of coal cars. These men were on the God forsaken telephone shift, where they spent endless hours awaiting a telephone call to go to work.

“The miners always had to walk down to their theatres of operations at the beginning of their shifts, but they always got a man-trip to ride up, a coal trip headed for the surface. There might be four or five different theatres of operation in the mine, depending on the production and each hoistman was in charge of three trips of six or eight cars. At the end of the shift, I would collect my three trips of coal, to make an eighteen or twenty-four car trip, and then take it to the main slope. Occasionally, the rope broke coming up with a load. Instead of a drag, behind this twenty-four car man-trip was what they called a safety car. This was a big five tonne, double-pronged chunk of steel on four wheels. These two big prongs were called dogs. The main slope roperider would set this car at the back of the trip, and it would be pulled along behind. These two big dogs were on a ratchet and if a reverse motion set in, if the trip rope broke or something, the ratchet let go and the spikes went down, effectively stopping the twenty-four cars of coal.

“At the end of a shift it was safe for miners to climb into the cars and get hauled up to the surface, up to what was called the shaft bottom, but we could not do that at the beginning of a shift because the safety car was ahead of the trip. Anything that happened going down was nothing but big trouble. There was a big, heavy, half-inch steel bar that went between every coal car and on one end was a link, and on the other end was a link and a hook. Whoever on haulage was in charge of the trip had to make sure that the hook went in properly; if it was upside down and there was any slack that hook could fall out. It was especially risky if there was a fault in the coal seam - where grade changed. Perhaps, instead of having the five to six percent grade that was the norm, all of a sudden there would be a two percent grade and if you tried to push twenty-four cars over any distance it was big trouble. The cars would move forward at a higher rate of speed and the tension on the hooks and links would slacken.

“As you come up the Royston Road and go over the overpass on the freeway, you notice that big ridge called Boulder Hill. Underground in my theatre of operations the coalface was continuing down on a certain pitch and all of a sudden the coal petered out completely and you had nothing but solid rock in front of you. At that particular place the coal jumped thirty-three feet - the seam just went straight up - and you can see that right on the surface of Boulder Hill. That is what happens in a coal mine sometimes - this is called a fault. We were 700 feet underground at that particular point and we had to go through solid rock to get up to that next section of the coal seam. Once we got over the Royston side of Boulder Hill Ridge, we hit the seam again. This fault situation also occurred in a longwall that had progressed for one kilometre and was nearing its boundary. This was the end of that longwall operation but fortunately it was already nearing its inevitable closure.

“No. 4 mine is very peculiar. No. 5 mine, No. 8 mine, and No. 7 mine all operated on what they call the top coal seam, which was the one that came to an outcropping on the surface in the locality of Cumberland. At No. 4 mine, by a real freak of nature, the lower coal seam, normally 300 feet below the top seam, was on the surface at Comox Lake. Comox Lake is a mystery of geology.

“An incredible amount of pressure dominates everything at the depth of six or seven hundred feet below the surface. On the average slope at least eight to ten foot timbers were used, but you could get in a landing where there were double tracks and there would be sixteen foot timbers, twelve to sixteen inches across, and they could just crack like match sticks from the pressure. As the coal was taken out, once you got around fifty feet of empty space behind the face, Mother Nature started to take over and the roof compressed into that empty space - right down to the floor. With any luck, that coalface just kept progressing as you went along. I have seen a three and one half foot post, eighteen inches across that looked just like a Japanese lantern! The pressure of the earth just flattened it right down, and many times when that happened, it affected the whole coalface.

“In Chinatown they had nothing and lived in the most degrading type of homes. We kids used to go scrounging for beer bottles in Chinatown, to get fifteen cents for a matinee, and we would find retaining walls of bottles all the way through Chinatown. The Chinese never had the best location to build a community - they seemed to have to take what nobody else wanted. In Cumberland, the biggest part of Chinatown was on a side hill. They would build up the front of a steep side hill with about four feet of bottles - Saki bottles or Sansui or beer bottles - and fill it in with soil. All the butts of the bottles would be sticking towards the road. From the top of that pile of beer bottles to the bank, the man had maybe ten feet by four feet of space that he had in vegetables.

“One thing you never found out after an explosion was who was really responsible. There was never any blame attached to the management, but the coal mining fraternity knew exactly what went wrong. Sometimes the Chinese were blamed. The theory was that the biggest part of Chinese miners could not read English, so they did not know what the regulations were, but at the same time they were forgetting the fact that there were miners from all over Europe who did not understand the English language either.
 
“There was another sad thing that happened to the Chinese in the mine. They did not trust banks too much, and along with their lunches, they carried in those paper bags every cent that they owned in the world. Chinese miners were usually on the slopes cleaning up and if they got caught on a certain section of the track that did not have a manhole, where they could duck in to let the trip go by, they got hit and killed by the trip. There had been incidents where the Chinese community would say, ‘He had so much money; where is it?’  The odd white man had picked that up. The Chinese sent their money home to China. Every seven years, the Chinese exhumed the graves of their fellow countrymen, cleaned the bones off and sent them back to relatives in China. It is reported that this is how the accumulation of money that they had went to the families - along with these bones.

“I can still recall a memory when I was age five, just before  the temporary closure at the No. 5 mine in 1921, of seeing a long line of Chinese miners walking home in single file along a wooden sidewalk. This line would be approximately three hundred feet long and on a hot day most of the miners would be holding a piece of cedar tree bough in front of their faces for protection against the sun. Another early memory was to see a large group of children from the No. 1 Japanese community going to their Sunday school on a Sunday morning. They were all dressed neatly in their bright colors and they were chattering away. In another memory, my dad was taking us for a Sunday drive in the Model-T Ford when we approached two Chinese men who were walking home, from Royston wharf to Cumberland, with their catch of fish, perch. He stopped to give them a ride and said to my mother, ‘Move over Molly.’ We also had a small community of Negroes who worked as teamsters, supplying mine timbers. On one occasion my dad, having just bottled his home brew, called to two passing teamsters to come in and have a bottle of beer to fortify them on the rest of the way home. My dad had no racial discrimination!

“There was labour unrest where the orientals were concerned so the company had made arrangements that if No. 5 reopened there would be no Oriental miners who went underground. In 1932, that was the end of the Japanese and the Chinese communities because there was no coal mine work for them from then on. That was a sad turning point in history for the Comox Valley. In 1942, the Japanese were moved out to internment camps after Japan declared war on the United States.

“Those poor old mules…. Their safety depended on the muleskinner. He would do what they called putting on sprags - putting chunks of wood in between the spokes of a wheel of the car and causing the wheel to drag. A muleskinner knew down to a science how many sprags it took to keep control behind the mule. The mule was ahead of the trip so if the downhill grade was too much for him and he came up against an obstruction that he could not get around the coal cars just crushed him. There were a lot of mules killed in the mines.

“In No. 5 mine there was a large comfortable stable near the shaft bottom that was climate controlled by a skilled stable boss. A mule skinner would pick up his mule and lead it to the traveling road, which was an old slope that ran parallel about fifteen feet from the main slope. This slope had been created from previous methods of pillar and stall mining and it was mostly used for the travel of mules that were independent of the main slope. Halfway down this road was a pocket of dust and no mule would go by it without having to roll in it. This was permitted by the drivers because we were going to work but neither mule nor driver had any time for these shenanigans on the return trip to the stable.

“We had two little mules, who were no bigger than ponies named Dempsey and Little Jean - who was a real lady compared to her reprobate of a partner. If anybody tried to tail Dempsey he brought both hind feet to battle stations! If some asked if there was ‘room for one more’ on a tail the answer would be to ‘try Dempsey.’ My dad told me of an incident in No. 4 mine when Dempsey was working with Chinese miners. They usually took their lunches in paper bags, and as the rats were as big as alley cats, they suspended their lunch bags from the roof supports. There was a sequence of missing lunches until Dempsey was caught in the act!

“Those little mules, Little Jean and Dempsey, did more than their share. When the pressure comes in a coal mine, either the roof comes down or the floor comes up. A regular mule could not get into the working space, especially if the floor was up. These two little mules, Jean and Dempsey must have worked more double shifts than the other hundred mules put together. The driver boss would say to a muleskinner, ‘you’d better take Dempsey down for a double.’ I’ll tell you, if Dempsey had gone up from work on his regular shift and the driver boss said ‘you’d better take Dempsey back’ and a green driver tried to get into that stall to try to get Dempsey out - you never saw such ferocity in all your life! He would look around with his teeth bared, snorting, and everything else, until the old stable boss came along and gave him a poke in the ribs. And that settled that, because the mules knew the stable boss. However, if a green driver tried to take Dempsey back down and tried to move alongside of him, he would push that guy against the side of the stall. He knew absolutely every trick in the trade. Fortunately, Dempsey lived to be over thirty years of age and died of natural causes after he was put out to pasture.

“If a roperider dropped a trip of six empties into a landing and picked up six cars of coal the mule would most likely take them, if the level was permissible, but God help you if there happened to be seven on there because that mule had counted every click as the hook and chain tightened up. If there was one extra on there he would most likely come to a stop and look back at the driver as though to say, ‘what is going on?’

“At the end of the shift, the drivers took their mules to the traveling road about fifteen minutes ahead of the man trip, and were usually accompanied by other teenagers who were eager to get the first cage up the shaft. Kids always got the last cage down and the first cage up, if they could do it! Most of the mules going to the barn would allow four or five kids to hang on to their tails, and a hoist kid with two lamps hardly noticed the extra weight on the fast jog up the slope. This was called tailing the mule.

“In No. 5 mine, there were three parallel slopes: the production slope was the center one, the one on the left-hand side was the return air slope for ventilation, and the one on the right hand side was what they called the traveling road, that is where the mules went up and down. In the early days of mining, prior to its closing in 1921, No. 5 mine was pillar and stall all the way through, and that was the reason for this traveling road being there; it had been a sub artery that went alongside the production slope. There would be a congregation of mules that went up ahead of the man trip. You would quit about five or ten minutes ahead of time to make sure that there was no trip coming down because the mules had to walk from where they were working up to where this traveling road entered from the main slope.

“They had two big horses, I think they were Belgians, in the main landing of what they called No. 5 Slope, and these two big horses were called Mark and Luke. Unfortunately, one morning in one section of the mine there were these two big horses and four other mules coming off a night shift. The mule is a pretty sharp character but the big Belgians were meant to obey orders. I guess the horses were in the lead and there was a connection between the traveling road and the production road. For some reason, and why it ever happened we would never know, the horses took a cross cut that the mules had never ever taken and they ended up in the main slope. A trip came down the main slope and killed the whole works of them. When the next shift came on and saw that carnage on flat cars out there - my God! That morning it brought tears to the eyes of many muleskinners to see what had happened, but there it was. Many mules died in the mines.

“There has been a big hullabaloo about mine safety with the West Virginia accident and eleven miners who were killed but, my God, at the same time last year there were pretty near 6000 miners in China killed by mine explosions. The death rate in mining there is absolutely phenomenal! There were another forty-six miners killed down in Mexico. When you hear about miners who are subjected to an explosion the general population and news media are not aware of the facts of the case, yet they often offer should have and could have opinions, even though most do not have a clue of what is involved - not at all.

“The biggest problem in a coal mine is methane gas. Methane gas is only half the density of air and it rises above the air, and if the roof above your head is uneven and there is a pocket up there, if there is any gas around that pocket will become full of methane. Back in the early days when coal miners used naked lights (a candle, a flame, or a fish oil lamp with a wick on it) there was one thing a miner really had to take care of - and that was the roof over his head. When a miner worked up over his head with a naked light, if there was any little pocket of gas up there it would explode. This process caused the major portion of accidents in coal mining. A miner’s face, arms, hair, or anything else nearby would be burned. There were many miners disabled with loss of sight and damage because of that type of explosion. If there was a big collection of gas then you had the potential for a major explosion. It only takes about 5.9% methane with the right amount of air to be highly explosive - that is what they call fire damp and of course if that explodes then oxygen is the first part of the make-up of atmospheric air that is lost and carbon dioxide takes its place. So in an explosion oxygen is the first thing to disappear and carbon dioxide is heavier than air and stays at the lower level of the workings, and then that is replaced by carbon monoxide, which is absolutely deadly, it has the same atmospheric density of air, and that floats all the way through the tunnels.

Conclusion

“You can only haul coal underground economically over a certain distance of tunnels before it becomes uneconomical, especially with what the coal market was near the end of the life of the local mines. The discovery of oil in Alberta was the downfall of the coal market here. Right now coal mining is coming back full blast and miners are making fifty to sixty thousand dollars a year in a coal mine - good Lord!

“All my working days in the mine at $2.25 a day a guy only got to work two or three days a week on average; if you got four days that was a bonanza! After six months, you got a two-bit raise (twenty-five cents) per day - not per hour. I lived in Camp, the miner’s section of Cumberland, and we would watch the empty cars going by in order to see if there was work tomorrow or not. Back in the Dirty Thirties, with wages starting at $2.25 a day to a maximum of $4.22 a day you could take home a bag of groceries for a dollar and be able to ask the store keeper to put it on the bill ‘til payday.

“This trip down memory lane did not dwell on the loss of human life, but despite the unfortunate conditions and circumstances that existed with the reopening of No. 5 mine in 1932, there was a greater loss of animal life than human life. The legacy of human tragedy, since coal mining started on Vancouver Island around 1850, is self-explanatory in the annual report of accidents by the chief inspector of mines. The report stated in one case the miner had sustained serious injuries to his chest, arms, and legs from a fall of coal. He was carried to his home where he died the next day. To correct this routine occurrence, Cumberland miners put together a hospital medical plan in which miners were deducted a small portion of their pay to finance it. That medical plan celebrated its Centennial Anniversary in 1994. By today’s standards it was a tremendous success, although the small hospital staff was as poorly paid as the miners.

“The coal mining game was nothing but blood, sweat, and tears and the life of a miner was pretty spartan, to say the least. There is one thing about a coal miner, and it is inbred into the breed: you might hate a guy’s guts on the surface, but underground everyone is on a very equal basis. Everyone depends on someone else to not pull any boners that could cause an explosion. That was the general way of coal miners and you can see it today in Cumberland. Even though coal mining is in Cumberland’s distant past, the people still have the spirit that has succeeded generations; the cooperation and the spirit of coal mining is still there, that real down to earth living capacity, of one human being to another, and the spirit of cooperation is still there. I do not know how much of it exists in Nanaimo anymore, but Cumberland has retained it.

Mabel’s Story

“My maternal granddad was a sailor and he jumped ship just out of Nanaimo and lived freely until the government needed coal during the First World War; the government paid for him and his family to go back to England. He was never reprimanded. After the war they sent the family back to BC, except for my mother because she had become of legal age while there, so they had to leave her behind with family until they had enough money to pay for her trip back to BC. 

“My mom’s youngest brother, George Shorty Sheppard, was involved in getting the Cumberland Museum started. My mom’s oldest brother was working in the mine in Ladysmith, and when the mine shut down he went to the States to work in the coal mines there.

 “When times where tough my dad would go deer hunting with his brothers. One day, while my mom and brother went visiting with a very prominent person, my brother was rattling on about these two deer at our house; it was not hunting season and he should not have been telling about the deer!

“I can remember my dad’s round aluminum lunch pail; we would use it in the summer time to pick blackberries. It was a round pail with a top and a bottom. The top was a smaller pail which held the food, and it sat inside the bottom pail which held the water. The miners would wedge one half of a clothes peg in between the sides of the top and bottom pails, to hold the top one up higher; this way, they could get more water into the bottom bucket.”

Mabel is currently enjoying retirement keeping busy with her knitting and helping Ben with any of his projects.

Ben's Clarification of Coal Mining Terminology

In 24-hour operation, the shifts are morning, afternoon and night shift (never called ‘graveyard’)

The mine manager is subject to the superintendent.

The mine manager has a pit-boss for each shift.

The pit-boss has a fire-boss for each major area of operations.

There is a driver boss on morning and afternoon shifts of production who is in charge of all haulage of coal.

‘Haulage’ consists of hoistmen, rope-riders, mule drivers, pushers, and chunkers (who forcibly divert falling chunks of coal from a moving conveyor into a mine-car without stopping the conveyor.)

The night shift is usually controlled by a fire boss, to have all maintenance in place for the main production shift.