About Miners Voices

The Miners Voices project was started in 2007 by ex-Barony miner Johnny Templeton. “My family have been miners in Ayrshire for many generations and as I got older I became more interested in Scottish mining history and wondered if I could somehow contribute to its preservation. I've been writing and recording the spoken word for many years, have my own digital recording studio and have experience in restoring old audio tape recordings. I also speak the pit patter fluently as I studied Coal mining at Ayr College for 5 years and trained as an NCB mining craft apprentice in the late 1970’s working underground at the coal face. In 1995, I got my 1st copy of George Montgomery's "A Mining Chronicle - Annals of the Coal Mining Industry of Great Britain from earliest times to 1984" For over thirty years George collected information and material about the miners that would have been otherwise lost. It chronicles the development of the mining industry and the struggle and the progress of the men who worked in it and their families. The chronicle places these developments in their social, political and historical context from the earliest times right up to the beginning of the strike in 1984. The book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in mining history and is one of the most influential and inspiring books I have ever read.

In October 1997 I met an old friend and union official, Alex Mills, who helped me and many other miners with our compensation claims. I have never met anyone with such a passion for social justice and the rights of the disadvantaged. I spent some time with Alex in 2006 and recorded his life story and mining memories.  The Union Man is an audio documentary about Alex Mills life as a miner and trade union delegate. It’s a fascinating story told with conviction and passion about the miners and our mining communities since the 2nd World war, the Miners Strikes and the aftermath of the closures. From this recording came the idea to develop Miners Voices a project to record, edit and archive the memories and experiences of the miners in Scotland. I then applied to O2! It’s your community awards and Scotland Unltd and was awarded funding for equipment and expenses to record the experiences of the miners who survived the 1957 Kames Colliery disaster, when an underground explosion occurred in the 6ft section of the West Mine, resulting in the deaths of 17 men. It was one of the last major explosions in the British coal mining industry. On the 50th Anniversary of the event, the survivors paint a vivid picture of the events of that fateful night and the effect it had on the village. It was a privilege to hear and record their memories. It’s a remarkable story, told by remarkable men. The completed recordings were made available to the Muirkirk community website and put online. Such was the response to the web pages I then decided that the internet offered the best opportunity for complete accessibility to my recordings, collected photographs and historic mining documents.

During my research I came across references to the Kilmarnock Address in Robin Page Arnotts " A history of the Scottish miners from earliest times" I was aware that the earliest trade unions began in Ayrshire and very surprised that an original document, AN ADDRESS TO THE COLLIERS OF AYRSHIRE AT THE FORMATION OF THE COLLIERS ASSOCIATION IN 1824. PRINTED AT KILMARNOCK IN 1824 BY H. CRAWFORD BOOKSELLER AND NOW REPRINTED FOR DISTRIBUTION AMONG THE DELEGATES OF THE AYRSHIRE MINERS UNION, was locked away in the rare books department of the National Library of Scotland. The Kilmarnock address is one of the most historic documents in the history of the miners; It marks the beginning of organised trade unions and socialism. When the Combination Acts were repealed in 1824, the Ayrshire miners were already an established underground organisation with unwritten rules, regulations, principles, aspirations and ideals. The Kilmarnock address reinforces this; it is not the work of an uneducated underclass but a sophisticated document, carefully thought out by intelligent men of sound discretion. This is evident in the articles which makes provision for miners widows and needing a two thirds majority to pass laws at miners meetings. There are also articles regarding the conduct of miners in disputes with the masters and the rate of wages to be paid to 10 year olds. This was 8 years before the Tolpuddle Martyrs, 32 years before the birth of Keir Hardie and almost 70 years before the creation of the Labour Party in 1895. The document marks the beginning of the long struggle to democracy. This is one of the most important documents in Scottish Mining History.

For the past three years I have been building the Miners Voices website and have created an online audio archive of miners sharing their living memories. With over a 100 tracks on the website, there are over 6 hours of high quality recordings of Ayrshire miners talking about their working lives, offering a unique insight into coal miners and their families’ experiences. The website also has over a 100 mining photographs including images from the Ayrshire Archives, Scottish Mining Museum, SCRAN, Glasgow Herald and many that have never been published before. The images, transcriptions and audio recordings combine together to create an informative and educational experience for visitors to the website. Over the coming months, I’m hoping to add audio slide shows and a database of mining words and terms to help with the interpretation of the material. At the moment I am also involved with the Scottish Coalfields collections, a group made up of members from Strathclyde University Oral History Dept, The Scottish Mining Museum, Fife Council and the Royal and Historic ancient monuments of Scotland. We are currently carrying out an assessment of what oral history material about the miners is held throughout the libraries, museums and archives in Scotland.

In the Ayrshire Archives there are around 48 audio cassette tapes directly linked to coal mining, some of which were made back in the 1970’s. These tapes offer a unique insight into local coal mining history, taking us back through time to when Coal was King and there were 1000’s of miners employed in an industry that changed the world for good and put the Great into Britain. I believe that oral history recordings, both new and old, are the key to unlock the vast wealth of mining photographs and memorabilia in the UK’s archives, libraries and museums. Given the disappearance of the coal mining industry in many areas of the UK, and the historic importance of mining to the UK economy and society, it’s vitally important to digitise, catalogue, index and make more accessible the existing material regarding coal mining in the UK. The resulting material should form the basis of a substantial and definitive national collection, which could be consulted by public and researchers and be the foundation for a new history of the rise and fall of the British Coal Mining Industry.

Thanks for visiting Miners Voices.

Johnny Templeton