ABSTRACT
Local writer and novelist Sid Chaplin, who comes from a mining family and is himself an ex-pitman, first gave this account as a talk to the Durham University Sociology Department staff-graduate seminar in 1971. There are two sides to the mining life and the mining tradition. Personally, the author can draw on all its richness very freely and he would not have missed it for anything. As a child the author thought pits were like the temple at Jerusalem, sort of created by God and had been there since time began. There was something divinely ordained about them and the mining villages had been there for all time. The mining villages were quite something in Durham. The pattern as the author knew it has gone now but he think its folk deserve a place in the history, if only for the extraordinary ties of kinship they created and the way they made an occupation into a tolerable way of life.
