Mr. WILFRID ROBERTS
(Newcastle Programme') this MORNING Wilfrid Roberts will discuss the clan of miners who inhabit some small villages in isolated moor-lands near the Northumberland coalfields, and follow the calling that their fathers and grandfathers have been following since the sixteenth century.
It is a curious thing that not only this race of men should have survived the ages, but a strain of poultry, too. Their forbears in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wagered on cock fights, and today Old English game birds, with their combless heads, their streamlined bodies, and sturdiness of leg, are still to be seen. Other times, other manners ; the miners now exhibit them at shows.
This broadcast will show these men as a type: as sturdy as their birds, downright, frugal, imbued with religious feeling, yet flying their pigeons with the best. And, hard as the life is, it attracts. Those who throw it up and go, invariably come back.
Listeners will hear something of the Denton Drift mine where men work up to their waists in water to the noise of pumps. They are there on this January morning, with the remote but ever-present danger of the pumps giving out and of death by drowning.