OVER the years, I’ve been underground in my job many times. In South Africa, I preferred being on the underground mines, rather than opencast (surface) mines, as there was a great sense of camaraderie. It was also generally more challenging in a professional way but I was lucky I usually only went down every week or two, rather than every day.

I’ve done other visits to underground mines - in India, it was downright scary and in Russia there was the strange idea of not getting socks to wear but a cloth strip to wrap round your foot. This very rapidly finished up in a ball in the toe of your welly. I soon just started to take a pair of socks, much to the Russian’s amusement.

I was recently down the tin mine currently being restarted in Cornwall. It’s pleasant enough - you can drive in or take a cage down, there’s electric light, ventilation and so on. But, going back to the earlier days, I can’t imagine anything tougher. There was no cage, you had to climb down hundreds of feet of wooden ladders - and up again at the end of an exhausting day. Light was a candle stuck on your hat, a cloth one hardened with resin. Gunpowder was used to blast out the ore, creating all sorts of noxious fumes. Boys started work down there from eight years old and it must have been a terrifying ordeal. It wasn’t much better on surface, where women were employed to break the ore up to allow it to be processed.

Mining has come a long way and it’s still a challenging business, but it’s nothing like the early tin and copper guys - they were the toughest guys around.