At the 50th Reunion someone asked why I took up Mining as a career. I’m sure I gave a somewhat flippant answer. I suppose I am the only known OM to enter the field so perhaps some sort of explanation is called for.
At the outset let me stress that the type of schooling we received would have prepared most of us for a career in mining. I really believe you have to be a “Jack of all trades” to be successful in the business and I think Saint Michael’s produced lots of Jacks!
In my last term we had a convincing guy talk to us about the Fleet Air Arm. Short service commissions (5 years) paid out a gratuity of £5 000 – a lot of money, and landing planes on Ark Royal sounded romantic. He didn’t mention life expectancy! On the other hand I came from a mining area and my father’s Churchwarden was the local Mine Manager and he convinced me to try mining first. I could always revert to the Fleet Air Arm later.
So this very raw recruit, with a bit of a plummy accent, started “down’t pit” just after my 18th birthday. My Gran was outraged. “Surely I could get a job in the time office?”
I should mention that I wasn’t the school’s best student and 2 A levels in English were hardly encouraging for an engineering career so I enrolled at the Tech. and very quickly started to make amends for the fun time I’d had at school.
The first two years underground were a little traumatic. A week after starting I lost a finger and within a couple of weeks of return to work I broke two back vertebrae, narrowly missing damage to the spinal cord (costing 4 months of rehab.) and a whole lot of minor injuries. I thought the Good Lord was warning me off the “pit”!
A part of essential training for a Mine Manager was 2 years work on the coal face. This I really enjoyed and it paid very well. Most of the time was in the “Three-quarter Seam”, ¾ of a yard thick. Cramped at first but you soon got used to it. I vividly remember an old miner telling me this story that I think sums up the standing of miners in the community. The traditional “bait” or mid shift snack was a bacon sandwich. The local Co-op had this sign painted on the shop window, “Miner’s bacon, 1/9d a pound, so good we could almost eat it ourselves”. This Co-op was boycotted for weeks! I’m afraid we miners brought some of the derision on ourselves. After the lockouts of the thirties miners tended to work the days they wanted to and absenteeism ran as high as 40%. I remember one miner being asked why he only worked 3 days a week; his reply “cos I can’t manage on 2”!
After 6 fairly hard years I had “made it”. I had a Manager’s ticket and Chartered Engineer status and underwent 2 years of so-called Management Training. But the “slump” had already hit the industry. Uneconomic mines, particularly in the north, were closing down on a large scale and it was a fairly easy decision to move offshore – the only employer of mining engineers in the UK was the National Coal Board. So in 1964 we moved to Africa, to Northern Rhodesia first and then to South Africa in 1975. I was lucky to be chosen to attend a short course at Harvard in 1980 which turned me in to a dangerous individual – a Mining Engineer who understood a balance sheet! Since 1982 I’ve been 100% involved in the financial side of mining. I’m currently a (non-executive) director of South Africa’s largest gold producer, its second largest platinum producer and the largest Russian gold producer listed on the LSE. By the end of 2004, in my 70th year, I plan to resign my directorships but maintain informal links with the sector.
I have been very fortunate in my chosen career. I’ve met some really good people in the mining world and developed lifelong friendships.
Thank you Saint Michael’s, you put me on the right road. I owe you.
