The National Coal Mining Museum - Lives Lived, Lives Lost

This story starts a couple of years ago now when I met John Connell, a former miner from West Yorkshire, when we both took part in a Masters Rugby League game in Barlborough.

We became friends on facebook and earlier last year it was John who alerted me to an initiative at the National Coal Mining Museum, which is located at the former Caphouse Colliery near Wakefield. In the grounds of the museum there is a memorial garden, a place for quiet reflection to remember family members and friends who were part of the industries and the communities they were built around.

It was also John who helped me locate more information about my grandad's brother Jim; another hobby of mine is family history and I'd started to look into Jim a bit more after my mum told me that he died in a mining accident when he was young. It was before she was born and she had limited information about him; John had found a reference to him by searching the National Newspaper Archives but thought you needed to register and pay to get the full details. I was quite happy to do this and followed it up to discover that after registration your first three page views would be free.

So, I did the search and up came two references; one from the Belper News from 1st March 1935 and another from the Derbyshire Times on the same day. Both had clearly come from the same source text but had been edited slightly differently.

There he was, looking just like my grandad, in his Sunday best as a late teenager - hat at a jaunty angle. The obvious family connection through his face already disarmed me a little and then as I read the text the whole story unfolded. Mentions of family members I knew and those I never knew, the shocking report of the accident itself and the subsequent inquest result and the funeral arrangements.

The two events - the finding of the article and the opening of the garden - dovetailed together and it was obvious that Jim deserved to be commemorated in the garden and I began the process of ordering the commemorative disc.

I had mentioned this to my family, of course, and my Auntie Margaret (the daughter of my grandad's brother George) was very keen to add a disc for him too and she ordered hers from her home in the Netherlands. George died from tuberculosis in 1943.

Once the two brothers were going to be there we decided that my granddad, the third mining brother, should be there too. It's very easy to configure and order the disc from the website

Both Auntie Margaret and I had been in touch with Liz Orme, who organises the ordering of the discs and the memorial days too. Liz was extremely helpful and, having met her, clearly takes a personal interest in the history and families behind each of the discs. She is from Derbyshire too, just a few miles from me in Bolsover, where my dad worked at the NCB offices for most of his working life. Liz told us she would make sure the three discs would be together.

Once the discs were ordered we had to wait until November 2016 for the commemoration in the memorial garden. My wife Fiona and I were joined by my mum, my sister Jill and her husband Dunstan.

It was a cold day, with low lying mist as we were welcomed with mulled wine before entering one of the former mine buildings that is used to host museum exhibits related, obviously, to mining. There were quite a lot of people present and the space was pretty full. We weren't in there for long though - introductions were followed by poetry readings and then we went outside to the garden nearby for the dedication. Although the wall is nowhere near full yet, it is quite hard to find yours, even when you have three of them. You get your first chance to see all the others and you get a sense of the wide range of lives that were involved in and affected by the mining industry in the UK.

Once everyone had assembled the next part of the event began -the dedications and names on each of the discs were read out in groups and in-between the Outwood Community Choir performed. It was cold but the length of this segment was perfect to enable us to take in the information and appreciate the music. It was very moving indeed and was made more so by the fact that Auntie Margaret had passed away just two weeks earlier and her sister Kath also back in the summer.

We then had time to look at the wall again before wandering back to the museum for coffee and cake. We met Liz on the way out and had a lovely chat; as we left the mist lifted to reveal the old colliery.

The memorial garden and the wall are a brilliant idea beautifully executed - congratulations to Liz and the team for their ideas and hard work. Following the formal end of coal mining in the UK those of us who come from that background should try our best to ensure that permanent memorials are in place and that education on local history and the national context of how coal drove the industrial revolution are not forgotten. It was, at times, a brutal way of life and you can argue that the industry's passing has benefits. However there is loss too - the loss of the communities, the comradeship and the jobs that it provided have never truly been replaced.

Find out more information and order your disc here