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in 1893, when the earl’s miners all walked out – many of them without conviction – in support of the Great Coal Strike. They were out for months, reliant on soup kitchens and handouts, but it wasn’t memories of the deprivation or the hunger that had stayed with Arthur, it was the shame he felt when four platoons of mounted troops rode through Netherwood, called to defend Lord Hoyland and his family from the insurgents. There was no need, of course; there was nothing personal in the strike action, at least so far as the Netherwoodminers were concerned. So although the dragoons and lancers held their positions on the great lawn of Netherwood Hall for almost three months, they never saw action. At the end of the strike the earl had written an open letter to his employees, and Arthur had hung his head at the words: ‘I am at a loss to understand why you would lay my pits idle,’ he wrote. ‘I had expected the loyalty of my men to match that of mine to them.’ There were, of course, employees of Lord Hoyland who were unmoved by the admonishment, but not Arthur. The day the pits were re-opened and the miners returned to work – all of them forbidden by the earl to join a union or ever again withdraw their labour – was one of the happiest days of his life.
    Arthur’s shift began at 5am and his home in Beaumont Lane was ten minutes’ walk from New Mill Colliery, but he always allowed twenty minutes for the journey in order that he could take his time. He hated to rush anywhere, and wherever his destination, Arthur would undertake the journey with his customary unhurried stroll. Plus, just as he hated to rush, he also hated to be late. He’d worked for Lord Hoyland since he was a lad and he had never yet failed to clock on, not once in over thirty years. Indeed his punctuality had become a matter of honour and – since the strike – a manifestation of Arthur’s deep-rooted loyalty to his employer. There were younger men at New Mill who muttered among themselves about long hours and low pay, but they didn’t have an ally in Arthur and would fall silent if they saw him coming. His deference to the master was increasingly out of step with the times, but there were few men at New Mill with the stomach to tell him. Arthur Williams commanded respect among his colleagues.
    The truth was that Arthur was unusually content. Even as a ten-year-old lad, when he first started at New Mill, he had felt part of an endeavour that was almost noble and certainly supremely worthwhile. He arrived with honour alreadyconferred upon him by his father, killed in an explosion six years previously and still spoken of with reverence at the colliery. Arthur had imagined he would be sent down the mine, but his first job had been on the surface, at the screens; he stood at steel conveyors in a dimly lit and dusty hut and sorted lumps of stone from the piles of coal, throwing them into wagons which then carried the unwanted muck to the stacks outside. The iron plates of the belt squealed demonically under the strain and the dust was sometimes so thick that he couldn’t see the boy next to him, but Arthur was stoical. Every day though, he asked the overman when he could go down, and every day received the same reply: ‘Soon enough, lad, but tha’ll rue the day.’
    At twelve he got his wish and was given the job of trapper, waiting for coal wagons and opening and closing the wooden doors that controlled the flow of air underground. Other boys shivered in the dark passages, whimpering when their lamps were accidentally extinguished, longing for the time when their shift would end and they could be carried back up to the surface of the earth, but not Arthur. It was as if he had a bright ember of self-sufficiency burning at his core to sustain him. At the end of his first underground shift, he stepped into the cage next to a boy taller and older than himself but whose face was rigid with trauma.
    ‘’Ow’s tha got on?’ said