pit-prop

With his pit-prop legs and a crew-cut head seemingly hacked out of anthracite, he was capable of lofting both centreforward and ball into the stands.

Hexarthrum exiguum (Boheman, 1838) is known as the pit-prop beetle in central Europe, where it damages wet wood, mostly in mines but also in houses (Hickin 1963).

But virtually every issue carries a story about individuals losing life or limb, never mind the hundreds of miners who died in horrendous pit-prop falls and dust explosions.

The age of pit-prop socialism and gilt-edged conservatism are over.

Now in his mid-sixties, Arthur is "no longer the pit-prop he'd been as a young man, but still straightbacked and alert, more middle-aged than elderly," still outspokenly antigovernment but mellowed, like Tennyson's Ulysses, "by time and fate." As foreshadowed at the end of the earlier novel, he married Doreen, who bears him a son, Harold, and a daughter, Melanie.

That was also the time, of course, when England's football team was served by a production-line of pit-prop centre-forwards who would rather have had their right leg sawn off at the knee than concede they had been remotely inconvenienced by a tackle.

No more glass ceiling and no more pit-prop ceiling either.

On that dark day, five doomed colliers, including a boy aged 14, perished horrifically in an underground flood which battered down the pit-props and caved-in the mine.

Wartime timber uses ranged from pit-props in mining, to producing chemical compounds in wood distillation plants.

Yet there was still a demand for carpenters, whose tools are shown here, as wooden pit-props remained essential equipment.

American troops disembarked there in two world wars; pleasure steamers; freighters carrying pit-props from Scandinavia for our numerous coal mines; battle scarred cargo ships unloading at its quays after braving the Atlantic during the war; liberty ships fetching the Marshall aid which sustained us and the raids suffered during the blitz.

He survived the shattered pit-props, and the scars of what fell on him.