Wilford pit is the only coal mine I have been down. Dave Turner, musician and comic, was working as a ganger there ( in charge of the pit ponies). We went out to the coal face under the Trent towards Ruddington, and the air became very hot and sticky. A strange and enlightening experience: one I shall never forget. I salute all those brave men who worked underground. Here's a poem I wrote afterwards.
Black and crumbling shearing coal glittering in the shone lamplight
Up against the face
Day after day after month after year he kept a mute tryst
With the coal
His life was the coal
His friends laughed at the love he had
Deep down dark in the distant fields
Of blackgold corn
He reaped his dusty harvest
He knew the carbon forests of his dreams
Where the giant trees toppled and fell
And the swamp's silent breathing which on its death
Lay stopped
To make a fuel for the fires of his mind
The clean awakening was the dirt of the day
For as he travelled down
And rode the manrider to a dusty blackness
His mind became lighter
A shining candle in the afterdamp
I remember the pit but not as well as you. It is a lovely poem. I went down a pit in the early sixties -think it was Welbeck. I found this interesting page on Wilford/Clifton http://www.healeyhero.co.uk/rescue/individual/Bob_Bradley/Bk-5/B5-1968-B.html