Me as curator at the Scottish Mining Museum, Lady Victoria Colliery, Newtongrange, c1990
Goodness. A photo taken by the Museum's photographer (whose name escapes me) for an exhibtion on 'working lives' that I think may have been at "The Lady" and may have travelled to other venues. This would be around 1990 as I started at the Museum, as Librarian, around 1986 and became Curator a year or so later. They were fascinating if somewhat sad years in a way as the Scottish mining industry, its collieries, workforce and communities were devastated by the massive closure programme. I met some of the most incredible and generous people in those years, miners, managers, across the central belt of Scotland and the people I worked with at the Museum were formidable personalities - fond memories of many of them such as Willie Hall (Colliery Chief Engineer and raconteur in the local "Goth" at Nitten), George Gillespie ex-NCB director and Don Mockett, ex-NCB/BCC director just to name a few.
As you can see I'm symbolically surrounded by artefacts from the collection including the wonderful library we developed and suitably togged up for what was either cold dirty work on the surface or hot dirty work if we went underground.
Me as curator at the Scottish Mining Museum, Lady Victoria Colliery, Newtongrange, c1990
Goodness. A photo taken by the Museum's photographer (whose name escapes me) for an exhibtion on 'working lives' that I think may have been at "The Lady" and may have travelled to other venues. This would be around 1990 as I started at the Museum, as Librarian, around 1986 and became Curator a year or so later. They were fascinating if somewhat sad years in a way as the Scottish mining industry, its collieries, workforce and communities were devastated by the massive closure programme. I met some of the most incredible and generous people in those years, miners, managers, across the central belt of Scotland and the people I worked with at the Museum were formidable personalities - fond memories of many of them such as Willie Hall (Colliery Chief Engineer and raconteur in the local "Goth" at Nitten), George Gillespie ex-NCB director and Don Mockett, ex-NCB/BCC director just to name a few.
As you can see I'm symbolically surrounded by artefacts from the collection including the wonderful library we developed and suitably togged up for what was either cold dirty work on the surface or hot dirty work if we went underground.