Tramming was one of the most painful and soul-destroying jobs in a pit. Only pits like the two in our village employed trammers. Other, better maintained pits in adjacent areas had high, wide roadways and used pit-ponies to pull the tubs from the coal-face to the haulage, but our pits used muscle and blood. A trammer had to be fit, strong, broad in the back and short, in his late teens or early twenties, and, I might add, weak in the head.

LRB 27 November 1997 | PDF Download