Tribute to mine
TOWN’S ‘PIT BROW LASSES’ HAVE BEEN HONOURED BY THE UNVEILING OF A HERITAGE PLAQUE BY THE COUNCIL
WIGAN’S pit brow lasses have been honoured with a heritage plaque by the town hall.
Rita Culshaw has lost none of the speed in her nimble fingers.
Today, they are zipping around the screen of her tablet computer as she keeps in touch with relatives and researches local history.
But turn the clocks back seven decades and the dexterous digits are working away at one of Wigan borough’s many coal mines.
As a pit brow lass - pronounced ‘pit brew’ if you’re from Wigan - it was her responsibility to pick the dirt and stones from freshly mined coal.
Kitted out in clogs, shawls and head-scarves, Rita and colleagues formed a coal cleaning production line, building a camaraderie forged through silent communication during shifts.
Now referred to as unsung heroines of the collieries, their contribution to the borough and its rich mining heritage - in addition to being heralded as pioneers for gender equality - has been marked this month by the local authority.
A plaque in their honour was unveiled in the town’s main museum earlier this month.
But please heed one bit of advice; don’t call Rita the last surviving pit brow lass.
“I have been billed as that before,” she says, shaking her head.
“Rita Culshaw, the last Wigan pit brow girl. I keep saying: ‘But I might not be. I’ve never claimed to be the last, they shouldn’t say that. I’m one of the last.”
Rita, who turns 85 in December, now gives talks to local history groups and has been in demand with news and documentary film crews in recent years.
It all started, she explains from the living room of her Wigan home, when she spotted a presentation on pit brow lasses by a local historian advertised at the town’s Museum of Wigan Life.
“I rang up and they didn’t have any tickets left,” she explains.
“I said to them: ‘Right, if I tell you that I was a pit brow girl they rang me back shortly after and said they had one ticket left.
“I sat at the front and we were asked if we had any relatives who had worked on the pit brow. He (the local historian) was dumbfounded when I said I was one. And afterwards people were coming up to me asking for a phone number and if I could talk to historical societies, which I did.”
Rita started work on the pit brow at Wigan Junction colliery in the days immediately after her 15th birthday in December 1948. Her sister already worked there, her father and brother were miners. “I think a lot of it was you had somebody who worked there, it was just automatic,” she says. “It was either work on the pit brow or work in a factory or cotton mill. My mum didn’t want me to work in the mill, she said ‘this will bring her out’ as in she meant it would help me grow, make me stronger.” Memories from the pit brow remain as vivid as ever for Rita. At 7am the hooter would sound and the tubs of coal would arrive marked with a number corresponding to each collier beneath the ground. The lumps of coal would be sorted on a ‘shaker’ - a sort of mechanical sieve - and the smaller pieces would drop onto the screen in front of her, she recalls. “You had to be fast. You had to be, because you couldn’t let the dirt be on the coal, if it went in the fire like that it would explode with the dirt, you needed the pure coal. “We had nimble fingers, there was no heating, it was just like a big shed. The coal came along and Rita Culshaw