Girls of Wigan

you picked the dirt out and you threw it at your feet and then the coal went down to the other end and went to a railway wagon to be shunted away.”

It was time to shovel the dirt from the floor when you could not see - or move - your feet, Rita says.

“It was a good job, very, very friendly.”

Rita and her colleagues would communicate by lip-reading to ensure they did not attract the gaze of the foreman by breaking the notalking rule. There was great camaraderie, she says.

Her pay packet would go straight to her mother, unopened, with no arguments. “I got half-a-crown (12.5p) spending money (back from her mother) for a full week’s worth. When you think about it, it went a long way back then.”

Now a great-grandmother, Rita speaks passionately about the borough maintaining links with its mining heritage.

More than three decades since many of the pits were closed during the 1980s, a statue of a miner, pit brow lass and a child is planned for a spot near to the town hall - itself a former mining technical college - if £150k costs can be raised.

The pit brow lasses were chosen as the recipients of the heritage plaque following a vote run by the council as part of its Believe in Her gender equality campaign.

“Wigan was built with mining money,” Rita says. “The centre of Wigan, it’s all from mining money and cotton money. They’ve got to recognise the heritage, it’s important.

Plans are afoot to take the youngster to the Lancashire Mining Museum in Astley Green, she explains, to visit the miner’s cottage with its open coal fire.

“If I can do anything for the miners, I would. My first husband died in 1984. The miners went on strike the day after his funeral. I gave money every week for the miners. Always would.”

Rita moved on from the pit brow when she was 18 after finding a job at a sewing factory. She retired aged 80 after decades as a professional dressmaker, culminating in owning her own wedding dress shop.

But it is those few years at the start of her working life that continue to evoke such warm - and some not so warm - recollections.

The recent drop in temperature as we get deeper into the winter months has brought back memories of the fingerless gloves that were part of the pit brow ‘uniform,’ she explains.

Best of all though were the clogs, which somewhat surprisingly, protected her feet from the cold.

They did a better job than the slippers she is currently wearing, she says with a laugh.

“It’s because they had wooden soles. It would be bitterly cold and we would have the fingerless gloves on but the clogs kept our feet warm.”

There has been a surge of interest in mining history and Wigan borough in particular recently with the 80th anniversary of George Orwell’s work The Road to Wigan Pier falling last year.

Local authorities across the country have also this year been marking the achievements of pioneering women to coincide with it being 100 years since the first British women won the right to vote.

Wigan’s pit brow lasses have had a ‘lasting impact’ and ‘played a pivotal role’ in the borough’s history, Donna Hall, the chief executive of Wigan council has said.