The first of 10 “history” benches has been erected on the Crags, to give walkers a well-earned rest on steeper sections of the public park.
Each bench will have some ref to the history of the area, to reinforce the messages on the totem pole way markers and interpretations boards, and to enhance the Oral histories of the area that continue to be recorded.
The first bench (pictured above commemorates the locally-famous Bag Muck (or Bag Muck) strike of 1902, in which miners at Denaby Main Colliery went out on strike against owners the Denaby & Cadeby Colliery Co, over payments for removing ‘bag muck’ – an uneven layer of rock running through the Barnsley seam.
The company said this was part of the men’s ordinary work, and refused to pay extra for it – while the men argued that the ‘bag muck’ was growing in quantity and that an extra allowance ought should be paid for removing it.
The company brought in outside labour and paid the miners wages to them. In the resulting strike, the company drafted in police armed with cutlasses, to evict 750 miners from their pit houses.
Local shops were forbidden to give miners credit and as they starved, many took to begging and living in tents on the Crags. The national Press slammed the colliery owners with headlines such as “Concentration Camps at Denaby”.
The pit reopened in January 1903 – but many of the “ringleaders” of the strike were refused work and found themselves unemployable across the nearby coalfields.
The picture below shows Friends of the Crags chair Tony Sellars and his wife Carol helping to install the first bench. The others will follow later.
