Audio Transcript

I came into the world in June 1934, in the bungalow, owned by my grandparents, opposite White Lodge, right on that corner where Eastwell Road meets Green Lane. It was a wooden place in those days — nothing fancy, but it was home.

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Looking back, our village life back then feels like a different planet: water from wells and pumps, not mains; paraffin lamps; and you knew who had a telephone because there were so few of them. Electricity came in around the mid‑1950s, and mains water in 1959. Those dates matter to me, because 1959 wasn’t just “the year the water came” — it was also the year my quarry life, as I knew it, ended.

 

When I left school, I did what a lot of lads did: I took what work I could get. I went to Allen’s bakers in Scalford, but only for a few months. Then I got a job with the Eastwell Iron Ore Company — owned by Staverly.

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The landscape looked torn open in those days. The fields between Manor Farm and Eastwell Road were dug out, and there was a wooden bridge laid across the cut so you could still get through to White Lodge. There was a paraffin lamp on that bridge — same sort of lamp as on the church gate today — and we lit it every night. We called it the “Goadby Moon”. During the war it stayed dark, of course. Even as a youngster, I understood what the quarry pits were doing: they weren’t just “holes”; they were work and wages – providing a vital living for so many local men.

 

I wasn’t down a deep mine — none of us were. It was opencast ironstone quarrying: strip away the soil and clay, cut and lift the ore, then load it out. Shifting it — that was the heart of my bit of the job.

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Our little railway was 3‑foot gauge, steam powered, and it tied the quarries together: Eastwell, Goadby Marwood, and then over towards Branston as well. It ran down off the scarp by a rope‑worked incline at Harby Hills, dropping ore to the standard‑gauge line in the Vale of Belvoir. There’s something about an incline that sticks in your bones: the sense of weight, of gravity always waiting to take charge, and the way you listened — really listened — for what the cable and wagons were telling you. 

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I remember how Dorothy — we were courting then and she later became my dear wife — would sometimes be up on the bridge by White Lodge when the train came through. I’d spot her there waving as we rattled past, and even with the engine working hard and the wagons clattering behind me, I always made sure to give a wave back.

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In 1952, I left the quarry to do my National Service. I was sent out to the Far East for the Malayan Emergency, sailing for Singapore just after Christmas. Later I was posted to Hong Kong. I did my two years and then a spell in the reserves. And in 1956, during Suez, they called me back — only it all fizzled out before we even got on a boat. The quarry kept my job open while I was away, and when I came home, I went straight back to it.

 

I stayed until the quarry shut in 1959. That year is stamped on my memory. I drove the last steam loco that brought ironstone out of Coronation Quarry. There’s pride in that, I won’t pretend there isn’t: you don’t forget the feel of a regulator in your hand, the sound of a loaded train starting under you, or the way the men look when they know they’re watching the end of something. 

People walk across those fields now, but they can’t see what I see. It isn’t that the quarrying didn’t happen; it’s that so much of it was smoothed away. Yet some traces do linger if you know where to look — a line in a hedge, a remnant of embankment, a change in the soil level.

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The quarries gave lads like me a living and a skill — and they changed the shape of the land and the rhythm of the villages. Then they closed and the land healed over. But if you stand in the right place, on the right day, with a bit of wind on your face, you can still imagine the “Goadby Moon” burning above the cut, and a little steam engine working hard to pull ironstone out of the earth and down into the Vale. 

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