[Harry Bellamy worked as grocer’s errand boy until he left school in 1905. The Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Act 1908 limited the hours a miner could work to eight hours per day]

So I asked Dad to get me a job in the pit. In October 1905 I started as a collier boy working 60 hours a week and during the winters before the final Eight Hours Act for the miners we only saw the sun on Sundays. 

Colliery work then was easy. No mechanisation, no intense methods, no conveyer work and occasionally sing-songs were held. What a different world we lived in then, the last decade of the Victorian era and the Edwardian period.