In 1948 a young man from Rhosllanerchrugog, who was at the time reading chemistry at Bangor University, decided that on taking his degree he would ‘go in for mining’, which meant that instead of simply working in the pit he would also study to become a manager. There were by this time six collieries still operating in North Wales, and the obvious one for him to enter as a beginner would have been Hafod, the village pit at the foot of the hill, where his father, starting work at the age of 13, had risen to be underground manager; but the young man wanted to go where he would not be known and applied to Gresford Colliery, which by then employed 1,600 men. Even Gresford had some associations for him because his father, as captain of a rescue team, had been the first man to set foot on the pit bottom when exploration of the gas-filled area was begun in 1935.

As a newcomer he spent six months on a training face.

At the end of his training he was sent to work in the Slant District, on a face two-and-a-half miles from the pit bottom. ‘The district was a hot one, much warmer than the training face, which was itself uncomfortably warm, and we all stripped to the waist and wore football shorts at our work.’

In due course he achieved his ambition and became a manager at Bersham Colliery on the outskirts of Wrexham. Later still he fulfilled his earliest dream by becoming manager at Hafod, but the dream had turned sour on him. Hafod, the aristocrat of North Wales pits, was to close and his melancholy duty was to supervise the closure.

The North Wales coalfield, proving more and more uneconomic, had continued to shrink. Of its six remaining pits the first to be closed, in March 1966, was Llay Main, which had been opened with high hopes as recently as 1923.