I have not been following the rescue of the miners in Chile too closely - I come from what was a mining community, and it is a little too close to home. I was very annoyed at the BBC news programmes yesterday evening - headlining the university finance arguements and suchlike - to hell with money and politics: tell us about the lives of men.
It would not have surprised me to see a Cornish name among the list of men - though there wasn't. There was a programme about the Cousin Jacks - expat Cornish miners - on the radio, a few years ago. They talked to a man in the Mexican silver mines - he couldn't speak English, but had a Cornish surname, and regarded himself as Cornish although he was several generations on from the forefather who emigrated.
I have been reading through my Father's writings on the Levant mine disaster in 1919. He was six years old at the time and remembered it clearly for the rest of his life. It happened on a Monday, and his Father, who worked at a nearby mine, didn't come home till the end of that week. He was an engineer in the powerhouse, so not underground but he was doing the same as the underground men: they would do their shifts, and then over to the site of the accident to work on the rescue. Thirty one men died. There were many injuries as well, and I remember some of these people as old men.
Miners, like fishermen, are very superstitious men. One of their superstitions was that once you have set out for work, you should never go back. One of the men did go back, to get his matchbox. Miners had to carry their matches, for lighting the fuses, in a brass box since they had to be kept dry, and ferrous metal was not allowed in the same place as explosives. Danger of sparks. He would not have been allowed to go down without it but as it happened, he died. He was young, the father of a young family. I remember his widow, and was at school with one of his granddaughters.
Mine accidents and shipwrecks alike upset me. The fact that this one is having such a great outcome is amazing and wonderful.
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It was very close to home here too - or brought back memories of having to reach two men in Tasmania, another technically difficult task that should never have happened.
The idea of them having to leave one by one - and leave the others behind was the thing that really got me in the end.
I come from West Cumbria, another area rich in mining history and famous disasters. There were whole communities of Cornish miners there - in fact the landscape is still full of villages purpose-built to serve the mines. The miners brought in their skills, but also their culture, religion - everything.
I loved that so many countries shared technology and expertise to get it done. Who would have thought that what was learned by going into space would be used to bring men up from the depths.
I remember looking for one of our family surnames when the 1901 census results were first available online - with only a handful of exceptions, it was found around St Buryan in West Cornwall, and in Cumbria.
There is a family joke that if one of us should ever become famous enough for 'Who do you think you are?' they'd spend their entire time in Barrow-in-Furness - so many branches of the family independently ended up or passed through there.
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