IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. NATIONAL LIFE STORY COLLECTION ARTISTS’ LIVES WILLIAM GEAR interviewed by Tessa Sidey F4737 Side A First tape of an interview with William Gear in George Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, on the twelfth of July. And I know, Bill, we are going to be celebrating your eightieth birthday on the second of August. That's right. Could you tell me where were you born in fact? Well, I was born in a small town in Fife, Scotland, a town called Methil, but my father was a miner and they moved when I was about three years old, they moved to a...another mining village nearby called East Wemyss. Did he come from a mining family? Yes, my Grandfather was a miner, as did his father and my Great Grandmother was a miner (laughs) so that, you know, I remember my father saying that, in his Scots voice, he would say, 'me fether's muther worked doon the pit'[ph] and, of course, would take, we are going right back to about 1840s or so when girls were employed in the mines and, of course, this was abolished around that time, but anyhow, so this was very much... My Grandfather was a miner and this is how the... Your Grandmother actually went down the pit? Yes, yes, yes, my Great Grandmother. Your Great Grandmother? What? Would she have been assisting or...? Yes, they employed the girls as, to pulling hutches and helping out, they weren't, you know, full-scale miners digging coal, but they just helped out by dragging the hutches around and helping with whatever, you know, but they employed girls, they employed girls and there was... Did you know, you didn't know your Great Grandparents? Oh no, no, no, no. You knew your Grandfather? I knew my Grand, my Grandfather... What was he like? He was a sweet old man, I mean he was, they were all, apart from the mining thing, they were all military, they had all been in the army, you know, there was a kind of army tradition among them, too. And he was very smart. He lived until he was eighty- four and I remember him quite well, you know... The same, in Methil? Well, the thing was he, there was, apart from my own father and family there was another, he had another brother who lived in Methil and another sister, so that in his, in my Grandfather's old age he would spend six months with us, and six months with the other... He was, he was shipped around, and finally he died in, well, I was a student at the time, it must have been around 1930 or something like it, he died anyway. So he must have been quite an influence or presence in your childhood? Well, I, you know I, I wasn't really, you know particularly aware of him, you know, but he was around and, and I was at school I suppose, and so on, anyway... Your Grandmother, did she come from a nearby...? Well, his, my Grandmother on that side, he had, she had died many years before... His wife? But I never knew him, knew her. But my mother's family, I knew her, I mean my mother's mother and, again, my Grandfather on that side, he had died early, you see, he died quite young, leaving, the old story, leaving a widow with seven children, or something like that, you see, and of course the tradition in those days was that the girls, as soon as they left school, went into service, and the boys went 'doon the pit', and that was the standard thing, and it had to be, I mean, they had to earn some money because the income from mining and anything else was minimal in those days and this was the normal sort of routine. Did your mother...? However... Did your mother? Stick to your mother. Did she actually go into service then? Yes, yes, she went into service, when, I presume, when she left school, and she went into service in East Wemyss, where my father was by this time, and it was where they met, in East Wemyss... Do you know how they met? I wouldn't know how they met. But I mean she, she was in service in a, in a house of a factory manager, which was quite near where my father would live, you know, within a few hundred yards, but they would, you know, I suppose they would meet around that time. This, and they were married in 1915 or, I suppose, 1915. I was born in 1915. But he was a miner as I say... Was he already, what age would he have become a miner? Well, he would, again, he would have gone 'doon the pit' when he was fourteen... Yes. .....you see. When he got married... Which mine was he actually working in, one mine or...? A mine called the Michael, which is now closed, the Michael was one of the big pits in Fife at the time. But, the, you know, that was the tradition and, of course, I was going to say that since he was a miner they, he didn't go into the army, in the First World War, even though he had been what they called a volunteer, the equivalent of Territorials. I even have a photograph of him in uniform somewhere. But the miners were kept back, to produce coal for the industry in the railways and so on. So the miners, some of them I suppose, the younger unmarried, unmarried ones went into the armies and were slaughtered of course. And of course... Would he have been in his twenties when he...? He was probably, let me see, '81, he was about thirty-three or four I suppose. He was born in '81? He was born in '81, he was born in '81. And your mother was born...? A little later, I think 1890 thereabouts, yes. Somewhere about there. Nine years difference? Yes, there was a few years difference, she was younger, slightly younger I suppose, yes. Yes, yes. Did you have, come from a large family? No, my, there was only myself and a sister, in due course. Yes. She did have, my mother did have another child who died in infancy, when I was a kiddie, a toddler I suppose... Do you remember that? Do you remember that? I vaguely remember the funeral. I can still - a kind of vision of a, the, the tiny white coffin. I was probably not more than three and a half or something like this at the time. But I still have a picture of us, a tiny, a pretty little box so to speak, I mean, I wouldn't, I wasn't aware of funerals and death and these sort of things, but, anyhow, she died. I don't know of what, pneumonia or something like this, as an infant, a few weeks old I should think. That was it, you see. And I think, I'm not sure, but I think at the time I would suspect that the doctors then said, 'Oh, no more,' I'm not sure, but I would think that was the case probably. 'No more,' you know. Where did you live in fact? What, what was...? Well the, at the time there was, as I say we moved to East Wemyss when I was, I think in fact they got, first, when they were first married they didn't have a house, and accommodation was very difficult, and so they lived with my, my mother's mother, with my Granny, you know, but they, they got a house in East Wemyss, a miners', in a miners' row, in East Wemyss. So where were you born in fact? In Methil, in Methil... In a house they were renting...? Yes. .....or with...? It was the house of my mother's mother... .....So, was it...? .....my Granny. .....your Grandmother? Yes. Yes. But they lived with her for the first couple of years anyway. So in fact you were born there, at home. Were you born, born at home? I presume so. I mean how would I know? In those days one was. You didn't have things like hospitals and so on. And so was, your first kind of memories were not of Methil particularly, no...? No. Of course, we, we were all the time we were continually up, and going down to, to Methil, to see Granny and so on, and aunts and so on, and there was a big family on that side. A couple of mil...how many miles...? Oh, there was only about three of four miles apart. Methil and East Wemyss, I think three miles or so... Right. Maybe, yes, that's all, or quite nearly so. Methil in fact was the main docks, for exporting coal, abroad. You know, there was quite an, quite an area of coal mines over in that area of Fife and most of the coal was exported from Methil docks, and, you know, it was just a couple of miles apart. The, in-between Methil and East Wemyss there was this other town called Buckhaven, which is where I went to the High School, in Buckhaven. I went to school in East Wemyss to start with, the local Primary School, I suppose. And at the age of ten or eleven if you, you had a kind of thing called a Control Examination - rather like an Eleven Plus in those days - and if you were good enough you went on to the local High School, which was at Buckhaven. And when they travelled backwards and forwards there on the tram, there was a tramway system which was meant, went from Kirkcaldy to Leven via East Wemyss and Buckhaven and we had a free pass on the trams, oh yes. At least you weren't walking to school. No, no, no, there was a bit of a walk from the tram down to the school, but it was, it was feasible, it wasn't bad you know. Perhaps before we talk about your school. What was home like, I mean how, how would you describe your...? Well, it was just, it was one large room which they just, they called it the kitchen, but it wasn't a kit..., it was one large room with two beds and a partition between the two beds, two kind of great box beds. And then there was what you might call a parlour, one other room which was kept for special occasions, it was hardly used. (laughs) And they kept, and you know, they... It sounds... Yes, well there was no, and that was it. There was a place, which they called a scullery - which we would call a kitchen - where they cooked food and washed the dish...there wasn't a bath, there wasn't a bathroom, there was a toilet, but that was all. And there was a garden at the back, but that was it. In all this, in this miners' row of cottages, or houses in one strong row called Randolph Street I think it was called at the time, but we were there up until I went to college and so on. So this was a mining community? Absolutely, oh absolutely. I mean, most of the men worked down the mine, the local mine, most of them, oh, yes. It was absolutely a mining community and most of the housing had been built for the miners in fact. Did they, were they a certain type of architecture then? Well, it was a kind of fairly basic architecture, it was well built but there was nothing luxurious about it. As I say, there wasn't even a bathroom in those days. And you know, it was primitive but cheap, I suppose and the, the, the properties were owned by the coal company and they, your, the rent was deducted from your wages. When did your father, was he very committed to mining? Well, (laughs) Nobody is committed to mining dear! In fact he tried his damnedest to get out of it because there were frequent strikes when I mean, they were, I mean, I remember them as a boy, I mean when I was at school and so on, the strikes, and even soup kitchens for the kids at school and all this stuff. Was he involved in the strikes? Oh yes. Well, of course he was a great strike..., one knows about the General Strike of 1926. Well really it was essentially a miners' strike. Well the miners stuck out for six months, nothing coming in, you imagine how did they manage? But my father, he took jobs as he