It is reported by the Telegraph that the last working pit-pony in Britain has died, at the age of 35, at the Beamish Open Air Museum where he had lived for the last 23 years.
35 is a fair age for a horse.
I am a shockingly bad horseman, never really having trusted the beasts since having had, at the age of about five, all of the toggles on my duffel-coat eaten by one. But I am a bit of an industrial archaeologist, and have been down a (preserved) coal-mine, where neat little stables for the pit-ponies are still kept, hundreds of feet below the grass and sunlight which most of them would never see again.
By no means all pit-ponies died underground, and hardly any suffered the appalling fate of Bataille, the pit-pony in Zola’s Germinal (who was trapped by a fall and slowly drowned). Despite which, of those who were blindfolded and lowered into the darkness few, as Lewis puts it, ‘returned to the sunlit lands’.
The hydraulic coal-cutter and the armoured conveyor are prosaically efficient and historically quite uninteresting things, but they have done away with the little underground stables, and also with the depressingly regular practice of slinging a net beneath the cage in which finally to wind to surface the mortal remains of the likes of Pip.
