The secret language of Leicestershire’s coal miners

Anyone from Leicestershire will know that we have a unique language here, with words and phrases that often don’t mean much to outsiders. And it was the same for local coal miners, research has revealed.

Coal miners in the county had a secret language of their own compared to fellow miners in the East Midlands. Particular words and phrases used in Leicestershire ‘pit talk’ – as it was known – had never been heard in the neighbouring counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

Leicestershire’s mines were geographically separate from the rest of the East Midlands coalfield, with a seam running through South Derbyshire to Leicestershire and another along the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

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‘Pit talk’ included phrases like going “off the rod” which was used when two miners had fallen out. Other terms unique to Leicestershire were ‘ringer’, a crowbar, and ‘stint’, used to describe a length of coal. The research, led by Natalie Braber, professor of linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, found that Leicestershire’s miners also used words such as ‘doddy’ when working an extra hour, ‘double doddy’ for two extra hours, while sometimes referring to ‘mekadoody’ for doing overtime.

Natalie said that ‘ommer’ was a very typical local phrase used for hammer and that ‘denting’ was used when the floor level in the mine had to be lowered after it had risen due to geological fault lines. ‘Dinting’ was the regular term used by other miners elsewhere in the region.

‘Snigget’ was another term used for a small connecting roadway in Leicestershire, whereas other miners used ‘snicket’. For the research, Natalie spoke to more than 90 miners from the East Midlands.

She originally set out to study language variation more broadly in the East Midlands, when some of the people she spoke to suggested she speak to local coal miners, “as they had a funny language all of their own.”

She said: “A lot of the Leicestershire miners had words that the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire miners had never heard of. One of the expressions Leicestershire used that the others did not, if you talk about falling out with each other, was called going ‘off the rod’.

“At the end of your shift you would hang your tools up on a bar by the coal face (called the rod) instead of taking them home and if two men fell out, they wouldn’t be hanging their tools up next to each other, this was called going ‘off the rod’.”

“A water bottle for Nottinghamshire miners would be ‘dudley’ while the Leicestershire miners have never heard of that,” Natalie added. “Language and forms change in different ways.

“For something like coal mining which involved a lot of moving as a lot of the coal industry and its miners moved down to the Midlands in the seventies and eighties. Thringstone (colliery) had a very large Scottish contingent, whether it’s something to do with that we just do not know.”

At the time the coal industry was nationalised in 1947, By 1997, the last of them, in Asfordby near Melton, closed down for good. Natalie said that while the heritage of the “crucial” industry is being preserved, the language is not.

“The mining industry was a crucial part of the East Midlands and entire communities were made up around these mines. In 2015 the last mine closed and the language associated with it is disappearing,” she said.

“There are a lot of mining heritage groups and they preserve that, but not the language. So it would be lost if it was not recorded and preserved. There are a lot of similarities between the terms used in the East Midlands, some terms are universal, but others vary. So it’s interesting to understand why.”

Natlalie’s research discovered that words used to describe the dangerous working conditions were used more generally. ‘Afterdamp’, ‘blackdamp’, ‘chokedamp’, ‘stinkdamp’, ‘firedamp’, ‘sweetdamp’ and ‘whitedamp’ were used widely, to describe the various noxious gases found in the mines, ranging from carbon monoxide to methane.