Ian Walsh's Grandfather was Ernest Walter (Midge) Welsh who was mines manager at Norden from 1951 to 1965, when George Allingham took over. Ian has watched the film that we show in the foreman's office and these are his comments.  

The promotional film was made by Mr. Etches in 1960 for Pike Bros. Fayle & Co. to encourage new blood into the mines to boost a dwindling workforce.
At first the workers were not keen to partake in making the film until they were offered a days pay for their time in performing in front of the cameras on a Sunday.
Most of the scenes in the film were staged, and mention of the shaft from Greenspecks was just for the camera, as the shaft they were in was miles from Greenspecks mine.

Les Birkin is the chemist that appears in the film, and in the meeting there is Mr. Beazer and Mr. Swain the MD.

The corrugated hut at Norden was used to transport miners to the various mine shafts in the Purbecks. It was lifted onto the back of a Bedford TK pickup truck, and the miners climbed a makeshift ladder hooked onto the back of the truck. At the front end there was a wooden blank, at the back there was a tarpaulin sheet to keep out the weather, and there were wooden benches bolted to the walls, with a wooden frame around the base of the hut to keep it in shape.

The Foreman’s Hut was painted black with cream windows on the outside, and primrose yellow on the inside, as that was the only tin of paint they could find at the time. There was a large square “tortoise” stove inside to prove the heating. The battery charging house was also provided with a “tortoise” stove to prevent the battery acid freezing over during the winter nights.

Holeman pumps and pneumatic spades were used in the mines over ground and underground.
At the end of their time in the underground mines, most miners were stone deaf from the noise of the pneumatic spades.

Electric safety lamps were introduced in the 1950’s, but  many of the old miners refused to use them because they thought it was too dangerous. Previously carbide lamps with a naked flame were used, as there is very little methane gas in clay mines, but there is a lighter than air gas which seeps out of the clay, and this was burnt off by the miners on a regular basis by holding their lamps against the roof of the tunnel.

Safety hats used underground started as cloth caps with a plate for the lamp attachment, then progressed to compressed leather, which were replaced by fiberglass and then polycarbonate. The fiberglass helmets tended to jab broken glass fibres into your head when they broke, so were not that popular.

The underground mine tubs varied from 7cwt to 17cwt depending on the mine, but were all a nominal 22” gauge with wide tread wheels to accommodate track gauge variations, as only the miner’s boots were used to gauge the track. Some of the mine shafts were so small that the miners had to descend to the mine face by crouching inside the mine tubs. 
The miners were all paid on piecework by the tub full of clay, so each batch of tubs hauled to the surface was marked with a notched stick to denote which team had dug the clay. If bad clay had been dug out, it was designated as spoil to the winch man by placing bark stripped from the pit props on top of the clay in the tub.

Pit props were usually made from pine, as this gives an audible warning of splitting prior to collapse of a prop. Steel hoops were introduced after the 2^nd world war, but timber props were still widely used up to the end of underground mining.  As miners were not paid for erecting pit props, they tended to dig in an unsupported shaft until lunch time, when they went back and propped up the shaft, which could be a hundred feet long. The recommended practice was to only dig a maximum of 6 feet unsupported tunnel before erecting more pit props. 
In the film can be seen a square cage built of pit props in one of the underground scenes. These were used to filter water running into the mine so that the pumps had a clean supply to pump out. They were filled with alternate layers of gorse and heather and packed with sand on top to catch the sand and clay particles washed down into the mine. The gorse and heather was gathered from the surrounding heathland, and was brought back to the mines on the tramway, as visible in one of the photographs taken in the 1960’s. The tradition of furze (gorse) gathering by “Furzehackers” in Purbeck goes back years, as it was used for firing bread ovens and as firelighters.  

The bore hole drilling shown in the film used a hydraulic drive from a diesel pump. The vehicle used to transport the equipment was a second world war Bedford field gun tractor unit, which was fitted with one fixed and one “portable” diesel pump units. The film shows a bore hole drilling in the Arne area.  

The practice of chewing the clay was to determine the quality by texture and silicon content.Mr. Welsh was supposed to have been able to tell exactly where he was underground solely by chewing the clay.  

Banging the roof of the tunnel with a pick would show up pockets of water above the tunnel by returning a hollow sound.