George Hitchin

PIT-YACKER

 Reproduced here with kind permission of his son John Hitchin

 

An unwanted child ten days old, whose mother advertised him as for disposal and who was adopted by a miner and his wife to be brought up in grinding poverty, here tells his life story.

As a boy often hungry and always under-nourished, he was wild and happy in his grim surroundings , and was out of school and into the pit before he became aware that there were privileges he was being denied.
He worked underground for eight years, labouring at the coal face and in the dusty galleries, lonely sometimes but for the pit ponies, though usually with companions whose characters he faithfully describes with simple alertness.
What he most vividly recalls is his struggle to acquire an Educational Settlement. Through encouragement and disappointment and physical disabilities that would have daunted a less determined man, he won his way toward the goal of his ambition.