On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 12:32:37 +0100, Ian Sage <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for that link, Josephine. It's one I haven't come across before. > I am not sure if your search led you to the information (which I am > unable to verify) that Jonathan Presto was a pseudonym for Charles > CHALLENGER - a surname which I know appears in the ancestry of listers. Hi Ian, Yes, I did come across Charles CHALLENGER, when I was looking for information about Five Years of Colliery Life. I thought of my Ian's CHALLENGER family in Clutton and wondered if there was a link with the CHALLENGERs of Clutton. I also saw an address of Fishponds Road, Bristol on this web page: http://www23.us.archive.org/stream/bibliothecasome02greegoog/bibliothecasome02greegoog_djvu.txt > In the style of the day, he is fairly careful not to give specific names > of pits and people, but he relates how he began work in September 1864, > aged 12 at a colliery which had then been working for 40 years... it > therefore seems probable that he began work locally, either at the Fry's > Bottom or Greyfield pits. Thanks for giving further information about this book. I know that if Maggie Perkins was still with us she would have been interested in knowing about it, too. > The book gives much the best first hand report of Somerset coal mining > that I am aware of, and though the account is doubtless sanitised for > wider consumption I regard it as a bit of a treasure. I'm sure it is a treasure. You've reminded me that, when we were younger, we had some mining books dating from the early 20th century, which nowadays I would probably think of as treasures. But as we were about to leave Wales and I wasn't yet fully into family history, I didn't think we would need anything to do with coal again. (How wrong I was!) So we sold the books to a specialist book dealer who dealt in books on industrial subjects. There was one hard-covered book, which was actually a folded up map showing the mines in the South Wales coalfield. Now that would have been a treasure if we'd kept it! Josephine