Looking back with Ian Scott on the mining community of Glen Village

I have to confess that I knew very little about the village and what I did know came from a report from the 1850s which said that there were “two rows of collier houses one storey in height, slated and in good repair . . . popularly known in the locality as Glen Village”. I had also heard that the church had sent a missionary to the village in the 1890s and that he had helped the miners’ families during the bitter strikes of the time. Finally I knew a little bit about the Callendar Colliery and the firebrick works and that was about it!

That remained the case until I came across an article by Roy Hunter, one of the village’s most famous sons. Roy died at the age of 102 and throughout his long life he had lived in Glen Village and had given amazing service to the community.

Back then the walls of those original houses were still standing but they had been replaced in the 1870s by two rows, each of sixteen houses, the Front Row and the Tunnel Row. These were mostly ‘single ends’ with rows of coal cellars and dry middens at the back. Roy recalled that each miner was able to purchase a ton of coal for £1! The nearby stables were home to the coal cart horses and sometimes the ponies which worked below ground at the Cleugh Pit.

The village had three water pumps one in the middle of each row and one beside the Store and, in later years, four lavatories at the Front Row and another four at the Store which was eventually taken over by Redding Co-op Society. There were another two houses near there and six more at the Stables making 40 in the village. According to Roy another 70 odd houses were built in the 1930s including the ones in Glenbank and the people in the two rows moved in while their single ends bit the dust. There was a small Welfare Hall with a billiard room and reading room years before there was a Community Centre.

With the coal seams nearing exhaustion the pits shut one by one until the last, the Policy, closed in the early 1950s. The brickworks remained until modern times but today the work which made the village is long gone. The Policy Bing across the road is now a fine place to walk the dog and look down over the town.

Recent years have not been kind to Glen Village. The bowling green is gone, along with the Community Centre. But the spirit of a community is in the people and not the fabric and there are few places in the district with stronger feelings of belonging than the Glen. New houses have also helped to bring more families to the village.

The long life of Roy Hunter links the past and the present and his love of the place and determination to make it a happy and successful community should be an inspiration to today’s villagers and the generations to come.

I hope that after reading this Eileen Welsh will be speaking to me again!