Written and Directed By John Kelly

It’s 1966 and the NCB wants you ............................
A fifteen year old lad answers the call and learns more about life than he does about being an electrician.
Join him in the year when Harold Wilson’s pit closures rocked the town. England won the world cup and it was only 1/9 for twenty No 6 tipped.

“Parts of the piece with the dysfunctional male trio in the workshop generated belly laughs a-plenty as the characters pattered away to each other in a way men tend to do together. Wide-ranging discussions taking in football, music, sexually transmitted diseases and creative swearing are the power that drives the whole of the piece, with naivety and cynicism provided but just-starting Darby and finishing-soon Woody acting as the metronome of the piece. If it’s an engaging, straightforward time you are after which makes you laugh at, as well as feel for the characters this is definitely for you”

It’s forty years since I last gazed out of the lamp room window at Monkton 3 & 4 Colliery and rubbed rust off old junction boxes in the now derelict workshop pictured.
One of the regular questions asked about this back-water of the industrial revolution is, “Where was it?” Everyone seems to remember Monkton 1, 2 & 6 in Royston but Monkton 3 & 4?
Well, depending on who’s being asked, the pit was either in South Heindley, Ryhill or Havercroft. The truth is that it was stuck right next to Havercroft. Ryhill was a tad further away and South Heindley was… up the road somewhere. (Incidentally, the astute among you will have spotted that in the numerical sequencing of Monkton’s pit shaft numbers, shaft number 5 is missing!) Apparently shaft 5 was a ventilation shaft that could be found in Old Royston – not far from the Oliver Twist Pub, near Notton.
The Monkton Collieries were closed in December 1966, and not by the pathologically hated Torys but by a Labour administration that had received enormous local and undeserved support. However, on the positive side, their act of betrayal and social vandalism did offer me, and many others, an insight into what happens to communities when their reason for existence is ripped away.
The Labour pit closures of the sixties were but a taste of what was to come twenty years later and ‘Sparkies’ – for what it’s worth – is dedicated to the people of Havercroft and Ryhill who populated my youth and fashioned my future.