The Mackintosh Colliery where both Will Jones and his father worked. It was opened in 1867 and closed in 1919 because of flooding. The shaft was 1,620 feet deep, one of the deepest in the North Somerset coalfield.
The Newbury pit yard. In the foreground is the timber shed where John Marchant Jones worked as a sawyer.
The forge at Newbury. The man in the left foreground with the axe is John Marchant Jones.Will Jones went down the Newbury pit in the early 1900's to take the following pictures of life at the coalface. It should be remembered that he was using a primitive box camera which employed glass plates, not film. The flash bulb was not invented for another thirty years, and so he would have used explosive flash powder, ignited on a metal plate as he opened the shutter.
Notice in the above picture that the man on the left is wearing the notorious guss and crook, a harness which passed under his crutch to draw a "putt", a sledge laden with coal.
When it was decided to build a new chimney at Mackintosh, much higher than the old, on completion Will Jones climbed it with his camera on his back to take photographs from the top. He used the iron rung ladder set into the chimney and, when he reached the top, set up his equipment on a few planks of wood. He was assisted by a Mr Bellis, the steeplejack who had supervised the building of the chimney. Perched a hundred feet above the ground, because of the wind Bellis had to hold steady the cloth which covered Will and his camera as he exposed the plates. A photograph survives of the men on the chimney scaffolding but not the photographs taken from the top.
Will, however, performed the feat again when a new chimney was built at Newbury.
Will Jones on the Newbury chimney. The following two views of the pit yard were taken from there.
Sadly Will Jones was no sentimentalist. When he acquired the Newbury pit yard after the Second World War for his concrete block business, he wiped all his priceless glass negative plates and used them to repair the windows in the buildings! 
I walked eastwards down the High Street in search of Brook Cottage, the house where he had grown up with his parents, John and Millicent, and his three brothers and two sisters. It wasn’t difficult to find. On the corner of the street and a little lane, it was announced by a wooden sign, next to a post box let into the wall of the house.
“Cottage”, for its place and period, is something of a misnomer. Brook Cottage is quite a substantial house, and John Marchant Jones and his bride, Millicent Martin, must have been considered a fortunate young couple when they went to live there after their marriage. There was money on both sides of the match, from John’s adoptive mother, Mrs Hobday Jones of “Camden House”, and from Millicent’s father, Benjamin Martin, a mining surveyor and Coleford’s parish clerk. 
I stood in the street and wondered how the family, with such a promising start, could have foundered so spectacularly, reduced to hand-outs of bread and tea from the parish. The handsome, dashing, John Marchant Jones perhaps was no better than he should have been, and one family legend tells that Millicent was pregnant when she went up the aisle of Holy Trinity church. On the other side of the street to Brook Cottage stands the old Temperance Hall, now a private house but still with an improving text from the Book of Habakkuk over the door. Was it the demon drink that sank my great grandfather?
I walked on, through the trees and up through a field, wondering if this might have been the way Will Jones had taken to his work at the colliery. He said later in life that he loathed the work, particularly on the “batches”, the heaps of smoking slag and spoil. I had no idea if any trace of Mackintosh, closed for some ninety years, still existed. As I topped a rise, I could see a hillock covered in trees in front of me. A new farm lane had been driven around it, cutting back the soil around its base – except it wasn’t soil. Even from a distance the blue-black sheen of slag was obvious. Here was the old batch of the Mackintosh colliery, where Will Jones had toiled at sorting scraps of coal from the waste. 
That brick archway once had led to the top of the shaft, beneath the winding tower, where my grandfather had banged shut the cage doors on the squatting pitmen before they were lowered seven hundred dizzy feet below the ground.
The yard today is a sprawling mass of buildings and works, owned by the Vobster Cast Stone Company. The receptionist kindly sought permission for me to wander around the site. The tall building which once housed the Cornish Beam Engine to pump the water out of the pit galleries still survives.
Near to it stood my grandfather’s original offices, built in his own blocks and now abandoned.
I regained the footpath which took me round the edge of the site through woodland thick with the scent of the buddleia which run riot there. Where the yard ended, a hard path ran away eastwards.
This was the track of the old railway which connected Newbury and Mackintosh with the sidings at Mells Road. The track is bordered by fields, and above it stands a handsome building, Page House, and below it the vale which leads to Vobster.
Eventually the track became a metalled lane at Upper Vobster Farm and a little further on, at St Edmund’s House, I turned down a path into the fields. At a stile into a road, I turned right and walked down into the hamlet of Vobster.
You may be forgiven, however, for claiming that the Vobster Inn was the model of the “King William” in my grandfather’s books. After all, he spent every evening possible in the place, putting the world to rights with his pals.
He wouldn’t recognise the pub today. I hadn’t been through the door since he died, and felt completely disorientated until I realised that the old front door had disappeared, and that I had entered by the side of the building. An old photograph on the wall of the bar was there to remind me of how things had been, and part of the room was signed as “George’s Snug”, while another board declared this area of the bar to be the “Village Parliament”. Was it merely coincidence that this recalled the title of Will Jones’s last book, “Our Village Parliament”? I took one look at the very young, and very pretty, girl behind the bar, and decided to keep my memories to myself. The “Vobster” – the inn bit gets dropped in some of its publicity – is more restaurant than pub these days but that’s the reality of making a living from a boozer today. Pints of cider and hours of chat and whist wouldn’t pay many bills. I had a good pint of Butcombe bitter, a pricey cheese sandwich, and some of the best chips I have ever tasted, arranged in a little vase for all the world like a bunch of flowers.
I walked past some cottages along the road towards Coleford and then climbed a stile on the left of the road into a field. I took a path to the left which led to a bridge across the Mells Stream.
There was a flash of blue over the water downstream – a kingfisher! “A spell is wov’n by Somerset,” wrote grandfather, and he must have loved this country between Coleford and Vobster. Even so, as the path took me westwards, there was evidence that even here the pits had left their mark. A stone building standing apparently without purpose in the middle of a field had been part of the Vobster colliery, and some old low arches half-concealed by nettles in woodland further on might have been remains of the coke ovens which existed here.
Half way along the valley leading back to Coleford are some coarse fishing lakes. I walked round and round them, sweating in a waterproof coat and slouch hat as the thunder banged about me, without finding the path which should have taken me to Hippy’s Farm. After half an hour of this, I gave up and got south of the lakes to take a well-defined path westwards, despite a stile installed by the local ramblers which promised far more than it delivered.
The buildings of Coleford were now visible on the ridge to the north and, like some sinister watchtower, above the trees loomed the top of my grandfather’s house, “Mendip Ho!” Sadly, darkness of the gathering storm made it impossible to photograph, but later the present owner of the house very kindly gave me permission to take pictures from his garden. Where my grandfather had his eyrie on the flat roof, there is now a proper penthouse.
The views from the house remain completely unspoilt. From here at least you can see the “Springfield” countryside of his imagination.
I walked into Coleford past the “King’s Head”. Even today Coleford boasts three pubs, a legacy of the thirsty miners who once drank in the village. Just above it I came across Camden House where John Marchant Jones had lived when he first came from London to Coleford as the adopted son of Hannah Hobday Jones. Hannah, the widow of a cabinet maker in Camden Town, North London, had returned to her native Coleford to start a shop at Camden House, the name which the property bears to this day.
Climbing a steep hill, I came to Holy Trinity Church, opposite to the old Miner’s Welfare Institute which Will Jones bought and gave to the village as a church hall. In the church is the controversial window designed by Keith New which Will presented. There is a plaque in Will’s memory below the window, now sadly darkened by the growth of the trees outside.
On the northern edge of the churchyard is the group of family graves, including those of Benjamin Martin and his wife, and John Marchant and Millicent Jones, the latter’s’ memorial placed there by their eldest son many years after their passing.
Below the church and the hall stands the old National School, now a youth centre but not much changed since the Jones boys were photographed there in the 1890’s.
Keith New described his work in the “Coleford Parish Paper” of October 1958 thus. “The subject is taken from I Samuel xix 9-10: ‘And the evil spirit from the Lord was upon Saul as he sat in his house with his javelin in his hand: and David played with his harp. And Saul sought to smite David even to the wall with the javelin; but he slipped away out of Saul’s presence, and he smote the javelin into the wall: and David fled, and escaped that night.’
In the same issue the vicar, Father John Sutters, did his best to justify the radicalism of the window to a sceptical congregation. “ For most of us in Coleford this window is a completely new experience, to which time will be needed to adjust ourselves. To begin with, it is stained, not just painted, as are our other windows, and so the colours are deeper and heavier. In the second place, in the central figures and the details of the background the artist has not been content simply to copy the stock ideas of what things and people look like to which we have grown used, but has expressed what the story of Saul and David means to him in the style of a young artist of 1958. But I think that the greatest shock for most of us, as we look at this window, is to realize that the Bible story, like whatever else deals with the whole of human nature, has to face the hideous wickedness of which human beings are capable. That, after all, is what the Crucifix has to tell us, if we were not hardened by seeing it so often. People often want to find comfort and soothing in Church: we like pretty-pretty pictures, soft sugary hymn-tunes, nothing to make us think or to stir us up; we want an escape from the harshness of life into a dream-world. But the religion of the Bible, and the Church, the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ, has to face and deal with ugliness and wickedness, not to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist.
By the early 1960’s the Miners’ Welfare Institute was redundant. All the pits had closed, and the social needs of the area were well-served by the lavishly-appointed Coleford British Legion Club, opened in 1956. In its early years the Club’s weekend dances provided a popular battleground for some memorable punch-ups between gangs of lads from Pensford and from Peasedown.
