My father was a coal miner in Yorkshire before the war. His father and uncles and grandfather had been miners. He ran away when they tried to conscript him to train up the Bevan Boys during WW2 but put the skills he learned in the pits to use working as a leading miner- later as a pit boss - building tunnels in London (although he always said that coal miners wouldn't regard such work as real mining) .
My mother's family worked in the pits as well . She had an uncle died in an explosion in Wales.