unlike his kids and their kids he was not a miner, but a garden labourer on a commercial plant labourer, so not quite ag lab like Pardon's family, but close. Moreover they were all Methodists as far as I knew. When I enquired, I was told by somebody that in all probability his parish clerk duties, this being a small place, would have consisted of digging graves. That figures, given his day job.

I live in a former mining village (the mine closed in 1980). My wife once overheard a conversation between two old locals after a funeral - they were grumbling about the quality of gravedigging these days, people didn't make them deep and square enough. The reason they had in mind was that gravediggers used to have mining experience. If you want a good-sized hole dug fast and accurately, you don't get a council flowerbed guy to do it, that's a miner's job.