"I found out about the LHI through someone I once taught, who scoured the Net, and this project ticked all the boxes as far as the LHI is concerned.

Everyone was extremely helpful with our application, though we had a glitch early on because somebody had heard about our production of No Thankful Village and thought we were a professional outfit, and therefore not eligible.

No Thankful Village was a community play based on my own book about the First World War. We were able to put together a cast on stage that was about 80 strong, including 46 soldiers, all aged between 18 and 40, all dressed in original First World War uniforms.

So many people from the cast were anxious to stay together that we then formed the Somervale Thankful Players, so called because the whole play was closely associated with Somervale School, and the Thankful because of the meaning of Thankful Village www.ficklehill.com

A Thankful Village was one to which all the men who went to war returned. At the end of the Great War there were only 32 such villages in the whole country, with a quarter of them being in Somerset. In the context of the play the cast and crew were thankful to all those who were portrayed – those who returned as well as those who perished.

We were more confident when we came to do the second play, A Miner’s Tale, which interprets a facet of life in the North Somerset coalfields, recording the difficult living and working conditions endured by our ancestors over a 200 year period.

I had interviewed goodness knows how many coal miners over the years and used some of the material in several different books, though there’s not one specifically about the mines.

As with my First World War book, by the time I wrote it, most of the interviewees had been dead for twenty years or more. It’s the real coal miners’ story, though no-one knew it would eventually be a play when they originally talked to me.

I passed all the material to a close friend called Jeremy Robertson, who was an English teacher - we taught together for a while - and he wrote the script. About 90 people were involved altogether, including a cast of about 65, ranging in age from 7 to 70, and right across the board socially.

We showed the play to a total audience of about 1,000 people in May 2005. At the end of each performance I said a few words and, among other things, asked how many people in the audience, or the cast, had a relative or a forebear who worked in the mines.

At least 10 per cent of the people present had lost somebody in the local mines. It’s now 40 years since the mines closed, and there are still a lot of people here who have coal mining connections.

I am sure that this project has focused a lot of thought on the local heritage. The play opened with the death, in 1805, of a boy coal miner, who was a school teacher’s son. He was crushed underground and he had already been underground for a year, and he was 8 when he died.

Now, we had an 8-year-old playing that lad, and he and his family went to the parish where the boy would have been buried to try and find his grave. They found out that these people would have been buried in unmarked paupers’ graves. Based on the 1,000-odd people we questioned after the play, it seems that several thousand coal miners would have been buried in unmarked graves.

There was a noticeable difference in the audience's reactions at the end of the two plays. At the end of the war play, about 80% were crying, it shook them rigid. But that didn’t happen with the mining play. I think it reaffirmed for them what had happened, it hammered it home what a terrible existence it had been, even though we had tried not to be political. It was understood that there were problems between workers and management but we didn’t labour the point, we just wanted to talk about the families.

The lasting results of our project include videos and DVDs of the play. We’re giving copies to the museum in Radstock and to all the local schools, and they’ll also be on sale. We paid professional people to do the video, but apart from that it was an entirely amateur production.

The Somervale Thankful Players will continue as an amateur drama group. I’ve another play in mind based on a local chap called Austin Wookey, "Mr Mendip" - the most incredible man I ever met. I have about 36 hours of interviews with him on tape. He was a brilliant man, gamekeeper, a policeman, a hairdresser - all things to all men. He used to say to me ‘I hope you live for ever, and I hope I live to bury you!’"