Leo Beskeen fell down a ventilating shaft, caught malaria while mining in Zambia and several times has only narrowly escaped being blown up by blasting operations. But he still says: 'When I go across there and smell the fumes of the dynamite smoke and the funk coming up from underground, it makes me long for my youth to go back again.'
Now semi-retired Leo Beskeen acts as a summer guide for visitors to the old engine house near Redruth where he once worked. When he started there as a boy of 13, Cornish tin mining was going into decline. Now it is about to enter what some believe will be its greatest boom ever.
(from Bristol)
