Look Stranger

The Tin Miner They Couldn't Kill (2x17)

Air date: Feb 09, 1972

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)