This is a quick (for me) video on this May’s RTF subject I chose for ‘one colour’ as it reflected the sky when my mini 3 Pro was close up and personal!
‘JIGGER’ - BROWNHILLS MINER SCULPTURE
Brownhills is in the West Midlands on the edge of an area known as “the Black Country,” an identity earned through the soot, smoke, and slag of its coal mines. Close to the centre of the town, built to honour the coal industry, lies the statue known as “Jigger”, named after Jack “Jigger” Taylor, who was killed in a mining disaster in 1951.
Jack was from a multi-generational mining family, and was working at Walsall Wood Pit when the roof suddenly collapsed. Jack’s nickname was submitted to a competition to find a name for the sculpture, by Taylor’s own great-grandson.
At its peak aound 80 percent of the Brownhills population worked in the mining industry, included children as young as 11, but by the 1950s the 300-year mining history of a relentless pace of extraction, left its inevitable calling card on the local areas environment and was therefore considered unsustainable.
“Jigger” came to Brownhills 50 years after the decline of the mines, intended as both a celebration of the industry that built the town, and to serve as a reminder of the toll it often took on its workers and their surrounding communities.
The sculpture was created in 2006 by artist John McKenna, a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, and at approximately 40 feet tall, certainly commands the attention.
