..........Margaret Peffers came to the village of Quarter in 1936 when it was dominated by the mines. It was the United Colliery Company who ran one of the village stores , owned the pub, provided the lighting for the village streets, and who paid Mrs. Peffers' new husbands wages and those of just about every working man in Quarter. At one time there were eight working pits in the village. When Mrs. Peffers went to Quarter in 1936 she went into service at one of the farms that encircled the village - Kilburn Farm.
..............She married a miner two years later and moved into one of the colliery-owned cottages. There were five rows of cottages in all, rooms and kitchens with bed recesses. "It was a nice wee place, a clean wee place," said Mrs. Peffers. "You could leave your door unlocked with the money for the insurance man on the table. He would come in and help himself." Mrs. Peffers' husband worked on "the hill" - above ground. "He said he saw so many dead ones coming up, he didn't want to work underground." She remembers one Sunday- "There was a foreman, Sandy Kerr, and Jimmy Ritchie. They went to work, but were late coming back. Sandy Kerr's wife asked me if I would go down and see the manager. They had been gassed. Both men were dead." One of Mrs. Peffers neighbours remembered that in Quarter you never needed an alarm clock. "All the miners wore big tackits and it was like an army marching down the road. About 500 men came from Glassford, Strathaven and Chapelton by train and miners came up from Eddlewood on their bikes. Nobody slept in with the noise from those pit boots."
..........Entertainment in Quarter also revolved around the pits. There was the welfare hall, opened in 1910 with a library, billiards and a hall and most necessary, baths for the miners as there were no baths in the cottages. There were dances, even in the streets, remembers Mrs. Peffers. "There were a lot of people with fiddles and accordions and they used to play outside and there was dancing in the streets." Until the 1940's, though, Quarter had no electricity, other than the street lighting provided by the colliery generator and in the middle of a village dance all the lights could go out. "We needed batteries for our wirelesses and I remember a man used to come up from Hamilton once a week with a barrowful of batteries." Others who did their rounds were Sanny Torrance, a Quarter farmer, who the villagers called the Sooky Dook man, he sold buttermilk; and the midden man employed by the colliery to clear the open middens into his cart. The same cart delivered coal to the miners' homes.
..........One of the great events of the year was the Sunday school trip when the farmers' carts were cleaned and filled with new straw piled full of children and driven to the High Parks or Watson's estate at Earnock, or one of the local farms. "You had your tinny, your poke and you got into these carts while Danny McGlynn would get dressed up like a policeman and pretend he was directing the traffic. It was great fun," remembers one of Mrs. Peffers neighbours. There were an awful lot of children in Quarter, she added, because everyone had big families.
..........Mrs. Peffer's friend can also remember the soup kitchens set up during the General Strike of 1926 when the miners were paid "Russian Money", also called "Blood money", 2/6 a week from comrades in the Soviet Union. "There were soup kitchens in the wash houses. The men went round the farms to get chickens and vegetables and the butcher gave us bones. The men all had allotments by the football park and the potatoes and turnips went into the soup. It was great soup. When the men went back to work they got less money than before they came out. In the thirties, the miners, my husband, was getting £2.8.4d."
..........Mrs. Peffers loved the community spirit in old Quarter, a spirit which she says ignored class or religion. "It was a community. If anyone was ill everybody took an interest. Everyone was for you, no matter what religion and if someone died everyone gave money for the funeral and flowers. We had our own nurse and the miners built a cottage for her." The miners and their families were all "good kirk-goers" said Mrs. Peffers and her friend recalls much of the social life of the village was tied to the church.
..........Now the miners and the miners' rows are no more and the people of Quarter need alarm clocks to waken them in the morning.
