Miner’s apprentices at the sorting belt, around 1930

View into a sorting belt hall. With their bare hands, young miners seperated dead rock from raw coal. Before being allowed to go underground, they spent their first years doing this kind of work. During the years of war between 1914 and 1918, the employment of juveniles under the age of 16 was one way of compensating for the loss of skilled workers in the mining industry.