Scupltor and miner’s son was commissioned to spend a week making sketches of men in Yorkshire pit
He is one of Britain’s greatest sculptors, celebrated for his modernist representations of the female form. But Henry Moore had a little-known dark side: drawings of coalminers created from a week spent in the gloom of a Yorkshire pit in the wartime winter of 1941-42.
They depict the back-breaking, dangerous work carried out daily by hundreds of thousands of miners making a vital contribution to the war effort. Moore described the conditions 1,400ft underground as “like hell”.
