THE ringing of metal on stone gave way to a hollow sound and then they were through, their lamplight dispelling the utter blackness that had reigned for a hundred years.

Marty Lurvey looked on.

He was known for his enquiring mind and quick eye for a picture so when the team from the South Celynen pit broke through to the old Prince of Wales Colliery workings somebody tipped him the wink.

"But we never entered the workings where on September 11 1878, 268 men and boys perished, to be entombed for ever.

"To go any further was considered extremely dangerous and a temporary 'bash' or barrier was put across where the men had broken through" he recalls of that eerie moment a quarter of a century ago.

"Somewhere beyond that point lay the bodies of the men who had died in South Wales' worst pit disaster when rescue attempts were defeated by fire, explosions and after-damp.

"Water from the canal was diverted into the workings to put the fires out.

"Somewhere under the present industrial estate, their bodies almost certainly mummified, those men still lie."

The temporary bash was shortly afterwards replaced with a substantial one re-sealing the tomb forever.

But did at least one man's gaze fall upon the dreadful scene of bodies either blasted, gassed or drowned by the torrent?

Marty Lurvey thinks so.

"I saw a surveyor underground which was the one place you hardly ever saw them and suspected that he might have been making his own investigation.

"I saw him again a little later and said 'You've been in there, past the bash, haven't you?'

He said nothing. Just tapped the side of his nose."

After training for the pit Marty Lurvey, now 52 studied for his managers' certificate but left the industry after the NUM strike of 1984 to follow his first love which was painting and drawing.

From Caerleon College he went to the University of Brighton to read fine art during which time he met Josef Herman, among the greatest of those artists who took their inspiration from the lives and workplaces of South Wales colliers.

"I wrote to him in London and to my surprise and delight he invited me to a pub lunch.

"He was a little man but spellbinding.

"I savoured the meal and every second of our meeting."

For a while he worked and painted in Sweden. Casual jobs supplemented his income from the sales of his pictures. He took a post-graduate certificate at Oxford Brookes University, taught art at Oxford House in Risca for a while and did a stint as a teacher in a Northern maximum security prison.

"There were some really scary people there. I taught the Black Panther. I would have met Charles Bronson but most of the time he was in seg (segregation).

As well he might. Bronson has been dubbed Britain's most vicious criminal, a bareknuckle fighter who, in the absence of a human to beat up picked a fight with a Rottweiler and once led another prisoner around on a lead.

After his wanderings in Sweden and the North of England the ex-miner with the cultivated voice is back in Gwent, not to where his roots are in Abercarn but to Caerleon where he has a small flat within sight of the college where he first trained.

His portrayal of underground are dark and powerful, his landscapes nostalgic. He has experimented with abstract art but understands that the local taste is for figurative work.

His idea now is to settle down and get his work shown in local galleries.

His work should sell well. But if it doesn't Marty Lurvey has a store of recollections about the latter days of Gwent mining and a honed way of presenting them.

He could always set himself up as a raconteur.