THESE days Bill Cook spends most of his waking hours hooked up to an oxygen tank.

The legacy of 42 years spent working underground in North-East pits, inhaling coal dust, has left him with emphysema and barely able to draw breath.

His lungs are, in fact, 15 per cent effective, according to one of a series of medical examinations he has had to endure over the years.

Barely able to walk three steps at a time, his GP has described him as "a respiratory cripple".

But when it comes to claiming compensation awarded to stricken miners following an historic High Court decision 16 months ago - none of this counts.

Legal representatives of the Department of Trade and Industry insist he undergoes a fresh set of tests before they consider his compensation claim.

Meanwhile, as the desperately ill 86-year-old waits to prove the extent of his illness, anger is boiling over at the scandalous wait facing him and thousands of other former pitmen.

In the 16 months since the court ruling that the Government must compensate former miners for their unnecessary suffering, 111,560 pitmen and widows have applied for compensation for lung disease, about 20,000 of them in the North-East

Yet, to date, only one man has received his full due. In the meantime, scores of miners are dying as they wait for justice.

Mr Cook, who walked miles to work at pits across County Durham and Wearside, can remember fainting from the sheer exhaustion of his labour.

Today, the life-long Labour Party supporter is a quiet, unassuming and always moderate man. "It's not really for me," he says, at his home in Houghton-le-Spring, Wearside, where he is forced to spend most of his time.

"It's for the younger ones and for the men for whom it might make life a bit easier. I would say it's too late for me now, but it might do a bit of good for some of the others."

Hardly able to breathe, it takes the former deputy shotfirer a long time to explain his feelings. He is like a man permanently drowning, constantly making desperate sucks of air for dear life.

"Breathing coal dust was a natural part of the job," he says.

"I wouldn't personally blame the management I had at the time, but it was proved in court that the miners should receive compensation.

"There is a principle at stake. I went down the mine at 14 because it was the only opportunity for us.

"I had no complaints and still haven't, but if the opportunities were different, and knowing what I know now, I would do something else - something that would not have left me like this.

"All I want now really is to be able to go out and have a chat with people, but it's just impossible."

Mr Cook's wife, Ellen, 73 - who constantly nurses her husband - and their son, Gerry, 50, are less restrained about the delays, which the DTI has put down to "naivety" in gauging the scale of the task.

In explanation, officials have said that all the paperwork tied up with the compensation claims could be stacked into a pile as high as Ben Nevis. But Mr Cook, junior, still feels "grim anger" at the situation.

"This means that all the examinations endured by him over many years regarding his breathing problems - providing medical evidence - will be ignored by the DTI's legal representatives in considering this claim. He must start again.

"I see this as unmitigated, cynical obstruction, and not, as they maintain, 'naivety'. I have no doubt that the DTI's objective is, where at all possible, not to pay.

"They must be instructed now to recognise and promptly meet their obligations to all those men with lives blighted, simply by having gone to work."

Reflecting on his father's fate, Mr Cook adds: "My father deserves much better than that."

He surely does deserve better for a working lifetime spent down the now long-gone pits of Eppleton, Houghton, Rainton Adventure, Lumley Sixth and Silksworth.

And he is far from the only who does.

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