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    Coal Mining in Britain
    Coal Mining in Britain
    Coal Mining in Britain
    Ebook88 pages52 minutes

    Coal Mining in Britain

    By Richard Hayman

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    About this ebook

    An illustrated history of Britain's coal mines and the lives of the miners who worked in them.

    Coal heated the homes, fuelled the furnaces and powered the engines of the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the coalfields – distinct landscapes of colliery winding frames, slag heaps and mining villages – made up Britain's industrial heartlands.

    Coal was known as 'black gold' but it was only brought to the surface with skill and at considerable risk, with flooding, rock falls and gas explosions a constant danger. Coal miners became a recognised force in British political life, forming a vociferous and often militant lobby for better working conditions and a decent standard of living.

    This beautifully illustrated guide to Britain's industrial heritage covers not just the mines, but the lives of the workers away from the pits, with a focus on the cultural and religious life of mining communities.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 25, 2016
    ISBN9781784421229
    Coal Mining in Britain
    Author

    Richard Hayman

    Richard Hayman is an archaeologist and architectural historian who writes on the history of the British landscape. His other books include Riddles in Stone: Myths, Archaeology and the Ancient Britons.

    Read more from Richard Hayman

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      Book preview

      Coal Mining in Britain - Richard Hayman

      CONTENTS

      BLACK GOLD

      BELL PITS AND HORSE WHIMS

      DEEP MINING

      GOING UNDERGROUND

      THE PIT VILLAGE

      PLACES TO VISIT

      FURTHER READING

      The engine house and pit-head buildings at the former Barnsley Main Colliery in South Yorkshire, which closed in 1991, are among the few colliery buildings to escape the rapid clearance of coal-industry sites in the late twentieth century.

      BLACK GOLD

      ‘The material source of the energy of the country – the universal aid – the factor in everything we do’. That was how the Victorian economist W. Stanley Jevons described the coal industry in 1865. Coal had been mined for centuries but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the coalfields became Britain’s industrial heartlands. Britain became the first nation to base its economic civilisation on mineral fuel and rose to be the world’s largest economy. How this came about is quite simple. Coal became the fuel of the iron industry, by far the most important of the metals trades in Britain. In turn the iron industry gave us fuel-hungry steam engines, and the railways and ships by which coal could be distributed cheaply at home and abroad.

      The decline of the coal industry in the second half of the twentieth century was rapid. When it was formed in 1947 the National Coal Board (NCB) was responsible for over 1,500 collieries. Coal was central to the vision of a bright future for Britain and its industry, but it was soon eclipsed by oil and very quickly it has been consigned to the past, with a reputation as a dirty fuel and a significant contributor to global climate change.

      Clearance of collieries and landscaping of old spoil tips has removed the industry from its former dominant presence in the landscape, so that in parts of the coalfields the only reminders of the former industry are subtle ones such as old miners’ institutes or the sterile landscape of re-graded spoil tips. Other aspects of coal-mining life have disappeared completely. The special language of the ‘goaf’ (the space where coal had been cut from), the ‘rolley-way’ (or underground tramway) and the ‘dib-hole’ (the sump for collecting water at the bottom of a shaft) no longer means anything. The skills of the face workers – known mainly as hewers, but as haggers in Cumberland, pikemen in Shropshire and getters in Yorkshire – have also vanished, a reminder that industrial decline brings with it cultural as well as economic losses.

      Wideopen Colliery, Northumberland, viewed here in 1844 by Thomas Hair. Until the nineteenth century the northeast was the dominant region of coal production.

      Nevertheless, there is still a rich heritage of coal mining in Britain, albeit one that engenders mixed feelings. It produced a skilled workforce vital to the nation’s interest, but in the process miners endured hard times and appalling sufferings. Outside of the coalfields the miner has always been something of a mythical figure, the consequence of which is that society has often viewed him (occasionally her) unsympathetically. In modern times this has been partly a political response, since coal miners became a recognised force in the nation’s political life, forming a vociferous and often militant lobby for better working conditions and a decent standard of living. But miners have always seemed like a community apart, a fact determined by the nature of the work and by the geographical locations in which the industry was confined.

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