Wideopen Colliery, Northumberland, viewed here in 1844 by Thomas Hair. Until the nineteenth century the northeast was the dominant region of coal production.
‘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.
Chatterley Whitfield, near Stoke-on-Trent, is the most extensive of the surviving collieries in Britain, although coal was last brought to the surface here in 1976.
The dangers of coal mining have cast a shadow over the history of the coalfields. The worst British peacetime disasters have happened in the coal industry. Disasters can be measured in numbers, on which basis the worst event occurred in 1913 when 439 men and boys from the Universal Steam Colliery at Senghenydd, in South Wales, were killed by an underground explosion. Or it can be measured on a scale of unimaginable horror, in which case nothing could eclipse the disaster at Aberfan near Merthyr Tydfil in 1966, when 144 people, 116 of them school children, perished under a collapsed colliery tip. In the face of these tragedies the coalfields produced communities with a distinct politics and culture, perhaps best expressed now in the still-flourishing Durham Miners’ Gala, who were proud of their contribution to Britain’s economic wellbeing.
