One of the best mining docu's I have seen. I took a mining degree and worked 5 years thereafter. I left the industry in 1972, not because I saw the future, but because of abusive senior managers who thought that the more they shouted and swore, the more coal could come up the shaft.
My father worked at Steetly mine, in fact i still have a safety lamp from there, i myself worked as a miner in Australia for, 44 years, great Video, Cheers from Australia.
I worked for British coal was fantastic place to work and some great men there . All changed after the strike. Left in 1989 then went contracting in a lot of the mines all over England
love the channel name :) and thank you for posting informative and interesting video's about history, I feel most passionately that everyone should have knowledge of the past.
The third and last film showed shots of Hem Heath Colliery (Stoke on Trent) and Wolstanton (Newcastle under Lyme) both North Staffordshire Coalfield, Wolstanton was one of the deepest mines in Europe when its shafts were sunk, there is a big ASDA store where the Wolstanton pit was, and as you go through the store entrance you are actually walking over the capped mine shafts!
I thought one of my local pits was the deepest Parsonage. "Parsonage's two shafts were sunk to the Arley mine at 999 yards (913 m) and the depth including the sump was 1,008 yards (922 m)*" Wikipedia. Couldn't find reliable figures on Hem Heath.
I worked at Wolstanton in the 1970s and the shaft was 1,139 yards [1265 yds including the sump] We also had the deepest coal workings in Europe at 1500 yards in the Banbury Seam .... hot as hell with virgin rock temperature of 150 degrees F [65 deg C] The deepest shaft in UK was and still is, the Boulby Potash mine which was deeper by just a few yards
back in the late 60s or early 70s the first nucleonic shearer was put on our face. myself and a bloke called george higgins were the test drivers. the electronics were battery powered and the battery had to be carried in and out every day. i think the face was 604s bass at west cannock 5s it made me a fortube in overtime bill bore
Cotgrave was using nucleonic sensors in the mid 1960's, I have a photo in a book somewhere of that set up. I'm not sure if any of the seven faces had it when I arrived there in 68.
One of the thickest seams of coal in England is in the blackcountry where I live known as the "Staffordshire thick" let's bring back coal mining to our country regardless of what people say we're still heavily dependant on it
There is a much thicker seam under the Vale of Belvoir and gets thicker as you go eastwards to Lincolnshire, there's not much borehole data much into Lincs.
@@TheGrimatic yeah, Thatcher got rid of a very rich resource which could have been made ecologically friendly with treatment plants, instead of having to rely on imported fuels.
@@TheGrimatic No, we're running them on biomass but there are several large coal plants still left. Crikey just looked it up on Wikipedia en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_coal-fired_power_stations_in_the_United_Kingdom it is listed as four. Hoping for a cold wind free winter to teach government some common sense. Shocked that Fiddlers ferry had closed in March 2020. Weighed many a hopper waggon of coal for there.
@@TheGrimatic We raped the North Sea of gas with the Dash For Gas for power stations. We are now net importers of natural gas. Short-sighted spite from the Blessed Margaret Hilda.
I worked down the pit starting at Gedling colliery in 1979. I did 15 years finishing at Annesley colliery. It was a fantastic time and I do miss it. We should still be coal mining now. It's such a waste of a plentiful energy source
West Cumbria mining have just had the final planning stage agreed by the council for a new pit to be sunk on the old haig colliery site it's called Woodhouse colliery 😀👍
@@andrewh5457 Yes but very selective facts. The pits closed in the 50s and 60s were small uneconomic pits. One third of pits were producing under 2,000 tonnes per week. Employment numbers decreased but coal production between 1950 and 1969 0nly dropped by just under 30%. The 1950 Plan For Coal envisaged upping production but other than the 1956 Suez crisis cheap oil appeared. Manual stoking might be becoming obsolete in the face of chain grates but oil plant was also cheaper to operate and could be more easily automated or at least require less manual control. It might have been post the 1972 miners strike but the 1974 Plan Of Coal looked to maintaining production in the 70s and increasing production in the 80s. Between 1971 and 73 Saudi crude prices had increased by 547% and it was apparent that the Middle East would use oil as a weapon to try to force western compliance in Arab Israeli conflicts. The need for a strategic fuel source was obvious. 1974 Plan selbycoalfield.home.blog/category/1974-plan-for-coal/ We had never imported coal till 1971and by 1983 our imports were still only 4 Million tonnes per year by 2006 that was 51 Million per year. (Bad joke, Immingham was developed for coal and steel exports.) That coupled with "The Dash For Gas" decimated the coal industry and raped our North Sea gas reserves to produce electricity. UK coal production figures www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption Electricity has only about 35% of the calorific value of the fuel used to produce it by the time it reaches your house. Little wonder electricity is over three times the price of gas. Alas, now we have to import gas the North Sea isn't sufficient for current demand. Also, with a desire for renewables that are only available when the sun shines and the winds blow we are very close at times to power outages. We had a lengthy power outage last year but that was just a taster. Lord help us if we get a cold spell at winter and no wind. We have coal burning power stations that are burning supposedly waste biomass but it's more efficient to fell forests, so we are paying massive subsidies to ship a low energy density fuel from America when US coal would actually be more environmentally friendly. The NCB wasn't just deep mines and opencast, we did massive technical development the Coal Research Establishment worked in conjunction with businesses to produce smokeless fires burning coal. CRE also developed fluidised bed combustion which as well as being very efficient solved the problem of UK coals chlorine content. If the bed was limestone chippings it absorbed the chlorine. Sulphur Dioxide and fly ash had been scrubbed for years. The very light Thermalite insulating blocks were made from power station fly ash. The only remaining issue is Carbon Dioxide which I believe is completely bogus as is man made global warming which became climate change when the warming didn't happen. The blessed Margaret Hilda in a fit of spite destroyed a national resource, but she also gave the economic boom of deregulation which then resulted in the crash of 2008. Privatise profits but make the losses public, great idea. She is not the only leader who made mistakes in an effort to equalize jobs we prevented manufacturing development in the Midlands in the 50s and 60s. Resulting in such shining examples of success as the Linwood car plant in Scotland. Oh for Midland manufacturing production now.
Remember who said send the rats back down there holes.and who called the miner the enemy within.and why did thatcher break the 30year secrets act still not exposed 😱
when i was deputy of grimethorpe we would win about 20,000 tons per shift, after 1972 this increased to 28,000 tons. and by the mid 1980s this had peaked to 34,000 tons.
There really WAS hundreds of years of coal left unmined (and it's still there) - it could have been made ecologically sound with treatment but Thatcher was determined to get rid of the miners.
I recall the many millions spent on new mines and prep plants, the equivalent of billions now. This was in the Barnsley Area in the late 70's and early80's, and it was to proffer and secure the long-term future of the coal industry in the area. A few years later there was the strike, then they closed many of them down without really using any of them. Expensive equipment oft just abandoned on coal faces. Someone all the way upstairs had decided upon alternative paths, and the NCB and NUM were not part of them. The amount of resources, equipment and the local communities completely written off was deeply alarming, as it showed no-one is safe from the ire of politicians and their rich business men, who most certainty do not have the well-being of the country's people and environment in mind, certainly not when they interfere with their own agendas.
Did he say an Anderton shearer? It was always Anderson...Anderson Boyes, then Anderson Mavor, then Anderson Strathclyde, and finally Anderson Longwall. They were always regarded as the Rolls Royce of shearers (Until they broke lol).
@@shibuya3185 and that's just what the right wing owned press wanted the sheep to believe - divide and conquer - so sad it happened and the country's working class has been an 'I'm alright Jack' society ever since. Very very sad.
@@shibuya3185 I'm certainly not playing the victim, but I saw it with my own eyes, there, did you? In fact don't bother answering, it's obvious you've been indoctrinated.
One of the best mining docu's I have seen. I took a mining degree and worked 5 years thereafter. I left the industry in 1972, not because I saw the future, but because of abusive senior managers who thought that the more they shouted and swore, the more coal could come up the shaft.
My father worked at Steetly mine, in fact i still have a safety lamp from there, i myself worked as a miner in Australia for, 44 years, great Video, Cheers from Australia.
My great grandad, grandad and uncles all worked @ Maltby great to see the old girl get a mention.
I worked for British coal was fantastic place to work and some great men there . All changed after the strike. Left in 1989 then went contracting in a lot of the mines all over England
Documentary is superb with nice voice. Congrats from India n coalminer.
Such a shame pits should be still open
Brilliant footage and great insight into the whole coal era.
11.00 "Canadian Dosco"? I worked with these machines and so far as I know they were totally British.
love the channel name :) and thank you for posting informative and interesting video's about history, I feel most passionately that everyone should have knowledge of the past.
The third and last film showed shots of Hem Heath Colliery (Stoke on Trent) and Wolstanton (Newcastle under Lyme) both North Staffordshire Coalfield, Wolstanton was one of the deepest mines in Europe when its shafts were sunk, there is a big ASDA store where the Wolstanton pit was, and as you go through the store entrance you are actually walking over the capped mine shafts!
I thought one of my local pits was the deepest Parsonage. "Parsonage's two shafts were sunk to the Arley mine at 999 yards (913 m) and the depth including the sump was 1,008 yards (922 m)*" Wikipedia. Couldn't find reliable figures on Hem Heath.
I worked at Wolstanton in the 1970s and the shaft was 1,139 yards [1265 yds including the sump] We also had the deepest coal workings in Europe at 1500 yards in the Banbury Seam .... hot as hell with virgin rock temperature of 150 degrees F [65 deg C]
The deepest shaft in UK was and still is, the Boulby Potash mine which was deeper by just a few yards
Hem Heath was 1062 yds but not sure if that is its total depth
Num did a land survey and we are actually standing on 800 year of coal....
Chattery Whitfield in stoke on trent was a beast of a mine for it's size, first mine to make 1million tons of usable coal in a year.
The hydraulic shields was one of the biggest revolution in coal mining.
back in the late 60s or early 70s the first nucleonic shearer was put on our face. myself and a bloke called george higgins were the test drivers. the electronics were battery powered and the battery had to be carried in and out every day. i think the face was 604s bass at west cannock 5s it made me a fortube in overtime
bill bore
Cotgrave was using nucleonic sensors in the mid 1960's, I have a photo in a book somewhere of that set up. I'm not sure if any of the seven faces had it when I arrived there in 68.
Great mining machinery recap in the middle of this film.
Fantastic film. What year was it made?
One of the thickest seams of coal in England is in the blackcountry where I live known as the "Staffordshire thick" let's bring back coal mining to our country regardless of what people say we're still heavily dependant on it
There is a much thicker seam under the Vale of Belvoir and gets thicker as you go eastwards to Lincolnshire, there's not much borehole data much into Lincs.
We aren't tho are we , we have 1 proper coal powerplant left , we rely much more natural gas
@@TheGrimatic yeah, Thatcher got rid of a very rich resource which could have been made ecologically friendly with treatment plants, instead of having to rely on imported fuels.
@@TheGrimatic No, we're running them on biomass but there are several large coal plants still left. Crikey just looked it up on Wikipedia en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_coal-fired_power_stations_in_the_United_Kingdom it is listed as four. Hoping for a cold wind free winter to teach government some common sense.
Shocked that Fiddlers ferry had closed in March 2020. Weighed many a hopper waggon of coal for there.
@@TheGrimatic We raped the North Sea of gas with the Dash For Gas for power stations. We are now net importers of natural gas. Short-sighted spite from the Blessed Margaret Hilda.
My grandad was a coal miner.
Died at 58. I never knew him.
I worked down the pit starting at Gedling colliery in 1979. I did 15 years finishing at Annesley colliery. It was a fantastic time and I do miss it. We should still be coal mining now. It's such a waste of a plentiful energy source
West Cumbria mining have just had the final planning stage agreed by the council for a new pit to be sunk on the old haig colliery site it's called Woodhouse colliery 😀👍
@@AngloSaxon449 Interesting news - just been reading about it. Thanks v much for that information.
@@ian3792 What on EARTH have you been reading? That doesn't even make sense man.
@@ian3792 the facts, Labour closed more pits than the tories, 10 years of Blair and not one new pit opened, New pit opens under a tory government.
@@andrewh5457 Yes but very selective facts. The pits closed in the 50s and 60s were small uneconomic pits. One third of pits were producing under 2,000 tonnes per week. Employment numbers decreased but coal production between 1950 and 1969 0nly dropped by just under 30%. The 1950 Plan For Coal envisaged upping production but other than the 1956 Suez crisis cheap oil appeared. Manual stoking might be becoming obsolete in the face of chain grates but oil plant was also cheaper to operate and could be more easily automated or at least require less manual control. It might have been post the 1972 miners strike but the 1974 Plan Of Coal looked to maintaining production in the 70s and increasing production in the 80s. Between 1971 and 73 Saudi crude prices had increased by 547% and it was apparent that the Middle East would use oil as a weapon to try to force western compliance in Arab Israeli conflicts. The need for a strategic fuel source was obvious. 1974 Plan selbycoalfield.home.blog/category/1974-plan-for-coal/
We had never imported coal till 1971and by 1983 our imports were still only 4 Million tonnes per year by 2006 that was 51 Million per year. (Bad joke, Immingham was developed for coal and steel exports.) That coupled with "The Dash For Gas" decimated the coal industry and raped our North Sea gas reserves to produce electricity.
UK coal production figures www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption
Electricity has only about 35% of the calorific value of the fuel used to produce it by the time it reaches your house. Little wonder electricity is over three times the price of gas. Alas, now we have to import gas the North Sea isn't sufficient for current demand. Also, with a desire for renewables that are only available when the sun shines and the winds blow we are very close at times to power outages. We had a lengthy power outage last year but that was just a taster. Lord help us if we get a cold spell at winter and no wind. We have coal burning power stations that are burning supposedly waste biomass but it's more efficient to fell forests, so we are paying massive subsidies to ship a low energy density fuel from America when US coal would actually be more environmentally friendly. The NCB wasn't just deep mines and opencast, we did massive technical development the Coal Research Establishment worked in conjunction with businesses to produce smokeless fires burning coal. CRE also developed fluidised bed combustion which as well as being very efficient solved the problem of UK coals chlorine content. If the bed was limestone chippings it absorbed the chlorine. Sulphur Dioxide and fly ash had been scrubbed for years. The very light Thermalite insulating blocks were made from power station fly ash.
The only remaining issue is Carbon Dioxide which I believe is completely bogus as is man made global warming which became climate change when the warming didn't happen.
The blessed Margaret Hilda in a fit of spite destroyed a national resource, but she also gave the economic boom of deregulation which then resulted in the crash of 2008. Privatise profits but make the losses public, great idea.
She is not the only leader who made mistakes in an effort to equalize jobs we prevented manufacturing development in the Midlands in the 50s and 60s. Resulting in such shining examples of success as the Linwood car plant in Scotland. Oh for Midland manufacturing production now.
He says horses are humanely "destroyed." What a word to use.
That's the correct word.
Albert Turner was my Great Uncle .. happy to be called a ‘ Sturdy Turner ‘
LOve how that Winder had a shirt and tie on
If only they knew back then
If the greens saw a film like [which is fanstic+the next one] at the start of coal mining they would be saying you can,t do that.
hats off to miners!!!
Remember who said send the rats back down there holes.and who called the miner the enemy within.and why did thatcher break the 30year secrets act still not exposed 😱
when i was deputy of grimethorpe we would win about 20,000 tons per shift, after 1972 this increased to 28,000 tons. and by the mid 1980s this had peaked to 34,000 tons.
Good video but . . . . 'Win our essential energy - not only for the next 40 years , but for the next 400 ? Someone was taking the piss ! ! !
There really WAS hundreds of years of coal left unmined (and it's still there) - it could have been made ecologically sound with treatment but Thatcher was determined to get rid of the miners.
Errr... did the commentator finish off by saying that coal would not be produced for the next 40 years, but the next 400 years? LMAO.😂😂😂
I recall the many millions spent on new mines and prep plants, the equivalent of billions now. This was in the Barnsley Area in the late 70's and early80's, and it was to proffer and secure the long-term future of the coal industry in the area. A few years later there was the strike, then they closed many of them down without really using any of them. Expensive equipment oft just abandoned on coal faces. Someone all the way upstairs had decided upon alternative paths, and the NCB and NUM were not part of them. The amount of resources, equipment and the local communities completely written off was deeply alarming, as it showed no-one is safe from the ire of politicians and their rich business men, who most certainty do not have the well-being of the country's people and environment in mind, certainly not when they interfere with their own agendas.
can remember our albert and george with ponies earley 60s at woolley
I worked briefly at Woolley, plenty of good lads.
I used to work at Brodsworth and Kellingley
Did he say an Anderton shearer? It was always Anderson...Anderson Boyes, then Anderson Mavor, then Anderson Strathclyde, and finally Anderson Longwall. They were always regarded as the Rolls Royce of shearers (Until they broke lol).
fantastic footage - where did you find this? would love the raw footage. Are you able to help at all?
Not sure Adam. Feel free to use
did you find it all online? or are these your raw tapes? i want to use it for TV but cannot without the permission of the owner of the material.
See credit Adam. Deffo not ours nor do we have raw footage sorry
God bless you
A massive loss to the country now there r know more mines
Unfortunately the miners still got shafted BIG STYLE
Nobody shafted the miners. they shafted themselves with their greed, strikes and violence against those wanting to work.
@@shibuya3185 and that's just what the right wing owned press wanted the sheep to believe - divide and conquer - so sad it happened and the country's working class has been an 'I'm alright Jack' society ever since. Very very sad.
@@AliceHatter : Stop playing the victim. Life is what YOU make of it.
@@shibuya3185 I'm certainly not playing the victim, but I saw it with my own eyes, there, did you? In fact don't bother answering, it's obvious you've been indoctrinated.
@@AliceHatter : Of course you're playing the victim by blaming "the right wing" for your problems. Get off your arse and do something for yourself.
Me dad worked on the face. In stoke. Hemheath. Never bin proader. Xx
which one I was undermanager in the Winghay, and after Johny Burton in Yard Ragman Hardmine
Name of track at 15:43?
eh ............ the ending is a prophet
01:40 - Woodhead Tunnel?
that's what I thought
The narrator speaks just like we did on't face
Why were the ponies destroyed why couldn't they live their life in peace
Most of them did. They were very well looked after.