BikinGlynn
Member
was a documentary on BBC4 last night - when coal was king. didnt see it myself
A positive history of coal?
- Thread starter PeteHall
- Start date
moorebooks
Active member
I have several Coal Mining Books available a number which have been mentioned here
Mike
pwhole
Well-known member
I started watching it, but got bored and came back on the computer - mostly about the music miners made rather than the mining.
I think the Ladybird book of Gender Dysphoria would fly off the shelves. Seriously though, the above book is good and most likely you'll get a copy on e-bay.
No doubt if Ladybird were still publishing there would be current titles like Vape Shop and The Nail Bar
"encouraged to show it at school" - don't go there! you'll get labelled as a climate change denier, seditious leftie and probably criminally insane. Reason and sensible discussion are on the 'back burner' whilst dogma stalks the land.
IMHO we could for about the next 20 years or so; after which even the 'younger end' would be getting too old. I fear the equipment situation is probably worse and we would probably have to import much of it (sadly, as with so much else). Thirty years on plus - I would think all the equipment, the expertise and very possibly the manual labour would have to be imported; if Brits won't turn out to 'scrat' for potatoes & broccoli I doubt they'll be queueing up to hew coal. Sad, once such a great industry, many many fine men.... gone. What a waste, what incompetence, what malice got us here?
I agree, another 'missing the mark' programme from the state broadcaster. I suspect many of the Southern intellectuals (and Tory politicians) don't know what coal was used for; they probably think coalmining was just something they told low-life thickoes (such as myself) to do to keep them occupied and out of mischief. And then, ungrateful as were, we deliberately piled it all up into big heaps to deface the landscape and block the views of the landed gentry - then we went off to play rugby. Rugby matches were fitted in between the bouts of industrial strife we caused.
Have I left anything out?
pwhole
Well-known member
Isn't part of the problem now though that the really good seams are just too deep underground to practically mine? At least with humans. Maltby was nearly a kilometre deep, and that was pushing it - the seams just keep going down and down toward the North Sea. If the Silkstone goes that far east, it must be 3km down by the coast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltby_Main_Colliery
Look North had some guy on years ago who claimed he could 'mine' the seams along the coast with remote flexible drills to just extract the useful fractions without significant subsidence or risk to humans, but dunno what happened to that.
Still not sure what happened to New Crofton near Wakefield. Hope Cement were going to some of their output, and Drax had bagged loads too. Both not far away by rail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltby_Main_Colliery
Look North had some guy on years ago who claimed he could 'mine' the seams along the coast with remote flexible drills to just extract the useful fractions without significant subsidence or risk to humans, but dunno what happened to that.
Still not sure what happened to New Crofton near Wakefield. Hope Cement were going to some of their output, and Drax had bagged loads too. Both not far away by rail.
Graigwen
Active member
Back in the 1990s I did an odd two year post-grad course at the University of Greenwich that converted me from a Tax Inspector into a physics teacher. Having worked hard and accumulated all the grades I needed, I could indulge myself on the final assignment about some aspect of Britain's future energy needs. Completely of the top of my head I wrote a fairly detailed proposal for robot mining of North Sea Coal, not just along the coast but many miles out under the sea. The whole thing from conception to completion took less than two hours, with a few references and a couple of maps and sections. This nonsense somehow got a pass mark from the University. I did acknowledge the technological problem of dealing with faults.
I have just seen this article from 2014.
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pwhole
Well-known member
I think that's the guy - it sounds very, very familiar. And yes, he was very confident it could be done with minimal impact (for the scale of the proposal), and unlike fracking it didn't disturb the bedrock (or coal), just sucked out the juice, as it were.
I did wonder what had happened, but oh dear:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35715389
I did wonder what had happened, but oh dear:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35715389
droid
Active member
Try YouTube
When Coal was King is on youtube (in sections), it was never intended to be a history of the job:
"Timeshift explores the lost world of coal mining and the extraordinarily rich social and cultural lives of those who worked in what was once Britain's most important industry. It's a story told through a largely forgotten film archive that movingly documents the final years of coal's heyday from the 1940s to the 1980s."
Dermot Roddy certainly has an interesting career path:
New Crofton filed as dormant in Feb 2021. last post on their website was 2018:
find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk
"Timeshift explores the lost world of coal mining and the extraordinarily rich social and cultural lives of those who worked in what was once Britain's most important industry. It's a story told through a largely forgotten film archive that movingly documents the final years of coal's heyday from the 1940s to the 1980s."
Dermot Roddy certainly has an interesting career path:
New Crofton filed as dormant in Feb 2021. last post on their website was 2018:
NEW CROFTON CO-OP COLLIERY LIMITED filing history - Find and update company information - GOV.UK
NEW CROFTON CO-OP COLLIERY LIMITED - Free company information from Companies House including registered office address, filing history, accounts, annual return, officers, charges, business activity
find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk
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Which just leaves Woodhouse Colliery (High Court hearing set for 24-26th October):
Whitehaven coal mine: Plan continues to divide opinion
Will returning mining to an economically-deprived area bring regeneration - or is it a backward move?
www.bbc.co.uk
Interesting forum on Crofton - the checkout girls already reckoned it had no chance:
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About the only adverts you see like that any more are for the military. Same target audience, same message.
When I was contemplating employment as a mining engineer, coal in the UK was patently dead as a dodo. So it was largely a choice of SA/Broken Hill or going rotary, with the latter a vastly more attractive option.
When I was contemplating employment as a mining engineer, coal in the UK was patently dead as a dodo. So it was largely a choice of SA/Broken Hill or going rotary, with the latter a vastly more attractive option.
PeteHall
Moderator
I recall reading recently that there wasn't a single mining engineering graduate from Calbourne last year. If that's true, the future looks pretty grim.
I'll never forgive that militant leftist Thatcher for shutting down the coal industry. Thatcher and her woke intellectuals Milton Freedman and Hayak and high on their theory of market economics.
If only we had a conservative government in now we could go back to the industry subsidised policies of the 1970s.
aricooperdavis
Moderator
I'm surprised that this data isn't publicly available, but I certainly can't find it. I've filed an FOI request with the University, and will update the thread when we have an answer.
