Gedling Colliery : Twenty Five Years On

Back in 2011 I posted about my childhood links to Gedling Colliery, visit that post here.

And today is the twenty fifth anniversary of the pits closure, you can read about it on the BBC here.

The point of interest being, the paragraph:

"Although production ended in 1991, Gedling has been identified as one of three mines in the early 1980s that could have had a 'long term' future".

They mention Calverton & Corgrave along with Gedling as being in that field.  And I remember seeing men crying when it closed, and my own father telling me there were at least 90 to 100 years more coal down there ripe for the picking, cleaner burning, locally produced coal of higher quality.

Because that is the difference, we import vast amounts of coal; the last time I looked mostly from Ukraine; and everyone I've ever spoken to about it has described it as a dirty burning sludge laden coal.  It was formed differently, coal here was formed from flora in pre-history and burned cleanly, making carbon collection from the burning easier, and toxins like sulphur a lot less prevalent in fume content.

Coal is of course a fossil fuel, and needs temperament when using it, but British Coal was strictly speaking the better of possible environmental impact, and would have been easier to scrub the waste gases clean for than the junk being brought in, and still being brought in, cheaply from overseas.

All three of the mines mentioned are now gone, ALL the mines are in fact gone, but the coal is sitting there.

My only question for future generations being, if they need fossil fuels still in the future, will they open up and go back down for that sitting, high quality coal, will the mines and the learning curve for all that industrial knowledge need to be covered again at huge, huge cost, when it was just there, ripe for the taking when I was a boy?

When I were a lad (Mining Kid Rebuttal)

This Bernard Hare guy annoys me, not because he's speaking any untruth,  no, he's annoying me because he's the one speaking at all, he takes a very Yorkshire centric view of mining, and I don't want that to spread too far, yes mining was big in Yorkshire, but the Nottinghamshire coal field was the biggest, people should remember that.  And kids, such as myself, came to the same conclusion he does, but without the need for any dramatic life lesson.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32961309

My father was a miner, and later Coal Preparation Plant Foreman, I saw the miners strikes, I saw the hard shifts and the wage quickly spent on mortgage, rates and bringing up two lads...

I saw it... I lived it... I grew up on an estate, which at the time was rough and ready, but at least friendly, an estate famous now for the number of shootings which occur on it, two murders having happened on the very street I grew up on, one in a garden I myself have stood in and played.

The down fall of that society was written on the walls in the late 1980's, along with the rest of this nations heavy industry of any note, Coal, Gas, Steel, Telecomms... All used to be "British", now they're only British in name, if at all...

So I had myself an education, I read, and tried to write and festered over papers and hoarded stationary as an ends to a means, as an attempt to keep myself on the upper side of those papers, rather than the darker side of a coal face, not that I had the option, as by the time I came to working age all the jobs were either low paid and menial, or they had no career progression path.

So, here I sit, it's been over twenty years since the pit my Father worked at shut, I've been working all that time, and I've had this same job I work now for twelve... I'm a computer programmer...

And I made damn sure I was, rather than end up in the social economic bracket this guy seems to have fallen out of through the angelic guidance of his father, rather than his own realisation.

This is what this tale tells me, not of his fathers lesson, but that a now educated man who can apply himself and must have some sort of empathy, even as a child needed leading by the nose, that lack of insight by that child... "Why does my Dad go off on one after he's had a few drinks"... You didn't ever think it was to unwind or even to try and relate to his own kids?  So you had something in common, even if it was his playing a silly, outrageous, game.

At ten, I was aware of the lack of money, the struggle to heat the house, the lack of food, Mum skipping a meal or two, Christmas being a single gift of utmost practical requirement (a bottle of Matey Bubble bath) and nothing more.

It just strikes me reading it, that us Nottinghamshire coal kids, of which there were more, more pits and more kids; we had an insight into a better life we wanted sooner... Your child ambitions were set at your pavement level and never looked higher, before your Dad's dramatic psychological shoving out the groove.

Hogwash - Coal & Oil to "Run Out"

No beating around the busy, what utter rubbish, I just read this from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27435624

That "UK's oil, coal and gas' to be 'gone in five years', what utter rubbish, perhaps the current pits left open will run out of coal, but the myriad of mines closed in the 80's and 90's lots still had coal to extract, the colliery my father worked at, Gedling, in Nottinghamshire.

It closed, and I remember at the time it was a stated fact "There are 100 or more years of coal down there", I don't doubt the UK would chew through 100 years of coal from that one pit in 5 years, but add all the closed mines together, and there's decades if not millennia of coal down there.

And here in Britain our mines never went to extreme depth, they get down to the hundreds of meters sure, but they don't go down to 1km+ very often.  And we have to look to the history here, coal is just fallen tree's and brassica yes, its compressed and over the years the minerals removed the carbon remaining.  But coal comes from a specific period in history when there were no evolved bacteria which could break down wood.

So as tree's fell they lay layer upon layer to build up.

In the interceding few million of millions of years bacteria have evolved which do break down wood and fibrous plant material, hence why coal is deep, because the conditions to form it stopped occurring.  So higher in the Strata you get gas and oil from old sea beds, but no coal from old forests.

Now, if we go deeper, if we open up the mines Britain is sitting pretty, we could also look at extreme deep mineral recovery off of our seabed and the continental shelf out into the Atlantic, France, Belgium & Holland may even be amenable to collaborating in better exploring the North Sea.

The challenge is to open up those mines again though, and retrieve those minerals, and crucially find a way to use them cleanly, such as sulphur & carbon scrubbers on the outlets of power stations (a technology I still hear of as being "new" yet I was taut all about it in GCSE Chemistry - as if it were the future - in 1991).

So, people should word their reports better, there's not 5 years left, there's 5 years of what we're accessing left, we could access more, we could have hundreds of years of fuel, we just have to invest in it, we just have to get at it... And whilst ever its cheaper to drive the stuff on lorries from Russia, or haul it on barges over the oceans that investment will never happen.

Gedling Colliery (14th June 1986)

So, what were you doing on the 14th June 1986?  Don't you know?  Well I was eight years old and I was going to work with my Dad... and my Mum... and my little brother... weird...No, not really it was an open day at the Colliery my Dad worked at.  He was a Coal Prep plant Foreman.

I remember a few things about the day, I remember my Dad being quite excited to show us around his work place, somewhere that you'd not normally ever be allowed to go, and I also remember the sheer magnitude of the noise of the machinery giving me a really splitting headache and ending up in the infirmary... but I also remember in the infirmary there was one of the first proper database driven "Expert Systems", it was used to diagnose simple aliments in a series of questions to help the on staff first aiders sort out problems... Probably not the lesson my Dad wanted to teach me, but I was fascinated with information and technology even then...

But, that colliery is long since gone, lost to the destruction of the mining industry and the site itself is flattened, the shafts filled in, possibly even capped, and the area is slowly (very slowly) being regenerated and they are possibly building houses on the site soon.  A sad loss, as my Dad did tell me once there were over 100 years worth of coal still down below that mine (and there are a lot of mines in Britain)... so why now I'm all grown up are we paying through the nose for electricity generated with (mostly) imported coal beggars belief.

Anyway, on that open day my brother and I received a booklet, with a little bit of history and some current information about the colliery, as well as a plan of the site.  During my recent decorating I spotted them still tucked inside a book... from 1986 to now, they had been scribbled on a little, they had a sticker or two on them, they had been... moved from my parents home, to my university digs, to a flat I had in Warwickshire, to a house I rented in Long Eaton and finally to my new home here in Brinsley (another ex-mining village)... so with two copies I've been able to scan them in, clean up the childish scribbles, edit off some of the mess and sticky finger prints we left on them as kids and I've got them for you all to enjoy here.

Please click on the images to enlarge them, and be patient these are high resolution scans.  Some of the pictures given on the pamphlet (all the pictures actually) are printed as grey dots (news paper style) so they scanned in as grey scale, if they look really grainy or granular then just zoom in/out the image (with most internet browsers you can do this with CTRL and + or CTRL and - respectively) to get the right "height" and you'll see the nice images.

The images are indeed nice, they show workings from far below Gedling, workings which will probably never be seen by a human again... least not until we've paid for all the foreign coal and some bright spark realises as all the lights go out, we can still power our power stations from the reserves below our feet.  But until then, lets pay a pretty penny for my running this computer to show you these pictures.

If you right click you can open the image in a new browser, new tab or download it...

For posterity.