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?

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.