‘Black Gold’

This year sees the 25^th anniversary of the start of the Miners’ Strike, which ultimately led to the demise of the coal mining industry as a major powerhouse in this country, the fall out of which coalfield communities are still dealing with to this day.

It was a battle between brains and brawn, money men and grafters. Margaret Thatcher and the Tory Government of the time were insistent that coal mining in this country was uneconomic and expensive and could be imported for less, and that deregulation of financial markets would make everyone rich.
They were wrong, on both counts. Maybe the coal industry was uneconomic at the time, but that was a short-term view, whilst financial freedom has simply led to polarised communities, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. On election in 1997, Tony Blair vowed to eradicate poverty, but this has proved nigh on impossible thanks to the untamed monster that Thatcher and her friends created, allowing financial experts to create more ingenious ways to make money. Maybe the pain that they are currently suffering is some form of social justice.

Margaret Thatcher and her Government may have had valid points, and ultimately an argument that could have been won. Deep down though, she believed that the strike was unjustified, and it presented her with an opportunity to flex her political muscles and hone her Iron Lady image. And that she did.

However, what has caused most damage and hurt was the virtual abandonment of coalfield communities that followed, communities that were raised on coal, that relied on the industry for their living. Told to “get on their bikes” to find new sources of employment, such communities became alienated from mainstream life, with the now recognised social ills of such public policy (drug and alcohol abuse, health issues, housing problems) spiralling out of control.

Various Government-sponsored initiatives were developed to help combat these problems, but the funds made available were mere breadcrumbs. Former colliery sites were transformed into business parks and new housing estates, and were trumpeted as the saviours of coalfield communities.
However, many former colliers have not found new work on the revamped pit sites, and very few mining families live in these new homes. Indeed, coalfield areas continually come out at the top of lists of the country’s most deprived communities. If there are any lessons to be learned from regeneration programmes in such places, it is that there must be more of a focus on the people that mined coal and their families, rather than the sites and buildings.

Remnants of the mining industry in North Staffordshire are fast disappearing. For example, Hem Heath colliery has been reclaimed and is now a massive business park and the home of Stoke City Football Club, Wolstanton Colliery is now a retail park that includes a 24 hour supermarket, and Norton Colliery is being transformed into a huge soulless housing estate.

However, the Potteries possesses possibly the most complete former colliery site in Europe in Chatterley Whitfield. Chatterley Whitfield was one of the most productive mines in the country and was the first colliery in Britain to achieve an annual output of 1million tons. The site is now a Scheduled Ancient Monument.
 

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the site was developed as a colliery, and by the mid-1800s there was an on-site engine house, wharf, carpenters shop, and brickworks.
In the 1850s, a prominent local businessman, Hugh Henshall Williamson, expanded production, and after initially working ‘footrails’, he subsequently sunk a number of shafts, including the Bellringer, the Ten Foot, and the Engine Pit.

Further expansion of the mine followed the opening of the Biddulph Valley Railway in 1860, and in 1865 a consortium of businessmen from Tunstall acquired the colliery and went on to form the Whitfield Colliery Company. In 1872, the managing director of the Chatterley Coal and Iron Company, C. J. Homer, bought the site, and went on to invest heavily in railway infrastructure.
However, this led to insolvency, and the company went into voluntary liquidation in 1878. Production continued through an administrator until 1890 when the business was acquired by a newly formed Manchester-based company, the North of England Trustee Debenture and Asset Corporation, who continued to own the site until the industry was nationalised.

David Proudlove     13 Apr 2008