When king coal reigned in our region
The industrial landscape of Yorkshire was long dominated by coal, as these rare pictures demonstrate. David Behrens takes a look.
IT WAS a landscape of industrial Yorkshire that did not change for a century, until suddenly it was no longer there.
The winding gears speared the skyline like pins in a giant cushion; ivory towers for their owners, whose workers toiled below ground to produce the fuel that kept the nation going.
The pictures here are testament to an era when large swathes of the county breathed coal – and the extent to which the industry touched every aspect of life is self-evident. In Castleford, where many of the rugby league team were also miners, a photographer witnessed them using the coal tubs to practice their scrumwork for the 1935 Challenge Cup final.
It had been 20 years earlier that production in Britain had peaked, with an output of some 287m tonnes. But its roots went back much further.
Coal had been a way of life – and death – since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it was not only men but also children who were put to work. Not all of them made it back to the surface.
At Norcroft, near Wakefield, in 1821, 10 colliers died – six of them children and three just eight years old – when the chain gave way on the bucket that was hauling them up. Some 17 years later, at nearby Huskar, 26 children, girls and boys from age seven, died when heavy rain disabled the winding engine.
Lessons were learned eventually, but as recently as the Second World War, older children – the conscripted Bevin Boys named after the Minister of Labour – were put to work manning the seams.
Around 160 pits were still in production in their day. But by 1984, two-thirds were gone and the rest soon went the same way.
In some villages in the West Riding, only the winding gear remained, awaiting the dismantlers. They had become company towns with no company.