History

Bolsover Colliery

History / /

In this post we present a short history of Bolsover Colliery – finally closed in 1993. It is another in the series using information from our former England’s Past For Everyone website.

Bolsover Colliery in 1989 – the year of its centenary. (From the centenary history of the mine produced in 1989).

Introduction

The modern history of coalmining in the district began with the sinking of Langwith colliery, just inside Scarcliffe parish, to the Top Hard seam in 1872–9, which led to the building of a new village at Whaley Thorns, close to the eastern boundary of Bolsover parish.

The surface layout at Bolsover Colliery in 1920 from the Ordnance Survey 1:2500 map. The road to centre left comes from Chesterfield – that to the right continues uphill toward Bolsover town centre.

Bolsover beginnings

John Plowright Houfton (1857-1929), general manager of the Bolsover Colliery Company.

For Bolsover itself a more important date was 1888, when Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge (1845–1911), previously a manager of collieries in the Sheffield area, acquired leases of the coal beneath the Portland estate at Creswell (in Elmton) and Bolsover. He proceeded to promote the Bolsover Colliery Co. Ltd, with J.P. Houfton as general manager. The company’s capital was fully subscribed by the beginning of 1890 and sinking began at Bolsover in June that year. The Top Hard coal was struck in September 1891 at a depth of 365 yards. A second colliery at Creswell was sunk in 1894–6 and in 1905 work began on a pit at Crown Farm in Mansfield Woodhouse (Notts.).

Bolsover colliery stood to the north of Chesterfield Road immediately east of the river Doe Lea, although spoil tips and an associated brickworks lay to the south of the main road. Further south again the company developed a model village, complete with schools, an institute and a co-operative store, built between 1891 and 1895, which became known as New Bolsover, and later executed a larger scheme of the same sort at Creswell.

By 1895 output at Bolsover colliery had reached 1,800 tons a day and the pit was employing about 850 men. In 1905 Bolsover was raising 2,850 tons of coal a day and the following year exported 300,000 tons from the pit.

The interwar period and beyond

By 1923 the Bolsover Company was producing 11,000 tons of coal a day. At Bolsover itself the extension of workings to the Waterloo and Deep Hard seams in the late 1920s, as well as the opening of the Coalite works next to the colliery in 1936, were seen as developments that would lengthen the life of the pit and provide for the `prosperity and contentment’ of the community for many years to come.

Unlike other concerns in the Derbyshire coalfield, the Bolsover Company remained generally profitable during the inter-war period and was able to modernise its older collieries as well as developing new ones in north Nottinghamshire. At Bolsover hand getting and haulage by ponies had given way to mechanised cutting and the use of electrically powered rope haulages by the early 1930s. On the surface pithead baths were opened in 1935. An aerial ropeway to carry spoil from the pithead to tips south of Chesterfield Road was installed in 1943.

In 1944 the company demonstrated a Meco-Moore power cutter-loader at Clipstone; after vesting, the Gloster Getter, developed by W.V. Sheppard, formerly of the Bolsover Company, almost doubled output per man-shift and made possible the development of continuous longwall mining at Bolsover. The technique pioneered at the colliery became known as the `Bolsover System’ and considerably reduced the cost of producing coal.

This staged image was taken from a 1952 safety booklet issued by the Bolsover area of the NCB. It might well have been taken at Bolsover. It shows a group of miners having taken retreat to safely during shot-firing – when explosives would be used to blast into a coal seam.

Bolsover colliery remained an important part of the coal industry in north Derbyshire for half a century after nationalisation, although by the mid 1950s, when the pit was producing 10,000 tons a week and employed 1,000 men, the more profitable and easily accessible seams had long been worked out. The headgear and winding engine at the original (No 1) shaft were removed in 1974; the winding engine at No. 2 shaft had been replaced by an electric winder in 1968; and in 1976 skip-winding was introduced at No. 3 shaft.

In the late 1970s the colliery still employed between 900 and 1,000 men, who in 1978 were said to be breaking all previous output records and picking up large bonuses. In this period half of the output of the colliery went to power stations, 30 per cent to carbonisation plants, and the rest to other industrial and domestic markets.

Decline and closure

A decline set in after the dispute of 1984–5: in 1987, when output was 650,000 tonnes, the number of employees had dropped to 750. Three years later only 600 men, including 150 contractors, were working at Bolsover. In August 1992 British Coal announced that more than 450 miners would lose their jobs the following spring when Bolsover was due to close. Ironically, early in 1993, the year in which coal was last turned at Bolsover, the remaining 350 men at Bolsover were said to be producing coal very cheaply and once again breaking output records.

After Bolsover colliery closed some of the surface buildings were adapted to create an industrial estate for small businesses.

In 1947 the former headquarters of the Bolsover Colliery Company, built on higher ground to the east of the pit became the NCB area office. The premises remained in use for this purpose until the contraction of British Coal in the late 1980s, when the former North Derbyshire Area was absorbed into a Midland Area with headquarters at Leicester. After the offices closed this site was also converted into units for small businesses.

Once one of the centres of the coal industry – this 1952 extract from a safety publication shows the collieries of then East Midlands Division, number 1 area, with its HQ at Bolsover.

Sources used in this account are fully referenced in our Derbyshire VCH Volume III Bolsover and Adjacent Parishes. Additionally we have used a National Coal Board safety publication produced in 1952. We would especially like to credit Bernard Haigh and his centenary history of the Bolsover Colliery, published by British Coal in 1989.

Bolsover Colliery Read More »

Coalite, Bolsover

History / /

In this post there is information about the former Coalite smokeless fuel works at Bolsover. The works are now largely disappeared – they have been built on by warehousing and industrial units. This is the first in an occasional series of posts (albeit updated) which originally appeared on our now defunct England’s Past for Everyone website.

Beginnings

In 1936 the Derbyshire Coalite Company Ltd, a subsidiary of Low Temperature Carbonisation Ltd, decided to erect a plant comprising eight batteries of retorts to make Coalite (an early form of smokeless fuel) on a site to the west of Bolsover colliery. The Bolsover company agreed to supply coal to the plant and was given the right to nominate two additional directors to the Coalite board. Two years later an associated company, the British Diesel Oil & Petrol Co. Ltd, opened an extensive chemical works on an adjacent site to refine the liquid products arising from the treatment of coal by the Coalite process.

Production at the plant began in November 1936 and the site was officially opened by the duke of Kent the following April. It was then using 500 tons of coal a day from Bolsover colliery, thus securing the jobs of 400 miners; 200 men were employed in the carbonisation plant and about 120 on the by-products side.

This 1970s map shows the extent of the works at this time. To the top side of the B6418 (Buttermilk Lane) is the chemicals complex. Below this, with the network of railway lines into it for import of coals and export of coke, is the carbonisation plant. (Ordnance Survey Sheet SK 47/57 – Revised: 1958 to 1971, Published: 1973. Courtesy National Library of Scotland). For a photographic overview of the operation visit the excellent Britain From Above website – you might like to start with the image here.

Full orders

In 1938 it was reported that both the government and local authorities had placed large orders for Coalite, and that the Bolsover plant was working at full capacity. A research laboratory had been opened at the works. In its early years the Bolsover plant also played a leading part in attempts to manufacture petrol and diesel road fuel and oil from coal: the refinery operated by the British Diesel Oil & Petrol Company was in full production in 1939 and working at maximum capacity the following year. The Coalite and by-products plant at Bolsover was then valued at £264,000 and the refinery at £180,000.

Low Temperature Carbonisation’s activities did not fall within the scope of the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act of 1946, as the minister of fuel and power, Emanuel Shinwell, made clear when he visited the Bolsover plant in May that year. In 1948, however, the holding company was renamed Coalite & Chemical Products Ltd, which continued to operate the Bolsover site through two subsidiaries, Derbyshire Coalite Co. Ltd, responsible for the smokeless fuel plant, and the British Diesel Oil & Petrol Co. Ltd, which ran the distillation plant, refinery and chemical works. In 1952 the registered office for all three companies was moved from London to Bolsover.

A 1951 advertisement for Coalite.

The company prospered during the economic growth of the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1953 Coalite ceased to be rationed, although supplies of coal were disrupted that year because of the failure of the Deep Hard seam at Bolsover. In 1956 it was reported that the Coalite plant would shortly have 19 batteries of retorts in use and that there had been a corresponding extension to the chemical plant. When the Clean Air Act came into force the same year Coalite was made an `authorised fuel’ that could be burnt in domestic grates.

Change

In 1960–1 a new research centre for the company’s chemical and chemical engineering activities was built at Bolsover and in 1966 a new wing was added to the head office to house a computer. In addition to the Bolsover plant, where the refinery business was now being run by Coalite Oils & Chemical Ltd, the company was making Coalite at Askern, near Doncaster (Yorks.). In 1972 Coalite employed over 1,200 men in Bolsover.

In 1978 Coalite & Chemical Products was absorbed into Charrrington Industrial Holdings Ltd, whose activities were said to lie mainly in the distribution of solid and liquid fuels, although the group also owned the manufacturers of Dormobile camper vans and the Falklands Islands Company. Three years later what was now the Coalite Group PLC, chaired by Eric Varley, the former Labour Cabinet minister and NUM-sponsored MP for Chesterfield, reorganised its two operating companies into one, Coalite Fuels & Chemical Ltd, which took over the Coalite plants at Bolsover, Askern and Grimethorpe, and the refinery at Bolsover. The Askern plant was closed in 1986. Three years later Varley led an unsuccessful campaign against the takeover of Coalite by the Anglo-United group.

The chemical plant around the mid 1980s.

Run-down

Under Anglo-United the Bolsover plant began to contract. In 1991 26 jobs out of a total of 388 at the site were lost, the company pointing to a recession in the chemicals industry and in particular the reduced demand for agrochemicals. Anglo-United also sold the Falkland Islands Company that year, to provide funds for its mainstream activities in solid fuel manufacture, fuel distribution and chemicals.

Health and environmental issues

By the 1990s the owners of the Bolsover site were operating in a much more hostile environmental climate than a generation earlier. As early as 1973 the company’s doctor, a Bolsover GP, had defended conditions at the plant, claiming that cases of chloracne among workers and their families arising from the absorption of dioxins were due to men `not availing themselves of the high-grade personal hygiene facilities at the works’. In 1981 a county council tribunal investigating the long-term effects of an explosion at Bolsover in 1968 found dioxins in opencast coal and clay workings in various places in north-east Derbyshire, although once again the company’s doctor claimed that exposure to dioxins among workers at the plant had no significant long-term effect on their health, apart from persisting minor chloracne in some cases. An article in a trade magazine the same year pointed out that the 1968 explosion had killed one man and left 79 others with severe chloracne. It also drew attention to buried dioxins at Carr Vale and Stretton, where a former clay pit was owned by Cambro Waste Products, one of whose directors was then chairman of Coalite.

Although a report commissioned by the district council in 1989 concluded that most pollution in Bolsover was caused by domestic fireplaces, and another two years later by HM Inspectorate of Pollution was inconclusive, by 1992 the county council was demanding an inquiry into the plant and the National Rivers Authority was taking the company to the Crown Court over dioxin levels in the river Doe Lea near the works said to be 1,000 times higher than normal. MAFF was also concerned at dioxin levels in milk, eggs, meat and herbage around Bolsover, and in 1992 the National Union of Farmers planned to sue Coalite on behalf of three of its members who had been banned from selling their produce for eighteen months after their land had been found to be contaminated.

In 1993 the company opened a new incinerator at Bolsover but continued to be pursued by both Greenpeace and HMIP. In 1995–6 Coalite Chemicals Ltd pleaded guilty to charges brought by the Inspectorate and were fined £150,000 with £300,000 costs; the judge commented that he had taken into account the fact that the company had incurred a great deal of odium locally, probably out of all proportion to the actual risks created by the events leading to the prosecution.

Letter heading from the mid 1980s, incorporating the once-familiar Coalite cross. During this period the group comprised a surprisingly diverse portfolio including the Falkland Islands Company.

Final phase

The long struggle between environmental concerns and a wish to retain industrial jobs in a district from which most had disappeared entered its final phase after the turn of the century.

In January 2000 Coalite Smokeless Fuels (the trading name of Coalite Products Ltd) announced the loss of 62 manual and eight office jobs from a workforce of 350, blaming the mild winter and investment in new plant. A year later the Environment Agency issued an enforcement notice against the company after several hundred gallons of coal oil were released onto neighbouring land. When the plant changed hands in 2002 the new owners announced a reduction in the output of solid fuel and investment in oil production and a tyre-recycling plant. The company went into administration in 2003, the administrators blaming `unresolved difficulties’ with the Environment Agency over the recycling plant, despite the investment of over £4 million since the change in ownership, and pointing out that nearly 200 jobs were at risk. Although the county council approved plans to extend the tyre recycling operation and oil production the administrators failed to find a buyer and in June 2003 announced the loss of a further 70 jobs at the chemical plant in addition to the 82 lost from the smokeless fuel plant two months earlier.

Coalite Products Ltd appointed receivers in April 2004, who in September that year, having also failed to find a buyer for the company, closed the Bolsover site.

Regeneration

After remaining partially derelict the coking and chemical site has been decontaminated and regenerated, particularly over the last few years. During this work the once-familiar coal-tar ‘Coalite’ smell appeared again, perhaps for one last time. At one stage housing was suggested for part of the site, but since the early 2020s most of it is being progressively built on for industrial and warehousing use, after remnants of the former activity were cleared. Both the chemical and coking plant site is now being marketed as ‘Horizon 29‘.

What it was once all about – the carbonisation of coal into the work’s top selling product. A mid 1980s sales leaflet.

Sources used in this account (except that in the last section) are fully referenced in our Derbyshire VCH Volume III Bolsover and Adjacent Parishes.

Coalite, Bolsover Read More »