Introduction

Coal has been mined in Britain for many centuries, but the most important period has been the last 200 years with the peak reaching 287 tons of coal mined in 1913 (Price 1971: 10). The regional economy in the East Midlands for many years was based on coal mining and there are records of early coal mining in the area as far back as the thirteenth century.

Nationally, both output and employment peaked in the years immediately before the First World War, but whereas in many other regions both indicators fell after 1918, in the East Midlands region numbers and production continued to rise in the 1920s. Productivity, through increased investment, also rose here and employment peaked in the 1950s. In the 1960s the East Midlands region was the most highly mechanised of all the National Coal Board's divisions. It produced 25 per cent of the nation's coal, employed about 85,000 men and women and cut 44.3 million tons of coal in its seventysix collieries. Productivity in the East Midlands was 40 per cent above the national average and performance was by far the best for the country. Even then, however, mines in the west of the region were closing, and many were already leaving the industry. The emphasis on increased productivity saw the closure of mostly older pits. The final contraction of the industry was rapid and by the 1980s around 70 per cent of mines had closed. When the last mine in the region, Thoresby, closed in July 2015 there had been a heavy impact on these local communities. Today, there are only a few small private coal mines which remain in production in various parts of Britain, along with opencast mining or ‘outcropping’ as it is known in parts of the East Midlands.

It has been said that: ‘The British coal industry was one of the mainsprings of the industrial revolution which, despite its undoubted harmful aspects, raised the standard of living of the British people to the high level we enjoy today’ (British Coal 1989: foreword). Coal thus became a crucial aspect of the British economy and was concentrated in several regions of the UK, of which the East Midlands was one.