A Brief History of Mining in Eastwood

Artefact 4: Snap Tin | Article 1 of 4

Brinsley Headstocks

David Amos worked at Annesley Colliery from 1974 to 1998 and is now a mining historian. He has lived in Eastwood for over two decades. In the first of four essays he provides context to Eastwood’s mining history.

David Amos

Eastwood is situated on the exposed part of the Nottinghamshire coalfield where the coal seams are near to the surface. Locally it is called the ‘Outcrop’ and runs in a staggered line from Wollaton to Chesterfield along the Nottingham/Derbyshire borders. Coalmining has taken place around Eastwood for centuries, the earliest records dating from 1306 in a pit near Cossall.

The Carthusian monks at Beauvale Priory had a vested interest in coal. Mining was small scale until the advent of the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when demand for coal meant a rapid expansion of the industry. This is when the deeper coal seams, which dip eastwards, started being exploited.

Prominent in this expansion was the Barber-Walker Co. Limited who date from the late eighteenth century and remained as local coal-owners until nationalisation of the coal industry on 1st January 1947. A sense of how important mining was to local employment can be seen by the increase in 1851 of 19.8% of males aged ten and over to 43.2% by 1921 [i]. The output from the Barber-Walker collieries expanded from 150,000 tons a year in the 1850s to just over a million in the early 1890s, when Lawrence was a child [ii].

The growth of the Eastwood population led to improvements in the quality of housing with the thatched cottages of Hell Row replaced with superior mining homes, such as The Breach were Lawrence lived between 1887 – 1891. Barber-Walker Co. were the Carston, Waite and Co. in Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers and The Breach was immortalised as The Bottoms. The opening to the novel details these transformations:

“To accommodate the regiments of miners, Carston, Waite and Co. built the Squares, great quadrangles of dwellings on the hillside of Bestwood, and then, in the brook valley, on the site of Hell Row, they erected the Bottoms. The Bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners’ dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a block. This double row of dwellings sat at the foot of the rather sharp slope from Bestwood, and looked out, from the attic windows at least, on the slow climb of the valley towards Selby. [iii]”

The Barber-Walker HQ was initially Durban House from 1876 and later Eastwood Hall, ancestral home of the Walker family. The Barber’s lived at Lamb Close House which overlooks Moorgreen Reservoir.

During D.H Lawrence’s time Barber-Walker operated several collieries around Eastwood; Moorgreen, High-Park, Watnall, Selston (Underwood) and Brinsley. Later, in the early nineteenth century, their influence ventured into the South Yorkshire coalfield at Harworth and Bentley.

Brinsley was prominent in Lawrence’s work as it was there that his father and uncles worked. Brinsley was the venue for the colliery scenes in Sons and Lovers and the short story, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. Brinsley was also used as a filming location in the 1960 adaptation of Sons and Lovers. It is perhaps more than a coincidence that Sons and Lovers was published in 1913, as this was also the peak year of coal production when 287 million tons of coal was excavated [iv].

References

[i] Griffin, A.R and C.P. Griffin, ‘A Social and Economic History of Eastwood and the Nottinghamshire Mining Country’ in A D.H. Lawrence Reader, ed. Keith Sagar, (Manchester University Press, 1982), 129.

[ii] Griffin, A.R and C.P. Griffin, ‘A Social and Economic History of Eastwood and the Nottinghamshire Mining Country’ in A D.H. Lawrence Reader, ed. Keith Sagar, (Manchester University Press, 1982), 131.

[iii] Lawrence, D.H, Sons and Lovers, (Gerald Duckworth and Company, 1913), 1.

[iv] See East Midlands English written by Natalie Braber and Jonnie Robinson and published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2018