National story - New Areas for Old - 1

Series

Series Name

Mining Review 19th Year

Issue

Issue No.

12

Date Released

Aug 1966

Stories in this Issue:

1. 1National story - New Areas for Old - 1
2. 2Nottinghamshire - New Warmth
3. 3Country Durham - Two-Way Belt
4. 4Nottinghamshire - Flying Spark

Story

Story No. within this Issue

1 / 4

Summary

NoS synopsis: Re-organisation of Britain’s coalfields
NCB Commentary - At Vesting DAy in 1947, the National Coal Board took over around 1000 collieries. Nobody had ever before run a mining industry so large and so scattered.
To make it manageable, the 1000 collieries were grouped into about 50 Areas.
And the 50 Areas were themselves grouped into 8 Divisions - 9, if you count the 4-pit Kent coalfield, small and out on a limb by itself.
Over the last twenty years, the industry has been concentrated into larger and more efficient colliery units. Less than half the original thousand collieries now produce roughly the same amount of coal. And the industry is becoming even more efficient.
Soon there may be only around 300 collieries, many of them producing somewhere near a million tons of coal a year each. That’s an awful lot of coal.
Fewer collieries can be grouped into fewer Areas - in fact this has been happening for some time.
Fewer Areas means that they need no longer be grouped into Divisions: the Area can work direct to Headquarters.
But Headquarters has always been in London, too far from the coalfields. So now a large part of the administration will move up to Doncaster - slap in the middle of the mines. The ex-Londoners are taking over a new block in the town’s Civic Centre - and the comfortable old building that used to house the Divisional Headquarters. Let’s look at one example of the way reorganisation of the Areas will work.
Here in the East Midlands is the South Derbyshire and Leicestershire Area.
Its first Area General Manager used to say that on a clear day, as he drove the few miles from his home near Coalville, along the ridge to Area Headquarters, he could see every colliery he managed.
But his Area was cut off from the rest of the Division ...
... and just down the road was the Warwickshire Area, just as cut off from its Division, the West Midlands.
So now they’re going to put South Derby and Leicestershire and Warwickshire all together as one Area, the new South Midlands.
And what an Area it will be. Half-a-dozen or more long life efficient pits from Warwickshire, including the new record-breaking Daw Mill ...
... to be put together with over a dozen long-life South Derbyshire and Leicestershire pits, some of the most efficient and safest in the whole country, like Donisthorpe and Rawdon.
And in between, below ground, there is coal linking them together ...
... while on the surface the pilot plants are producing the remade smokeless fuels, which are starting to warm our homes.
In succeeding issues of Mining Review, we will show how Reorganisation of the Areas will be planned, up and down the country.

Keywords

Politics and government; Mining

Written sources

British Film Institute Databases
Films on Coal Catalogue   1969, p.52
The National Archives COAL 32   /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963

Credits:

Sponsor

National Coal Board

Production Co.

National Coal Board Film Unit