The North East - NEW AREAS FOR OLD - 2

Series

Series Name

Mining Review 20th Year

Issue

Issue No.

2

Date Released

Oct 1966

Stories in this Issue:

1. 1The North East - NEW AREAS FOR OLD - 2
2. 2Leicestershire - COLEORTON
3. 3Nottinghamshire - MIDLAND PALLADIUM

Story

Story No. within this Issue

1 / 3

Summary

BFI synopsis: The reorganisation of the Durham and Northumberland coalfield.
NCB Commentary - Under the North East Coast lies coal - millions and millions of tons.
Now, the coalfields of the North East, like all the others up and down the country, are being reorganised.
Once, the map of the north looked like this - Northumberland and Cumberland - one division, four areas.
Durham - another division, with six areas.
Cumberland will now join up with Lancashire.
Northumberland will be just one area - Durham will be two:- North and South Durham.
For more than 700 hundred years sea-coal has been picked off the shore. The monks of Newminster Abbey were the first to receive grants of land on the sea-shore and with it, the right to take coal wherever they found it.
Through the Centuries coal from the North East was shipped from the Tyne, till by the time of Charles II over half a million tons a year went south by sea.
That’s way no one ever dreamed of sending coals to Newcastle.
By then, of course, the coal was coming, not from the seashore, but from deep under Durham and Northumberland - as indeed it still does today.
The seams are thinner now, but south-west Durham’s coking coal is still amongst the finest in the world.
And yet it is the sea that once again holds the key to the future of the North East. Coal lies for miles out under the water, hundreds of feet below the sea-bed.
All down the coast, past Blyth and Sunderland to West Hartlepool are vast resources of coal, waiting to be mined.
Since 1958, this tower has worked some 3 to 5 miles off shore, drilling 20 holes from Blyth to Hartlepool.
As one hole was completed, it would lift itself up off the sea-bed, and tugs would tow it along to the site of the next, where it would put down it’s legs - and start drilling again - drilling to prove exactly where the coal measures lie.
Results to date have shown that there are at least a 1,000 million tons of coal accessible off the North-East coast - much of it in seams from 3 to 7 feet thick.
Thanks to the tower - mines like Lynemouth in Northumberland, already Europe’s biggest undersea colliery, have an assured future.
Further down the coast in Durham, a whole row of Collieries is being geared to undersea work. Wearmouth, Whitburn, Dawdon, Easington and Hordern - a roll call of pits with a long-life for many, many years to come.
Inland working too is by no means dead - not when it produces some of the finest coal in the world - but just as 700 years ago, it’s in the sea-coal that the future lies.

Keywords

Mining

Locations

Northumberland; County Durham

Written sources

British Film Institute Databases   Used for synopsis
The National Archives COAL 32   /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963

Credits:

Sponsor

National Coal Board

Production Co.

National Coal Board Film Unit