Subscribe to my youtube channel for 200+ coal mine tributes and counting. Moorgreen Colliery 1865 to 1985. The NCB days.
Along with Selston and Pye Hill collieries, which became the Pye Hill Complex, Moorgreen was the last operating colliery in the former NCB East Midlands Division No.5 Area. At ‘Vesting Day’, No.5 Area had eighteen operating collieries, but following the closure programme in the late 1950’s and 1960’s only the Pye Hill Complex and Moorgreen remained on the old exposed coalfield.
There was a strong ‘Derbyshire influence’ at the pit as miners end up working there as the No.5 Area contracted. In the 1960’s many transferred from pit to pit in a short time and became known as ‘Industrial Gypsies’. The dialect was ‘thee’s and thou’s’ as DH Lawrence had noted earlier in the century. Locally they were referred to as being from ‘over the brook’ i.e. Derbyshire. Maximum manpower of 1,719 was in 1953 with record production of 1,058,420 tons of coal being achieved in 1963. Locally collieries at High Park and Lodge closed and merged with Moorgreen as part of rationalisation in the coal industry in the 1950’s. The surface drift constructed in 1943 by Barber Walker was equipped with a 42 inch cable belt in 1956 with a capacity of 550 to 600 tons per hour. By 1975 drifts between various coal seams meant that the Blackshale seam coal could travel to the surface by conveyors. Following the abandonment of the Second Waterloo seam in 1976, all production for the final nine years was from the Blackshale seam. NCB South Nottinghamshire Area.
At the NCB reorganisation in April 1967, Moorgreen Colliery became part of the NCB South Nottinghamshire Area, the No.5 Area having been wound up the previous year. It was one of seventeen collieries that made up the Area with the HQ being based at Bestwood. By 1980 the NCB South Nottinghamshire Area was down to twelve operating collieries and in 1990 just four South Nottinghamshire collieries remained as part of the British Coal Corporation’s Nottinghamshire Group. Margaret Thatcher, then Leader of the Opposition, made an underground visit to the colliery in 1976.
Closure of Moorgreen Colliery
The closure of Moorgreen Colliery due to exhaustion of viable reserves was agreed between the local NCB and the Nottinghamshire Area of the NUM in 1983. A gradual rundown of the workforce started with older miners over 50 taking advantage of enhanced redundancy payments and miners under 50 transferring to other collieries in the NCB South Nottinghamshire Area. Particular emphasis was made on transfers to Calverton, Gedling and Cotgrave, to the east of the old exposed coalfield, which were then deemed to be long-life pits.
Moorgreen & the 1984-85 Miners Strike
As the start of the 1984/85 Miners Strike in early March 1984, Yorkshire Flying Pickets arriving at Moorgreen were greeted with the message “You’re too late mate, its closing anyway!” A seemingly forgotten fact nowadays when discussing the ‘pros and cons’ of the 1984-85 Miners Strike, is that the NCB South Nottinghamshire Area had two collieries running down to closure as the strike broke, one being Moorgreen! Out of the four million tons capacity to be taken out nationally, half a million was to take account of these closures! In the ensuing thirty-six years since the strike, many accounts can be found that Nottinghamshire was unaffected by the proposed cuts to production and manpower by the NCB for the 1984-85 financial year, this was not so!The Last Day
Final production was on 19th July 1985 and on the that day, the ‘Pit Klaxon’, normally only sounded at times of a pit disaster, was blown for the final time as the last men from K77’s coalface arrived at the surface. 140 men out of the final production workforce of 350 were kept on for salvage work.
Негізгі бет Tribute To Moorgreen Colliery And Its Proud Coal Miners.
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