The Dukeries - The Dukeries Coal Field

The Dukeries Coal Field

In the early twentieth century the economic and social base of the Dukeries was dramatically influenced by the development of a new coalfield there, the eastern extension of the existing Midlands coal industry. The main source for these changes is Robert Waller’s Oxford Historical Monograph The Dukeries Transformed (OUP 1983).

Five new mines were opened in the Dukeries, sinking having been commenced in 1920. These were at Clipstone (coal won 1922), Ollerton (1925), Blidworth (1926), Bilsthorpe (1927) and Thoresby near Edwinstowe (1928). The Dukeries aristocratic landowners auctioned or leased mineral rights, such as Earl Manvers’ Thoresby estate in May 1919 and Lord Savile of Rufford Abbey’s lease for Ollerton in 1921. In each case a single colliery company was responsible, such as the Butterley Company at Ollerton and the Stanton Company at Thoresby. All the companies financed the construction of new pit villages to house the miners and their families, who largely migrated from older coalfields throughout Britain.

These villages offered more advanced facilities, such as a distinctive water system heated by the mine running in pipes between houses in New Ollerton, but as well as displaying characteristics of paternalism the new villages were also restrictive, with the employment of company policemen and the discouragement of trade unionism, with the exception of the breakaway Nottinghamshire Miners' Industrial Union (NMIU) of George Spencer in the 1930s; work at the Dukeries collieries had not ceased even during the coal and general strike of 1926. The Labour party was not electorally successful in the Dukeries mining villages until 1946, after the Second World War had weakened the power of the employers.