Mining history: everything you wanted to know

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Mining History: Everything You Wanted to Know"

Release Date: February 23, 2025
Host: Lauren Good
Guest: Professor Robert Coles, Research Professor of English History at De Montfort University, Leicester

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Mining History: Everything You Wanted to Know," host Lauren Good engages in a comprehensive discussion with Professor Robert Coles about the intricate history of British mining. This episode delves into the evolution of mining practices, the socioeconomic dynamics of mining communities, safety advancements, and the profound impacts of labor movements and strikes.

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The Genesis of Mining in the UK

Professor Coles begins by tracing the origins of mining in the United Kingdom. He highlights that while the Romans were the first recorded to dig for coal during Roman times, it wasn't until the 17th and 18th centuries that coal mining gained significant importance, supplanting wood as the primary fuel source.

Professor Robert Coles [03:12]: "There was a time when pieces of coal were everywhere. They got up your nose, they got in your fingernails, they were in every street, they were in every house... Now, my grandchildren don't know what coal is."

Beyond coal, the UK also mined other valuable resources such as gold in Wales, iron ore in the Pennines, and tin in Cornwall. The smelting of iron ore, crucial for industrial advancements, became feasible primarily due to the availability of coal, which provided the necessary heat.

Professor Robert Coles [04:22]: "The Welsh had a bit of a gold rush at one point... The other major mining activity was iron ore in the Pennines and tin down in Cornwall."

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Key Mining Regions and Practices

The discussion moves to the significant coal fields across the UK, emphasizing the dominance of the northeast regions—Northumberland and Durham. By the mid-19th century, this area led the coal mining industry, setting the pace for other regions.

Professor Coles differentiates between various mining methods:

• Drift Mining: Excavating into the side of a hill or mountain.
• Bell Pits: Small, bell-shaped pits requiring minimal labor.
• Deep Mining: Involving extensive pit shafts and lifts, referred to as "cages" by miners.

Professor Robert Coles [06:31]: "Miners would love the idea of going down the mine in a lift. They called it a cage, I suppose. Lift makes it sound a bit fancier."

Deep mining represented a significant engineering milestone but also posed substantial risks and challenges, particularly regarding safety and labor conditions.

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Wages and Working Conditions

A pivotal aspect of mining history is the remuneration and daily life of miners. Professor Coles explains that until the late 19th century, miners were primarily paid via piecework—earning based on the amount of coal they extracted rather than a fixed wage.

Professor Robert Coles [07:14]: "Nearly every kind of labor, you were paid for what you did. And if you didn't do anything, you weren't paid anything."

The earnings varied significantly, with miners in the mid-19th century earning approximately 15 shillings to a pound per week, contingent on the seam's difficulty and working conditions. Additionally, miners' livelihoods were heavily influenced by the management's whims, affecting their placement in different mine sections.

Despite the harsh environment, Professor Coles posits that miners were relatively better off compared to other laborers of the time, such as farm workers or factory operatives.

Professor Robert Coles [10:10]: "They were relatively disciplined, relatively well paid, relatively in control and relatively respected."

His personal reflections underscore the stark contrast between the miners' challenging lives and his contemporary comfortable existence.

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Labor Unions and Strikes

The strength and influence of mining unions played a crucial role in shaping labor conditions. By 1914, mining unions had become formidable forces, capable of exerting substantial bargaining power to secure better wages and working hours.

Professor Coles delves into the history of miners' strikes, highlighting the 1984-85 strike as a significant turning point. Spearheaded by union leader Arthur Scargill, the strike aimed to prevent the closure of coal pits and preserve mining communities. However, internal divisions and the lack of a unified strike front led to considerable strife and long-term social ramifications.

Professor Robert Coles [27:53]: "Striking for a year must have had such an impact on people's livelihoods... the miners found themselves in a civil war village on village, family on family, man on man."

The aftermath of the strike left lasting scars within mining communities, fostering animosity and economic decline as the industry dwindled.

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Safety Innovations and Challenges

Safety in mines was a perpetual concern, leading to several innovations over the centuries. Professor Coles discusses the introduction of pithead baths post-nationalization in 1947, which allowed miners to clean themselves before returning home, enhancing their dignity and reducing the burden on their families.

Professor Robert Coles [12:48]: "A miner could walk home looking like every other person on the street... It was also really important for their wives and families who life was really an endless round of washing and drying."

Another critical safety advancement was the invention of safety lamps by Sir Humphry Davy and George Stephenson. These lamps prevented gas explosions, although they inadvertently led to deeper and more hazardous mining operations.

Professor Robert Coles [18:44]: "Safety lamps did not make mining more safe because it allowed the owners to put miners into more dangerous areas of the pit."

The implementation of dual shafts in mines post-1863 significantly reduced accidents by ensuring proper ventilation and providing escape routes in emergencies.

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The Role of Women and Children in Mining

Initially, women and children were integral to mining operations. However, the 1842 Mines Act prohibited women from working underground, reflecting societal shifts towards more regulated labor practices.

Professor Robert Coles [22:49]: "They were called putters or pushers of the tubs... until they were banned from going underground in 1842."

Children, often as young as seven or eight, worked alongside their families, pushing coal and assisting in sorting. Gradually, legal reforms increased the minimum working age, easing the exploitation of child labor but also impacting family incomes.

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Socioeconomic Impact of Mining Communities

Mining fostered tight-knit communities characterized by strong social bonds and cultural richness. Professor Coles laments the loss of these communities, which were centers of sports, music, and collective identity.

Professor Robert Coles [32:13]: "We might have been a bit bleak in our discussion... I also regret the end of true community and communities that were bound together by hard work and togetherness."

Notably, mining communities produced notable figures such as novelist D.H. Lawrence and David Storey, illustrating the profound cultural contributions stemming from these challenging environments.

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Lessons from Mining History

Professor Coles emphasizes the importance of contextualizing historical labor practices within their time, cautioning against judging past communities by modern standards. He highlights the resilience, solidarity, and cultural vibrancy of mining communities, advocating for a nuanced understanding of their legacy.

Professor Robert Coles [32:13]: "Don't judge the past in the way that you judge the present. It would be so easy to dismiss all that carboniferous capitalism as a mistake when in point of fact, for those who lived through it and achieved it, it wasn't."

He also reflects on the environmental and community losses resulting from the decline of mining, underscoring the need to preserve and learn from these histories as society navigates contemporary challenges.

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Conclusion

The episode sheds light on the multifaceted history of British mining, exploring its economic significance, technological advancements, labor struggles, and enduring social impacts. Professor Robert Coles provides a balanced perspective, acknowledging the hardships faced by miners while recognizing their contributions to industrial progress and community building.

For more insights into the history of mining and other compelling historical narratives, visit HistoryExtra.com.

This episode was produced by Jack Bateman.

Transcript

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[Lauren Good]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Historically, how much would a British miner have earned for a hard day's work? What would they have worn underground? And how did adding baths to the pit heads create much needed change? In conversation with Lauren Good for today's Everything youg Wanted To Know episode Professor Robert Coles explores the history of working down British mines and explains how, despite it being brutal hard, there was also beauty to be found.

[Professor Robert Coles]

We're talking all about mining history today and I think much of our conversation might lean towards history in more recent centuries. But let's start at the very beginning with a question we've had from Instagram. How did mining in the UK actually begin?

Well, it's a funny old world, isn't it? There was a time when pieces of coal were everywhere. They got up your nose, they got in your fingernails, they were in every street, they were in every house, coal was everywhere. Now, my grandchildren don't know what coal is, so suddenly it became all important. And that was in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first recorded instance of digging coal was in Roman times. But I think the real point is it was until the 17th century, 18th, 17th, 18th century, that coal became important to us. Up till then, most burning, most fuel was done by wood. But the Romans, of course, were first in so many things and there they were digging away for a bit of coal. I've no idea what they used it for. Heating, I would imagine domestic heating.

Now, you've talked a bit about coal there, but that's not the only material we've mined in the uk. And we've got some other questions asking, what else have we mined for in history?

The Welsh had a bit of a gold rush at one point, so there's gold in Wales, but the other major mining activity was iron ore in the Pennines, particularly in the North Pennines, and tin down in Cornwall. As we know, the Romans were pretty big on tin. Iron ore is important, but you've got to be able to smelt it. And it takes an awful lot of wood to smelt iron ore into iron. So it wasn't until coal was able to do it that the mining of iron ore became huge. Yeah, tin, iron ore, gold.

You've talked about the Pennines and Cornwall there. Where else have we mined in the uk?

Well, coal fields are the most important areas of mining and they changed everything, really. There were 12 major coal fields, but the most important one was the one in the northeast of England, in Northumberland and Durham, and that was getting pretty big by the 17th century, so the northeast led the way and the other coal fields got in line. Let's say somewhere in the middle of the 19th century. There's always been bits of mining, Lauren, you've got to understand. So called drift mining, where you dig into the side of a Hill or a mountain. Or there was bell pits, which were very small pits, the shape of a bell, which five or six men could dig into the ground. The country's always been pockmarked with small mining, but if we're talking about serious mining, 12 coal fields by 1914, the first one being the northeast. And the northeast was always the biggest coal field, pushed hard by 1914 by South Wales.

I think that's an important distinction to make about the different types of mines we're talking about here, because I imagine, you know, the huge pit shafts and the lifts coming down. But there were other types, as you know, with the drift mines.

Yeah. The miners would love the idea of going down the mine in a lift. They called it a cage, I suppose.

Lift makes it sound a bit fancier.

We'll go with cage makes it sound like John Lewis.

Lovely.

Miners would get into a cage and they would drop. All of a sudden, you drop like a stone. You leave your heart at the top and you land your feet on the bottom. That was called deep mining. And deep mining was an engineering achievement of great proportion. Before that, there were all kinds of little mines going in and out of mountainsides, two of which I've given you, the drift and the bell pit.

I'd like to talk a bit more about the lifestyle of miners. How much would miners have earned?

Ah, nah, that's a real tough question. The thing about labour, the British Isles until really the late 19th century, is that it was nearly all piecework. So nearly every kind of labor, you were paid for what you did. And if you didn't do anything, you weren't paid anything. So nearly all mining, that is, the elite miners who were the hewers, who were at the face, they would be paid by how much coal they sent up. And that coal would go into a tub, and on the tub, the two men working together usually was. Two men working together would put a brass plate giving their number or their name, and that tub would then go up top and it would be measured or weighed, and they would be paid accordingly. Other branches of the mine were also paid piecework, particularly the boys who pushed those tubs from the face to the bottom of the shaft, or shall we say the bottom of the lift, and they would put it into the lift and up it would go, and they would be paid accordingly as well. Other kinds of work in the mine might well be paid just by a daily wage or daily rate. Now, I'm not trying to avoid the question, because it's a good question. What were they paid let's say in the middle of the 19th century, miners would be paid something like 15 shillings to a pound a fortnight if they were badly paid, or 15 shillings to a pound a week if they were doing well. Of course, this was endless wrangling about how much you got for how much work. There was also another problem. The conditions in which miners earned their keep differed. So if you're in a very difficult seam, then you've got a problem earning enough money, or if you've got water coming in, or if you've got gas coming in and where you ended up working with your mate, or in the Northeast we called him your Mara, depended on the whims, really, of the manager. And if the manager wanted rid of you, he put you in a bad place. In the Northeast, they overcame this by having a kind of lottery whereby men would choose their place of work by putting their arm in a lottery and finding out where they were deputed for that quarter. That was called caveling. So it's a really complicated business and a difficult question, but there you are, piecework dependent on conditions.

So they were so dependent on their natural environment.

I suppose I have to say, however, that there's a tendency in the history of mining to always put them at the bottom of the heap and always victims, always being crushed, always in awful conditions. And some of that is true. I mean, as the miners write, as Sid Chaplin said, miners had it brutal, hard. But at the same time, if you compare them, say, with Sheffield steel grinders or Dorsetshire farm labourers or female buttonhole makers in the East End of London, they didn't have it so bad as them. Compared to these difficult, lowly paid trades, miners were relatively disciplined, relatively well paid, relatively in control and relatively respected.

I suppose we have to view it within the context of that time, rather than looking with our modern eyes.

Yes. I must say now, when I think about members of my family who did what they did, it's quite astonishing, given how easy and pleasant my life is. I mean, look what I'm doing now, chatting away to you. Lovely coffee to my left, water to my right. Well, 50 years ago, I had male relatives who were, you know, 300 meters below ground dealing with all that. But as a labor force, they were relatively well paid, relatively respected and relatively in control. There were a lot of other workers who were much worse than them. Miners were serious beings and they were well respected for their power to stop things if they wanted to.

And what sort of hours would a miner have worked down below?

Well, again, this differs coalfield to Coalfield. It depends on the bargaining power of the miners who were there. But the elite miners, that is the hewers, that is men over 21 who'd served their time below ground. At their peak in the northeast of England around 1914, they would be doing a six hour shift, bearing in mind that it would take them up to an hour to get to the face and up to an hour to get back again, for which they were not paid most of the 19th century, the hewing elite I would reckon would do about eight hours. The northeast miners did particularly well in their bargaining because they were such a powerful union force, 240,000 of them, all in the same union. This is serious negotiating power.

The power of these unions is something that I'd love to talk about a bit later. First I'd love to talk about the turning point that was the pit baths, when men could wash at work instead of having to come home and rely on washing facilities there. What sort of changes did this bring to miners and their families lives?

Well, it's a great question actually. It's really the national coal board nationalization 1947. They were the ones who introduced most pithead baths. And it just meant that, well, for a start, a miner could walk home looking like every other person on the street on the bus, clean, with clean clothes on. And he probably felt a lot better too in those terms of status and self regard. Bearing in mind, however, though, a lot of other workers who didn't have pit head baths didn't have any kind of baths and they went home dirty. So we have to bear that in mind. I think miners felt good about baths. They certainly felt they'd had a shower and deserved it. It was also really important for their wives and families who life was really an endless round of washing and drying and something in the northeast we called dadding, which was when a miner got home and he didn't have the baths, he had to take all his clothes off. And his daughters, my mother did this every day would dad, which is take the clothes and hit them against the wall outside just to get rid of all the dust and all the unpleasantness of the pit. So status, self regard, self respect, just like other men. And also a lot less work for the women. You could leave your pit clothes at the pit and walk home clean.

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[Professor Robert Coles]

Clothes would they have actually worn to work?

Well, there's a saying in the Northeast, out is good enough for the pit, out means anything, so out's good enough for Pitt. What they wore was any old clothes that they could find. Well, my father worked in the shipyards and he went to work really in last year or ten years ago suit, his old overcoat and a cap. And miners were similar. They would work in their old clothes. Having said that, in really hot mines you had to strip a bit. So miners would wear things we called hoggers, which were like long shorts. They would wear boots, they would wear stockings, and they would wear a kind of vest when the pit was hot and pits were hot when you got to the face. Other people who worked in and around the mine would just wear old clothes. Later on, under nationalisation, which was much more organized and disciplined in this respect, miners wore helmets. Oh, the other thing. I can't forget this. Actually, I could run downstairs and get you one, but I won't because I've got my headphones on. Every miner had attached to his belt a lamp. And in the Northeast they were called geordies because they were invented by George Stephenson, and in the rest of the country they were called Davy lamps because they were invented by Sir Hugh Davey, a great scientist. These were safety lamps because they could take you into parts of the mine that were gaseous without explosion. And right up until yesterday, really, miners they still had their Davy lamps as well as their electric lamps which were attached to their helmets.

I know them as Davy lamps. But before miners used these lamps, they used canaries. Can we talk about how these were actually used to spot gas in the mines?

Well, very simple. You pop the little bird in a cache and you go down and if it falls off its perch, you've got gas, that is, you've got a certain kind of gas, carbon monoxide, really, and it would die. They were not so good for finding out the other kind of gas which exploded, which was methane gas. But either way, the canary wouldn't do so well with its tiny little lungs in a gaseous mine. This was just disastrous. From the point of view of men working in mines that were getting deeper and deeper and longer and longer, it's.

Clear that, you know, mining wasn't exactly a safe profession. As well as the, what I would call Davy Lambs, what other safety precautions were taken to try and prevent mining accidents?

Well, the most important thing was that boys were taken into the complicated, dark and dangerous world of a pit early so that they understood how it worked and how it worked safely. Very, very difficult, if not impossible and highly dangerous for an adult male to go mining if he had no experience of mining. So most miners in the Northeast who were the traditional home of pitmanship, as it was called, were a caste. They followed their fathers and their fathers had followed their fathers. And from being, what, 8 years old, 9 years old, 10 years old, boys would go in the mine and they would learn how to operate there. That's the first and most important thing they were called true bred pitman, bred to the mine. The second thing after that, I suppose, was the qualification and talent of the engineers who organized the mining. But gas, I mean, basically business capitalists, landowners, wanted mines to go deeper and further. And when you did that, it got more and more dangerous. And that is where Sir Humphry Davy in 1812, was invited to invent a safety lamp, which he did. Actually, he was preceded by George Stephenson, who was a railway engineer. Actually, he started as a mining engineer. They weren't called that then, you see. He was just called a fireman. This doesn't mean he was a fire brigade man, it just meant he dealt with the safety in the mine as a fireman. He invented the Geordie, which was another kind of lamp. Sir Humphry Davy invented his lamp. These lamps were safe in gaseous areas. They allowed the gas in into the lamp, but they didn't allow a flame to come out, essentially There was a kind of gauze protection of the flame in the lamp. Gas went in, the flame didn't come out. This was from about 1812. And by the 1820s, all deep mines were carrying lamps. Safety lamps did not make mining more safe because it allowed the owners to put miners into more dangerous areas of the pit. So in the era of the lamp, mining got worse, accidents got worse, explosions got more frequent. And it wasn't until 1862, when Hartley Colliery in Northumberland, the beam engine, that's the big pumping engine at the top of the shaft, collapsed. It fell down the shaft, it blocked the shaft and the men below couldn't get out and they died underground of carbon monoxide poisoning because the shaft was blocked. Now, what did that show? That showed that mining with just a single shaft was dangerous for the men and it was terrible for ventilation. So after 1863, all mines had to have two shafts, so the air would be dragged through the whole mine, through the workings of the mine downshaft, one shaft up the other shaft, and if one shaft got blocked, then the miners could escape by the other shaft. So long answer to your questions. But skill in pitmanship comes first. The miner's lamp came second, the quality of the engineering came third. And then finally and supremely so, two shaft mines changed the game completely. And after that it became explosions and so on became much, much more rare. It's not to say they didn't end in your part of the world. In Wales, there was an awful disaster at gresford colliery in 1934, but they certainly. The mortality rate certainly collapsed after the 2 shafts system.

I'd really like at this point to talk about. You mentioned the presence of children in the mine, and I think it's very easy to approach mining as a very male environment, isn't it? But it hasn't always been the case because women also worked underground. What sort of roles would they have played?

Mainly young women. Again, in the best managed mines, there was very little female labor underground. It was in the worst mines where this happened. Even so, it was not seen as something criminal or appalling. Quite often they were working with their brothers and fathers, but it was hard work. And the 1842 Royal Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in Mines, which led to the illegality of women working in mines. The 1842 Mines act shows pictures of young women pushing the tubs, largely with the boys underground pushing it from the coal face to the shaft. That was their predominant underground work until they were banned from going underground in 1842. They didn't work at the face. It was called putting. They were putters or pushers of the tubs above ground. Older women would work basically in sorting coal from rock, large coals from small coals on the coal face at what we called the bank. So it was two jobs, really, sorting and pushing.

You spoke about older women there, sorting at the top. Were there any restrictions to how young or old you could be?

Yeah, Parliament started to get involved from the 1840s, actually from the 1830s, first of all, how old you could be before you worked in a factory, and then from the 1840s how old you could be before you worked in a mine. And gradually speaking, the age level crept up, up to 1870s, where I think it was 13. You had to be. But when Parliament first got involved, the worst case scenarios were children of seven or eight. And by 1914, that did not happen. They were children who were mixing, working in the mine, were going to school, they were around 13 or 14 years old. So from the 1840s, it got more civilized. Of course, banning children from working also meant cutting the family wage because wages were best assessed in family terms. So that put more pressure on the miners unions to ask for more money, better rates for the adult males.

Now, that moves us nicely, that discussion of unions into the very political side of this history. We can't have a conversation talking about the history of mining and not talk about the miners strikes, which I'm sure will be in living memory for many of the people listening to this. First of all, Robert, when were these strikes?

There's always been strikes. I mean, the first big miners strike I know about was 1765, when men in the northeast of England withdrew their labor from the coal owners or the coal trade. If you're reduced to your labor, Lauren, for your livelihood, for being able to live, then the only option you really have when in dispute is to withdraw that labour. And that's been recognized in this country for a very long time. And it's been recognized in law from about 1825, that is, trade unions were lawful. However, the things trade unions did were not always lawful. Really, that dominates the labour law courts. From the 1820s to the 1860s and 70s, for instance, picketing is picketing, that is trying to get fellow miners to join you. How far can you go without being guilty of assault or intimidation or harassment? And this is one problem the courts had to agree upon. By the 1870s, it was pretty generally recognized that unions were legal. They could strike, and there were things they could do to persuade their fellows to join them. By 1914, it has to be said, the unions were so big and so influential and so well organized that when they did strike, generally speaking, those strikes were 100% solid. This changed, of course, in 1984, 85, which was a disaster. When labor isn't solid, then winning becomes very, very difficult. Striking, Lauren, is a team game and you can't have some of the team playing and some not playing.

Can we focus particularly on the strikes in 1984? What were the miners striking over at this point in history?

Well, about 150,000 of them were afraid for their jobs. I mean, putting it very simply, their motto was Save our pits and communities. And these were generally the most militant coal fields, historically South Wales, the northeast of England, Yorkshire and Kent. These unions followed their leader, Arthur Scargill, and his warning that if Mrs. Thatcher got to close the 20 pits she put on the list, then that would just be the start of it. The other unions, generally speaking, in the Midlands and Lancashire, were not convinced by that argument. And the very least they asked for was a ballot of all the miners about whether they should strike or not. Scargill hadn't allowed that. He'd allowed each area to vote. And the areas then came together or not. What the non strikers wanted was one ballot. So about 50,000 of them stood out. About 150,000, I say stood out. They stood out of the strike. They didn't strike. They kept working in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere. And the other 150,000 stood out for nearly a year. And it was the last great Victorian strike, only it happened in our lifetime.

I mean, striking for a year must have had such an impact on people's, people's livelihoods, people's well being.

Yeah, a long haul. It's easy to talk about it, much more difficult to do it. Of course, there's all the material problems of how do you pay the bills, how do you pay the mortgage, what do you do at Christmas? Food. The miners welfares, that is like their club, became hubs of struggle, they became cook houses, they became adult education centers, they became nurseries, they became concerts, they became places where the strike was planned, where picketing was planned. That was in the first case, and that lasted up to a year anyway. But the real problem here was not the areas that stood out against the strike, but those families within the striking areas that stood out and were forced back by poverty and penury. And those men and their families took a terrible toll from the striking families. They were called scabs. In other words, this greatest of communities, this Greatest of unions, this labor force that are not called miners, but the miners, that is one group, suddenly found themselves in a civil war village on village, family on family, man on man. And it was a very awful and difficult period for everyone concerned. And some of those bad feelings continue even now.

It's quite difficult, I think, for most of us in today's society to imagine this idea of a community, the majority of whom working at one pit is so different to what we know, isn't it?

Yes, that kind of industrial imagination. Lots and lots of people coming out of a shipyard, hundreds of women coming out of a factory, hundreds of men, you know, running out of a pit to catch the bus in filthy clothes. It's gone. That's what the market has done. It's really taken away our industrial base and turned us into some other kind of industrial production country. But that kind of job, that kind of carboniferous capitalism based on iron, coal, steel, engineering, gone. The last vestige of it, I suppose, is the automobile industry, which survives.

And finally, Robert, this is such an expansive history, but what learnings do you think we can take from it today?

Well, there's lots of things. I mean, we might have been a bit bleak in our discussion, me particularly, because I regret climate change, but I also regret the end of true community and communities that were bound together by hard work and togetherness. So I'm kind of caught. Mining communities produce great riders, great sports men and musicians. Their band music was famous and beautiful. Their sporting achievements, particularly in football and rugby, was famous. And of course, it was a mining community that produced possibly England's greatest modern novelist, D.H. lawrence, or even David Storey in Wakefield. There's a lot of other things that came out of this brutal hard industry too, that we've not discussed, but we could discuss. For me, the big lesson is don't judge the past in the way that you judge the present. It would be so easy to dismiss all that carboniferous capitalism as a mistake, when in point of fact, for those who lived through it and achieved it, it wasn't.

[Lauren Good]

That was Robert Coles, research Professor of English History at De Montfort University, Leicester. You can find more about the history of mining on our website, historyextra.com thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.

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[Professor Robert Coles]

1, 2, 1, 3.

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