Exercise 3.5: Local history.

Exercise 3.5: Local History.

Coal mining in Kent. 1896-1989.

According to Bygone Kent mining was born in 1896 by a local entrepreneur named Arthur Burr who set up the Kent Coal Syndicate.  There was already a belief that the geology in the area of East Kent was a good area to look for deep coal deposits.  The many test bores proved that there was indeed coal in mineable quantities deep down and in places running out under the sea.  

There were many false starts and abandoned pits before the coal was extracted in commercial quantities.  The first mine was on the Shakespeare Colliery on beach at Shakespeare Cliff near Dover, an area that later became the spot where the Chunnel spoil was deposited and is now the wildlife park Samphire Hoe. The mine suffered badly with flooding and was closed in 1921.  It produced only 1000 tons of coal and never made a profit.

During the 1920s the four main collieries at Betteshanger, Snowdown, Tilmanstone, and Chislet opened and for many years supplied usable quantities of coal, much of it going to the newly opened Richborough Power Station that was commissioned to use this ready supply.  

As a by-product of this activity and the need to transport the coal to Dover Docks,  Richborough Power Station and a coal fired brick works at Hammill the East Kent Light Railway was built.  It ran a limited passenger service, mainly for the miners, as well as its main task of transporting coal.

One of the areas main problems was industrial relations which, while never good, came to a head in the 1980s when the miner’s leader, Arthur Scargill, picked an  unwinnable  battle with the then Conservative Government. A Sun cartoon of the time  summed up the lack of popular support for the miners and their backers.

  

By 1989 all the pits had closed, the railway had gone, and although the power station and the brickworks limped on for a few more years these too were eventually forced to shut down.  

Visit the area now and there is a distinct lack of evidence of mining and its politicised past.  In its community archive in Dover The Coalfield Heritage Initiative Kent “Made a conscious decision at the outset not to concentrate on the industrial disputes - feeling that this area had already been to some degree over emphasised.” (CHIK, 2006)

The mining and power industries are not yet done with East Kent as the site of the Richborough Power Station is to used as the UK end of a continental electricity cable and a large solar energy plant.  The whole of the area is also marked up as an area suitable for gas abstraction.  

Kent my be The Garden of England but it is also at the heart of the UK's energy future.

The archives for this project were all found on-line.  

Bettshanger Pit: Sixty Years of Struggle.

Life at the Coalface. Jean Hollingsworth.

Kent's Mining Heritage.  Kent County Society.  The Association of the Men of Kent and Kentish Men.

Wikipedia.  Kent Coalfield.