Blidworth Colliery - the benevolent monster
[Dream target date - 1970s - 1980s]

Blidworth Colliery and Village

Headstocks - 70s Marching Band - 70s Miners in skirts - 70s Pit yard 1980s Pit Wheels 1980s NCB flag 1983 Pit-top Miners 1983 Strike - 1983

The colliery at Blidworth was once the hub of the village. The hissing sounds of its engine room, the constant drone of earth-moving Euclyds and the regular tone of the pit blower signalling a change of shift, permeated the fabric of the village like some giant heartbeat - which in effect it was. A fact borne out in 1984, when strikes and pit closures finally layed the beast to rest and with it a way of life that we thought would go on forever.

Almost every day we passed the engine room on our way home from school. Sometimes the massive green doors were open, providing a tantilising glimpse of the giant pistons inside, illuminated in the yellow sodium lights. In those days, there was a steady flow of pit buckets - You'd hear them at night, like some round-the-clock cable-car ride, depositing grey mounds of slurry and coal-slack across Blidworth's industrial mountain range.

At night, the pit floodlights were always there, a big benevolent monster watching over us in our beds. The thing had a life of its own, as attendent miners worked it's rich coal seams to put food on our tables and clothes on our backs.

The pictures above, supplied by Debra Key, document a bygone age. The Key family lived directly opposite the colliery and so, witnessed many of the events in and around the pit yard, including the protracted closure of the site.

The pit was good to us for three generations and our fathers were there to witness its final heart beat, as a convoy of trucks poured a thousand ton of rubble into shafts which once took men deep beneath Sherwood forest.