I’m reading ‘Black Gold’ by television personality Jeremy Paxman, who has written perhaps the best and most informative history ever of British coal mining. Jeremy Paxman is a fine writer, with a forensic mind and effective writing style. He opens up the couple of centuries when the discovery and mining of coal was perhaps the most important industrial development in this country. ‘Black Gold’ is an enthralling biography of the rise and decline of this fuel, which was the key to Britain’s prosperity and leading position in world affairs for many years. It was the fuel not only for fires but for colonialism, shipping, and railways, and was a force behind the growth of the British Empire.

The industry expanded from small localised developments to great enterprises that brought enormous wealth to mine owners. Britain became the industrial leader of the world. It inspired and promoted other industries, including railways, steam boats and industrial machinery. Horse drawn tramways became train tracks to distribute the ‘Black Gold’. This brings memories of my childhood in Darlington in County Durham, which was quite some miles from the nearest coal mine but which became the most convenient location to build the first commercial steam train and railway station, to take this ‘Black Gold’ to a Teesside port for export to London or overseas locations.

Mining was dangerous work. There were many fatal mining disasters. Pit props in underground tunnels were sometimes unable to bear the weight of hundreds of feet of earth and rock, but perhaps the worst disaster was not underground, but above ground level, when a spoil tip collapsed and overwhelmed a school in Aberfan in 1966.

In the Forest, children as young as eight were used to work in tunnels too narrow for adults. They are remembered in Forest memorials at Upper Soudley, Clearwell Caves, the Dean Heritage Centre, and Hopewell Colliery. Coal heated most homes, and I can remember houses which had ‘coal sheds’ to hold the family store of ‘black gold’, and the ‘coal men’ who drove round in their lorries delivering sacks of it to households.

For a century and a half coal was the main source of power for transport and industry, but was being gradually and eventually completely displaced by nuclear, electrical, oil, wind (especially North Sea wind), and other non-coal fuels over the last 50 or so years. Rural railways collapsed, and the last Forest deep mine closed 1965 as competing forms of fuel were driving coal out of the fuel market. The days of houses containing ‘coal houses’ and ‘coalmen’ driving around in coal lorries to deliver sacks of coal to these ‘coal houses’ were over.

Paxman tells a good story, but he completely ignores the Forest of Dean in his story of British mining. Ralph Anstis’ novel and play ‘Let the Hero Be the Hungry Man’ (performed at Parkend Memorial Hall) tells of a mining community in the Forest in the 1870s, where there would be bitter family disputes as to whether miners should strike over devastating pay cuts. Parkend was full of mining memories, and sometimes, early in the morning, unable to sleep, I could pretend to hear the ghostly clatter of long dead miners on their way to work.

There was a complex network of railways in the 19th Century to take coal to Lydney harbour or, earlier, to Lydbrook for transportation along the River Wye. There were single and two-man mines in the forest, which may have escaped nationalisation in 1947. Some of these pits were still in operation until quite recently, and you might still find an old free mine in the deepest forest, which you will recognise by the abandoned corrugated iron that covered the mine and the tram lines that peeped out from the ground.