In Black & White

By Peter Williams

The 100 year life of a unique coalfield.

The County of Kent, with its hopgardens, oasthouses and orchards, is known around the world as the Garden of England. In the 1920s, plans were drawn up to transform it into a new, industrial Blac

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Williams Television
• Release date: May 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739441715

Peter Williams

Peter Williams is the author of the bestselling book Beacon on the Rock (2001). He has served at sea and was the founder of the lighthouse enthusiast magazine Leading Lights, which he continues to work with as consultant editor. Peter maintains a personal link with lighthouses as a Trinity House attendant for a Welsh lighthouse, which still uses a first order Chance lens, fitted in 1868.

Book preview

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FOREWORD

Chapter 1:In the Beginning…

Chapter 2:World War One – Underground Warfare

Chapter 3: Mechanisation and Tilden Smith

Chapter 4: The Great Experiment

Chapter 5: The Gibbs and Scotland

Chapter 6: The Northbournes and Betteshanger

Chapter 7: Immigration and the Welsh Connection

Chapter 8: Life Underground

Chapter 9: The Miner’s Road

Chapter 10: The Plumptres and Snowdown

Chapter 11: Chislet and Tilmanstone

Chapter 12: World War Two – A Time to Strike?

Chapter 13: The Sutcliffes and Yorkshire

Chapter 14: Conflict – The Strikes

Chapter 15: The Aftermath

Chapter 16: Champions

Thanks and Sources

Appendix

Glossary of Mining Terms and Phrases

INTRODUCTION

Decades, like people, have their own peculiar characteristics, quirks and crises. The birth and life of the Kent Coalfield spans roughly ten decades − one hundred years − from the reign of Queen Victoria through the turmoil of two World Wars, to Britain’s seismic shift away from an economy based on heavy industry.

This is a story of love and hate. The demanding relationship between Man, and a way of life that embraces hard work and boredom, comradeship and violence, danger and tragedy, moments of great triumph and crushing disappointment and, above all, deep political convictions. It is the story of a coalfield and a unique community with an accent of its own, drawn to Kent from all over Britain to hew its coal. It is secure in its own traditions and beliefs. It is a community proud to declare, today, that they are miners and miners’ families, from mining stock.

Their stubborn creativity has survived two World Wars, a multitude of industrial disputes, the closure of the mines and the subsequent grinding poverty as fossil fuel that had founded the Industrial Revolution, gave way to new, people-friendly energy.

Coal was discovered in Kent by accident, in 1890, when men first thought of linking Britain to France though a tunnel. Today, after a hundred years of industrial struggle and successful production that ceased in 1989, there are people even in Kent who are unaware that a Kent coalfield ever existed. It is time that situation is rectified and that the contribution made by the families of both mine owners and miners, is finally on the record.

I am an ‘incomer’ myself. A Welshman, I was in the 1960s living in Bristol and working for the Bristol Evening Post. Television was the new kid on the block and I was eager to be part of it. My first job in television was in Dover, as a newsreader and reporter for the nightly magazine programme ‘Day by Day’, working for Southern Television as they opened their new regional ITV station for the south east. The region stretched from Brighton and Worthing to Reading and on to Margate and the Channel Ports. The studio was a converted bus garage. I came on a six-month contract and stayed in Kent 50 years and more.

During that first six months, I clearly remember noting that the unique story of the Kent Coalfield had never been properly documented. On reflection, that is an understatement because, at first, I was completely unaware that a coalmine even existed in Kent. Throughout a long career making documentaries for the major networks in the UK and overseas, I tried from time to time to persuade the major channels – BBC, ITV, Channel Four, Discovery and others – to commission a film on a century of coal in Kent. There were no takers.

In 2016, the Hadlow Group, who were the inspiration for the enlightened Betteshanger Project on the site of the old Betteshanger Colliery, produced the money to make a feature-length documentary on the subject. It has won awards from film festivals around the world. We called it ‘A Century of Coal’ – and a DVD of the film is available on-line at [e-mail].

This book springs from the material assembled for that film, led by my wife, Jo, who thankfully, is one of the most highly-skilled and instinctive researchers in the business. It has been made possible by the generous support of our late friend, Sir Ronald McIntosh, and with the co-operation of the Kent Mining Heritage Foundation.

Peter Williams

Boughton-under-Blean

Kent 2019

FOREWORD

In Black and White spans several topics: local history, industrial history, political history… But terminology is to some extent misleading because it is too easily associated with facts and chronology. Peter Williams deals in both in his own way, but his book is first and foremost a multi-faceted account of a complex social experiment: the 20th Century migration of coal miners from Scotland, Wales and northern England to newly-opened collieries in East Kent.

These men, at first regarded with hostility, were able to adapt to their new surroundings and establish communities of their own, as they imported new rhythms of work, a new culture − almost a new language.

Appropriately, the book is full of voices. Long experience as an interviewer has made Peter Williams adept at putting people at their ease so that they can comfortably describe their experiences and feelings in their own language. These industrial migrants, their wives and their children, are vivid chroniclers, reaching beyond what they did, or what was done to them, to suggest how those happenings felt.

Many of their recollections are startling and distressing. To read this book is to become conscious of the fact that the daily hardships of all coal miners have been left virtually unreported and therefore unimaginable. We know less about life down in the mines than we do about the lives of elephants or insects. Peter Williams’ many spokesmen evoke a literally crippling environment that, in terms of darkness, danger and physical demands, verged on the phantasmagoric. A range of life-threatening deficiencies and excesses were somehow permitted to continue unchecked, year after year, presumably for the sole reason that they were hidden half a mile below our 20th Century feet, far out of sight and hence outside public consciousness. A documented list of the 22 fatalities at the Chislet colliery in the 30s alone is a shocking revelation in itself. It is commendable that In Black and White puts such information on record before the mining industry lapses into the past like horse-drawn public transport, to be similarly erased from the collective memory.

The aptly named Malcolm Pitt deserves a paragraph to himself. The first member of his family to go to university he was later a school teacher, a member of the Communist party and a convert to Catholicism. But in a startling career change he chose to be a miner, and worked in the pits for 14 years, becoming President of the Kent area branch of the NUM. When he died he left behind notes and a manuscript which included detailed and eloquent first-hand accounts of life at the coalface. Williams rightly makes full use of this remarkable memoir.

Pitt’s close-up descriptions, which appear in the eighth of the book’s 16 chapters, are so absorbing that they bring the chronological overview that has previously shaped the narrative to a virtual halt. But that is a price amply worth paying for the quality of the material concerned. In any case, the story cannot be tidily sequential because Williams is obliged to move between the four Kent collieries and to respond to particular crises such as closures, strikes and war. And mere chronology has sometimes to be suspended elsewhere to create space for the inclusion of a variety of relevant background figures: Shinwell, Chamberlain, Bevan, Scargill, Mrs Thatcher, Lord and Lady Northbourne, Ianto Hill…

The cast list naturally becomes particularly extensive in a detailed, meticulous and chilling account of the great strike of 1984. Williams scrupulously avoids communicating his own views on these ‘political’ events beyond – at most – a hint here, a pointed chapter-epigraph there. The facts, some of them not publicly known at the time of the strike, are left to speak for themselves – and are eloquent. The subsequent abrupt and unheralded closure of the remaining Kent coalfields was a bitter final blow. But there was nothing the miners could have done to avert it. The Kent collieries had been highly productive in their day, but circumstances had changed. It wasn’t merely that goalposts had been shifted. Growing awareness of air pollution and climate change meant that they had been removed altogether.

But the downfall of these collieries was only one of a number of major transformations in East Kent in the second half of the 20th Century. Traffic was re-routed, railway lines were closed, the traditional hop-picking all but vanished, many large stores ceased to trade and Kent Opera and the Hoverport came and went. On the other hand the Channel Tunnel was built, there is now a high-speed rail service to London, three new universities draw in thousands of students, a rebuilt Marlowe Theatre has opened in Canterbury, as has the Turner Gallery in Margate. In that context of change and adaptation, the final chapter of In Black and White, concerning the regeneration of Aylesham, offers some welcome reassurance. Here the ‘immigrants’, although retaining elements of their original identity, even of their original dialect, have in effect contrived to found a new town, with thriving small businesses, a vigorous community spirit and a host of leisure activities. After all, a cruel communal defeat can give rise to a communal recovery.

Michael Irwin

Professor of English

University of Kent

Canterbury 2019

CHAPTER ONE

In The Beginning...

This is what the people of Kent call the Garden of England…

William Cobbett

Many of the greatest names and most critical events in English history have been in some way connected with Canterbury Cathedral. It is the mother church of English Christianity and its long and varied story is recorded in tomb and stone and window. Augustine and Ethelbert, Edward the Confessor and the Black Prince, Henry VIII and his rival the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and, of course, Becket, whose martyrdom is still remembered annually with a dramatic and emotional service at the spot where he died, cut down by the Barons’ swords.

An unlikely venue, then, to discuss coal and coal mines. Nonetheless, on July 24th 1926, in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral and at the invitation of the then Dean George Bell, the great and the good of Kent gathered to hear a politician who would shortly become Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

Canterbury Cathedral (c 1925)

Neville Chamberlain

He had summoned them because he had a plan. The plan was that Kent, the Garden of England, was to be asked to accommodate up to 18 coal mines, and perhaps three ironworks, to become, in effect, another Black Country. And Chamberlain’s job that day was to break the news to an apprehensive assembly of the county’s leaders, and to reassure them that Kent would not be irreversibly damaged by this forced industrial intrusion into a predominantly rural county.

Coal had fuelled Britain’s industrial revolution, powered the rail networks and fuelled the Royal Navy that built and protected her worldwide empire. Coal was King. And behind the skilful speech that Chamberlain delivered lay a simple, economic impetus.

Coal had been discovered, by accident, in Kent. The nation’s ever-expanding capital, London, was hungry for coal. Currently, every ton of coal had to be transported hundreds of miles either from South Wales or Scotland, Nottingham or Yorkshire. But Kent was only 60 miles away from London. Coal from Kent had to be cheaper, in transport costs alone – and, besides, a new coalfield would present a fresh start after the bitterness that currently clouded relationships in every major coalfield in Britain in the aftermath of the 1926 General Strike, when the British miners had been among the Government’s most trenchant opponents.

Chamberlain’s audience knew that the Kent coal industry was as yet only in its infancy. Between 1906 and the outbreak of World War One, a new colliery had opened almost every year. Tilmanstone in 1906, Guilford in 1907, Snowdown in 1908, Wingham and Woodnesborough in 1910, Stonehall in 1912 and Chislet in 1913. But output was low and some pits had already closed. The sinking of a new, deep pit at Betteshanger in 1924 evoked this new optimism. Chamberlain left Canterbury that evening in 1926 having delivered his vision for the future and confident that he had convinced his audience that the economic argument would carry the day. But the Kent Coalfield had made a stuttering start over many years. And Chamberlain’s grand plan was speculative to say the least...

* * * * * * * *

It was a railway initiative that led to the discovery of coal in Kent. Sir Edward William Watkin was at one time or another chairman of nine railway companies and trustee of a tenth. He was knighted in 1868 and made a baronet in 1880 for his pioneering work in helping to create Britain’s rail network. Born in Lancashire, he had worked in his father’s mills and later founded a newspaper, The Merchant Examiner. He was ambitious, a man of vision. He was an advisor to Indian railways and those building the Athens to Piraeus rail link. He helped unite the Canadian provinces to create the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway.

His dream in Britain was to build a direct rail link from the North and Midlands to London and this he had achieved by 1899, with a grand opening of the Great Central main line at Marylebone Station, in London. Next, he planned to link Liverpool and Manchester to Paris by rail. He was already on the board of Chemins de Fer du Nord, a railway company whose headquarters were in Calais, and Watkin had constructed the Great Central main line from Sheffield to Marylebone with this in mind; its gauge would enable this British track to accommodate the larger-gauge continental trains.

But to fulfil this dream, a tunnel or a bridge would be needed to link Britain to France. Watkin, who was chairman of South Eastern Railway, chose the tunnel option and, in 1880, had sunk a shaft between Dover and Folkestone to enable a pilot heading to be bored. The borings were successful and Sir Edward formed the Submarine Continental Railway Company as a declaration of intent.¹ A second boring followed at Shakespeare Cliff, Dover and, in 1881, Watkin campaigned in Parliament for land on which he could begin to build a Channel Tunnel. History indicates again and again, however, that a relationship, be it political, economic or physical, between Britain and France, is fraught with difficulty. And so it proved in 1881.

Britain’s politicians were more concerned about security than the entente cordiale. What if the French invaded through the tunnel? Watkin was asked how he would block the tunnel to prevent such an invasion. Fiercely he argued the trade and cultural advantages of a Channel Tunnel. He lobbied the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister at champagne receptions. But in April 1892, the Board of Trade instructed him that boring must stop until the military security of a tunnel was ensured.

Queen Victoria, it was reported, found Watkin’s scheme ‘objectionable’. The War Office Scientific Committee opposed it. Watkin was left with a ‘tunnel’ 1850 metres long, and a shattered vision. And it remained so for the next four years. But the engineer to Watkin’s tunnel company, Francis Brady, had other ideas. In 1886, he suggested that the redundant machinery might be used to look for coal. And he assembled his evidence…

Across the Channel in France, there had been a Nord Pas de Calais coalfield since 1852. There were collieries at Lens, Bruay and Courrières. A scientific paper by Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen in 1855 declared that, if you extended a geological line from the established pits in South Wales and the Forest of Dean, across the channel, to the Nord Pas de Calais coalfields, there was every chance that there would be coal in South East England, perhaps under the rolling grasslands of Kent. He received little support for his views but coal was the nation’s primary source of energy and in 1871, a Royal Commission on coal supplies considered the suggestion again and agreed to a test boring. The ‘Sub-Wealden Committee’ was set up and a test boring began near Battle in Sussex. The boring reached a depth of 1905 – and then the boring machine jammed. The operation had cost a massive £7,000 and nothing had been proved. Undaunted, geologist and soldier, Godwin-Austen, recommended a second trial boring, this time not in the middle of Sussex but near Dover, the closest point in Britain to the French collieries.

The Sub-Wealden Committee ignored the suggestion. But Watkin’s engineer, Brady, urged that their redundant tunnelling machinery might indeed be used to seek out a coal seam, if one existed. Watkin agreed. Four years later, in 1890, 1180 feet from the surface, they struck a seam of coal 1ft 3ins thick. They drilled on. At 2221 feet, they found a seam 4 feet thick. He had proved that there was bituminous coal in Kent. The exercise had so far cost Watkin £10,000 but he was in no position to take commercial advantage of his discovery. Neither his Channel Tunnel Company nor his South Eastern Railway had a licence to dig coal. And Watkin was close to retirement. For the moment, coal in Kent would remain in the ground.

The discovery of coal became a political issue almost immediately. William Morris, designer of spectacular wallpaper, textiles and furniture, and a leading member of the Socialist League, forecast that Kent would become ‘a manufacturing hell’. He went on: They (the workers) have learned by this time that Sir Edward Watkin and his pals (the landowners) will stick to (keep) whatever swag they can filch out of Kentish Coal, which belongs to the people, not to them, and will only yield to the workers what they are compelled to yield.²

Despite the furore, Watkin’s engineer, Brady, knew what he knew – he had proved that as he stood on Shakespeare Cliff, there was coal under his feet. His challenge, now that Sir Edward Watkin had retired, was how to turn this knowledge into cash. Enter, stage right, Arthur Burr. Burr is an unlikely fairy godfather, with a questionable record as an entrepreneur behind him and an even more chequered financial career yet to be recorded. In his excellent essay on Burr,³ JP Hollingsworth recalls that, on one of his frequent appearances in a bankruptcy court, the judge described him as ‘a dangerous rogue’. Certainly, during his long and lively career, men died and others were stripped of all they possessed when they associated with Burr or one of his initiatives.

Arthur Burr

Arthur Burr was born in the London suburb of Islington in 1850. We know little of the first 55 years of his life; Hollingsworth describes him as ‘an archetypal Victorian speculator...a basically agreeable and friendly man’ about whom people had very different, often contradictory views depending on the experience of the acquaintanceship. He was probably ‘a very skilled conman...with his cavalier methods of conducting business and perpetual optimism that maybe even he believed in.’

This was the man who approached Watkin’s engineer, Francis Brady, in 1896, two years after Watkin’s retirement. He offered to help Brady develop what he described as ‘the Kent Coalfield’. Brady had considered setting up a syndicate to do just that but Burr persuaded him to join his newly-formed ‘Kent Coalfield Syndicate’. He gave Brady guarantees that favourable terms would be available to Sir Edward Watkin’s companies, the South Eastern Railways and the Channel Tunnel Company. Brady received £2,000 in shares and £1,000 in cash from the Kent Coalfield Syndicate and became a director. For a few months.

In 1896, Brady instigated a resumption of exploration on the Shakespeare Cliff site and the ‘Brady Pit’ was dug 280 feet west of the existing workings. In July 1896, Arthur Burr decided to take over responsibility for the project. A great deal of water was then found at a depth of 360 feet and operations were suspended. A second shaft was sunk nearby, known as the ‘Simpson Pit’. Almost immediately, there was a tragic accident. On March 6th 1897, ‘there was an inrush of water from the greensand which suddenly engulfed the men working in the bottom...and eight men were drowned’.⁴ Work went on and a third shaft was bored but all the pits were very wet. ‘The total water that had to be dealt with at a depth of 450 feet was 54170 gallons per hour…with this amount of water coming in, the sinking was tedious. In 1899, progress became very slow...and financial difficulties intervened’.⁵

Increased flooding stopped the mining. But at the last minute a thick bed of ironstone was found. Allied to the coal deposit, Arthur Burr had something to work with and to influence others, to fund his dream. He publicly paraded the possibility of a coal mine (which was unworkable) and an ironworks (which was unproven). On October 14th 1897, he instigated a new company, The Kent Colliers Cooperation Ltd. Its aim was to build, at the cost of £50,000, a colliery at Shakespeare Cliff, to produce 3000 tons a day by 1900. Costs rose to more than £1 million but no coal was ever mined in any commercially viable quantity.

By 1907, Arthur Burr was living with his wife and son, Malcolm, in a terraced Victorian villa in Church Road, Dover, with business premises at 58 Castle Street. Between 1904 and 1910 he began work on five more pits, none of which was a commercial success. The prospectus he wrote as he formed and discarded company after company, became ever more glowing. In 1897, he had declared the Kent Coal Exploration Company to be a vehicle for Dover coal to take advantage of the fact that it could be freighted to London four or five shillings a ton cheaper than Yorkshire or Midlands coal, and the company ‘should for many years return large profits’. Ten years later, disappointed investors were still waiting.

There is a pattern to Burr’s operations. First, he concentrated on the mineral rights, leases and freeholds to appeal to investors in a new company. Then, a separate company was floated to bore for coal. Next, a syndicate was formed to begin working and equipping the pits. A finance company was then added, and lastly a railway initiative.⁶ All separate companies, each working with the others with no related accounts. Burr was usually chairman or director-general for life, taking 10% of trading profits. It was also a feature of the Burr groups that, if one company had money in the bank, some cash would be lent to less successful companies in the group. All these loans were negotiated for a fee through the East Kent Contract and Financial Company formed in December 1907 (Director-General: Arthur Burr). The 1917 accounts reveal the Contract Company had lent:

Kent Coal Concessions Ltd – £56,116:12:6d

SE Coalfield Extension Ltd – £١٥,٤٠٣:١٥:٩d

Extended Extensions Ltd – £١٠,٢٣٢:٤:١١d

East Kent Colliery Ltd – £١٥,٨١٩:٧:١٠d

Snowdown Colliery Ltd – £١٩,٣٩٠:١٩:٢d

Guilford Syndicate Ltd – £٤٢,٧٣٦:١٦:٢d

SE Electric Power Co – £٥,١٥٢:١٢:٦d

But at the same time (1917), the East Kent Contract Company owed the following amounts:

Intermediate Equipment Ltd – £٢٩,٠٤١:٨:٧d

Foncage Syndicate Ltd – £١٤,١٢٦:١٢:٣d

Sondage Syndicate Ltd – £٤,٥٧٧:١٩:١d

Deal & Walmer Coalfield – Ext. £908:4:6d

East Kent Light Railway – £٨,٨٨٦:١٤:٠d

Like all the Burr companies, the truth was that the Contract Company was undercapitalised. The lendings to other companies were more than its issued share capital. Because of its position as a broker, and the constant lending and borrowing between companies, profits were high: 10% in 1908, 15% in 1909, 15% in 1910, 50% in 1911 and 20% in 1912. These dividends were very profitable to Burr; in 1912 he was paid £1,850.⁷

Yet Burr was a popular and respected figure in East Kent. In October 1912, the mayor and councillors of Dover planned to honour him with a civic dinner. Unemployment in the Dover area was high, and Burr publicly offered to employ practically all the unemployed in his various companies, which indeed he did. He set up a ‘Workmen’s League’ to improve the relationship between management and workers, to avoid misunderstandings and industrial interest. But, as Hollingsworth observes, his web of companies ‘became so complex that it is amazing that Burr was able to keep his business going for the best part of 20 years. The strain of all his dealings must have been unimaginable’.⁸

But, for Arthur Burr, 1912 was a good year. The Tilmanstone pit had been sunk in 1907 and officially opened by Burr’s granddaughter, Gabrielle, after whom the shaft was named. It didn’t have a conspicuously successful start. It had flooded early on and work was suspended for a year. It claimed the lives of three miners when a bucket broke loose and fell down the shaft. It was underfinanced and the machinery needed to bore coal from the seam arrived nearly a year late.

But a second shaft, named after Burr’s other granddaughter, Rowena, had been bored in 1910 and the installation of electric pumps to drain the water in 1912 meant that, at last, Tilmanstone was producing coal. Burr was ecstatic. He was unwell but insisted on going to the pithead carried by two burly miners.⁹ In the same year at the Snowdown Colliery, in which Burr also had an interest, a rich coal seam was reached. A special train carried jubilant shareholders and company officials to the colliery and, as the first hobbit (bucket) of coal was brought to the surface, glasses of champagne were raised and emptied.

However questionable Burr’s business methods, there was no doubt that he, and coal, had brought fresh business to Dover and East Kent. On February 4th 1913, Arthur Burr was made a Freeman of the Borough of Dover. His acceptance speech lauded one man – Arthur Burr. The coal mining industry in Kent had been a ‘one-man show’. No Board of Directors would have carried through the enterprise. ‘They would have killed it because they would not have taken the risk’. Burr was presented with a loving cup, which cost the town 250 guineas and the mayor praised him as ‘one of the greatest benefactors Dover has ever known’.

During this explosion of praise, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, declared that Dover was destined to become