The following titles have arrived recently they are available from the usual sources including myself at www.moorebooks.co.uk (all are publishers reviews)
Mike
British Mining No 96 - Memoirs 2013 (free to NMRS members ) £10.00 + P&P
produced by NMRS, SB, A5 78pp
•Colliers' wages in the West Riding Coalfield ca. 1610-1930, John Goodchild
•Colliers' housing in the West Riding Coalfield, John Goodchild
•High Wind Bank lead smelting site, Hawkswick pipeline,
Littondale, Gav Robinson •Kilnsey lead smelting mill - survey of existing buildings, Sonia Wilkinson
•Mines, trials and prospectivity along the Tylwch Anticline, Powys, Wales, David M.D. James
•The Strontian Mines of Argyll, R.M. Callender
•The New British Iron Company, Nigel A. Chapman
Remember Senghenydd - The Colliery Disaster of 1913 £8.00 + P&P
Edited by Jen LLywelyn, sb, 209x146 mm, 176 pages
On 14 October 1913 about 950 men were working deep beneath Senghenydd, near Caerffili, when there was a huge explosion in the Universal Colliery. After months of rescue work it was clear that 439 miners had died. This book tells of Senghenydd before the 1913 disaster, including the explosion in 1901 that killed eighty-one miners
Walkden Yard - The Lancashire Central Coalfield Workshops £14.99 +p&p
Alan Davies, SB, 159 pp
This fascinating selection of photographs gives an insight into the history of the Walkden Yard and the Lancashire Coalfield. Located close to the Ellesmere Colliery, the Walkden Yard ultimately became the NCB Central Workshops for Lancashire. From here the workshops served the Bridgewater Trustees' collieries, providing engineering support as well as maintaining the numerous railway locomotives and the many hundreds of wagons that the company owned. Opened in 1878, Walkden Yard transferred to the National Coal Board upon nationalization after the Second World War and its importance grew as it served the other Lancashire collieries too. At Walkden there were a machine shop, joiners' shop, electricians' shop, paint shop, tinsmiths', locomotive repair shop, wagon sheds and wagon machine shop. The yard itself employed hundreds of men and boys but was closed in 1986 with the decline of the Lancashire coalfield. A housing estate now sits atop the site of the Walkden yard and it is hard to remember that the site once serviced the many locomotives that belonged to the NCB, or that the Coal Board and its predecessors operated many locomotives over their own lines as well as the railway company ones and that a huge industry was maintained at Walkden yard, repairing locomotives and rolling stock. In this book, Alan Davies tells the story of the Walkden yard and the locomotives of the Lancashire coalfield.
Rhondda Collieries Through Time £14.99 + P&P
David Swindenbank & Alun Seward, SB, 234 x 165 mm, 96pp sepia and colour illustrations throughout
Rhondda’ – even now, the name evokes the turbulent times when Rhondda (actually two valleys, the Fawr and Fach) was synonymous with the deep-mining of steam coal. This is a story of pioneering deep-mining and unbridled capitalism: the prospecting of two valleys, unfettered by health and safety, amid divisive industrial relations and scarce health-care. The result fired railways, steam-powered shipping and the engines of the Industrial Revolution across the world.
Using a mixture of historical and modern photographs, coloured by personal testimony and memories, this book reveals the vibrant, turbulent, often tragic record of Rhondda: from pastoral vale via ‘black gold’-rush to grimy industrial prime, followed by the twentieth-century economic slide, the demise of all its fifty-three collieries and today’s valleys – a mainly residential landscape of green hills.