What was Cotgrave like? well, I hated it as I came from a small but very productive and profitable pit where everyone knew each other and were very friendly. I am easy going, but hit two in the first week at this pit because everyone was so petty and unwilling to help anyone. Their favourite saying was:

Its not my ******* job

It was a horrible place to work, well that was when the few that would work were not always being hampered by others to stop them working.
Personally I was glad it closed as it lacked the comradery of other pits, and the willingness to get on with the job and help others, and move to another smaller and friendly pit. :devil:

Fair enough.......but I know what you're saying. I worked at a small pit, Park Mill, probably not more than 350 men. Of course I didn't know them all, but was on "nodding terms" with most. After I left the industry I worked at Flockton plant hire & spent time working at a lot of pits in the Yorks, Notts & Derby areas. For the same reasons as you, I always preferred the smaller ones...

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I went to Cotgrave in 1986 for just over six months as a student having previously worked at Kellingley. Thanks to the training officer and Mr Crisp , the pit manager, I had the good fortune to go straight into my face training which I had just enough time to complete.

I have to say compared to Kellingley, for me it was a smaller and in some respects a friendly/happier place to work. That said I recognise some of the attitude you recall of "f#@! it .......... note to do with me" and where I worked there was a lot of post 84-85 strike tension (most of the shift I worked with were NUM men; a mixture of Cotgrave Geordies, exile Derbyshire colliers and ex Clifton Colliery men).

Virtually all the time I was there I was on K1's which was the development panel in the Blackshale Seam. It was a challenging environment; if the roof wasn't caving in then the return was suffering from spectacular floor heave. My memories are of working really hard either on good production runs, shoveling rock from falls onto the panzer, dinting, laughing, trying to avoid Vic the shearer driver attempts a snap time to scrounge my tea and learning the most important lessons in life about managing people!

If I was honest I have no negative memories of Cotgrave ........ in fact my experience there were formative in my subsequent employment in the coal industry (liscenced pits and opencast) and with my current employers in the heavy civil enigineering sector!

One thing I will never forget about Cotgrave was being sent with half a Blackshale face team to a Deep Hard panel on nightshifts to take three cuts in the shift from what was Europe's longest (?world) longest mechanised face (perhaps 460m?): so long it required a mid face transfer point from one panzer to the next). For three shifts on the trot we beat the outputs of the fully resoursed other shifts!

It might of only been a relatively short snapshot in 1986 but the six + months spent in and about Cotgrave Colliery's Blackshale K1 are a time that I treasure and look back on with affection

Ki's was generally filled with ex Moorgreen men who moved to Cotgrave and were put on it as an entire team because it was the worst face there. They were from Blackshale and knew the seam well, they were the highest producing face there for a while. Cotgrave men resented this and managed to get them broken up because they had the worst face, yet the highest output of any of the nine faces. This was how political and resnetful it was.

As more men came from Pye Hill, Hucknall, Babbington, Linby, and other closed pits the situation improved, but there was always that divide. With more men from smaller pits the power of the Cotgrave men diminished as these men banded together to form a better pit. Also many Cotgrave men jumped at the chance of redundancy as it was offered, and other men from the old Clifton and Wollaton pits loved the large numbers of men from other pits.

Thats not to say there weren't any good Cotgrave men, there were, and many of them are still friends to this day.

That rings very true, I had forgotten that quite a few of the lads I worked with were ex-Moorgreen Colliery men.

My time there was only short 😉

What always amazed me in subsequent years following my time at Cotgrave was how British Coal seemed suprised that the roof and floor conditions at their flagship (ie bottomless hole to throw money in) Asfordby Colliery were so poor?