Jim gave us an absorbing, illustrated talk about the history of the Kent Coalfields with old photographs and some video footage. Unless you live in Kent, many people have no knowledge of the history of mining in the county so it was a fascinating topic for us to discover more about. Jim had spent 35 years at Betteshanger and had seen vast changes in the way coal was mined over time.
It had been known since the Middle Ages that there was coal under France and Belgium, so the strata under southern England were also likely to yield coal. The original Channel tunnel attempt sank a borehole in 1880 at Abbot’s Cliff and a further shaft sunk in 1890 near Shakespeare Cliff found coal at a depth of 1,100 ft (340m). Between 1896 and 1919, at least 38 boreholes were sunk across East Kent to locate coal and it was estimated that there were 10 billion tons of working coal seams; at the same time 200 million tons of iron ore was estimated from the Dover area. By 1925, seventeen collieries were planned but only 4 produced economic quantities of coal – these were Tilmanstone (1906), Snowdown (1907), Chislet (1914) and Betteshanger (1924).
The plans for the area at the time look like an industrialists’ mecca; the mines would employ 147,000 miners and the steelworks, using the iron ore, would employ 48,000 steelworkers! New towns were proposed at Chislet (8,000 residents), New Woodnesborough (12,000) New Wingham (20,000) amongst many others including Ham, a tiny hamlet near Eastry where 31,000 new residents were going to be accommodated – East Kent would have been a completely different place than it is today if these plans had come to fruition!
Miners came from everywhere to work the pits, including Ireland, Scotland and even further afield. Many had been sappers in WWI and were used to tunnelling and the recession of 1919 pulled men towards Kent by every means, even by bicycle or foot, from miles away. The local communities were quite hostile towards the miners with many boarding houses specifying ‘No Miners’. Sir Patrick Abercrombie was in charge of developing Kent housing for miners and wanted to place communities at some distance from the collieries e.g. Mill Hill was 3 miles from the Betteshanger pit. Originally, there were no pithead baths so when miners finished their shifts, they were not able to use public transport or go into any pubs. Coal lorries were used to transport miners to and from work and a levy of 1d per ton of coal was used to fund pithead baths. Despite the difficulty of working thin undulating coal seams in Kent, some very deep and hot (Snowdown well over 3000ft (915m) down) coal output increased from 368,000 tons in 1925 to over 2 million tons, 10 years later.
Gradually the miners from disparate places came together as a community and organised places of worship, welfare organisations and social events including sports clubs, brass bands and choirs. Collieries competed against each other at yearly galas and outings were put on for retired miners and their families.
The women of the coalfields, the miners’ wives and mothers, had a very hard life often boiling water for tin baths at night for husbands and sons who had spent all day underground. During the 1984 miners’ strike, women organised soup kitchens and the distribution of food parcels, to keep families fed during these difficult times. Gradually the need for coal for industrial processes had petered out. Chislet mine had already closed in 1969 and the closure of the other three mines quickly followed, after the end of the strike.
Jim Davies was the last miner remaining at Betteshanger when the mine closed on Friday 25th August 1989; it was the end of coalmining in Kent and Jim turned out the lights as he left.
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Report by Lesley Smith
Secretary Deal Branch Kent FHS