THOUGH it never had more than two dozen major collieries, the East Lancashire, or Burnley, Coalfield was, until the closure of its last deep pit at Hapton Valley in 1982, the region's second-largest provider of jobs after the cotton industry, writes ERIC LEAVER.

But, as mines historian, ex-collier Jack Nadin, of Burnley, explains in a new book*, despite its seams having been worked from earliest times, it was not until the Industrial Revolution and the mid-19th Century that rising demand from the hungry mills led to new and deeper mines being sunk and domination of the coalfield by four major companies. It is on these that Jack concentrates, bringing back fascinating, detailed facts and some 200 images of a vanished industry that at the time of its nationalisation in 1947 employed 3,443 men at 19 pits in East Lancashire. As is disclosed by his in-depth research and pictures, helped by readers' responses to his appeals for information in Looking Back, work on the coalfield had not always been the preserve of men -- dangerous and arduous though it often was.

For, as the first photograph shows, employees at the old Moorfield Colliery at Altham, dating from around the second decade of the last century, shows, many workers were women. The women -- two of whom are wearing poke bonnets redolent of fashions of the previous century -- probably worked on the pit top screening coal, Jack says, though it is noteworthy that some are equipped with safety lamps that were used underground.

And this 1920s photograph of colliers at the Gambleside pit which was located on the far side of Clowbridge Reservoir near Dunnockshaw, shows mere boys among the workforce. The lads, Jack reckons, may have worked in pairs drawing tubs for the miners.

The Gambleside Colliery, which took its name from the nearby former hamlet of that name, employed 30 men underground and two surface workers in the mid-1890s, but was abandoned in 1936.

Alongside the headgear at the pithead stood the colliery manager's house.

"Rumour has it that the manager once complained to the owners of the pit that its roof was letting in water and that they gave him an umbrella," Jack writes.

The Moorfield Colliery at Altham was the scene of East Lancashire's worst-ever mining disaster in November, 1883, when 70 men and boys died in a gas explosion underground. It produced its first coal two years earlier and closed in January, 1949.

Down the road from Altham, work began in December, 1902, on sinking the shaft of the Calder Colliery alongside the Clayton-le-Moors to Padiham road near its bridge over the river from which the pit took it name. The picture below shows the shaft collar in position, ready for sinking to commence.

Four men were killed in February, 1908, when the sinking was almost completed. They were descending the new shaft in a tub connected to just two chains when it collided with a beam and all four were thrown to their deaths to the pit bottom. By the end of the First World War, the Calder Colliery employed 200 men underground and 37 surface workers. Until the 1920s, an aerial ropeway took its output to the coke ovens at the Huncoat Colliery.

Later the two mines were connected underground and coal from the Calder pit was raised at Huncoat and screened there. The Calder mine closed in 1958.

The coalfield's largest working pit was Bank Hall Colliery at Burnley, sunk in 1865. With a 1,500ft-deep main shaft, it also had the longest tunnel -- more than six miles long, it stretched almost to Colne.

This picture of the pithead was taken in 1948 just prior to a £1million modernisation programme which the National Coal Board undertook in a bid to alleviate the acute coal shortages which households and industry were suffering from at the time.

Three years earlier, Bank Hall employed 571 men underground and 362 on the surface. It closed in 1971 and the site was transformed into 50 acres of parkland. Apart from the Moorfield Colliery catastrophe of 1883 and the tragedy of the March, 1962, explosion at the Hapton Valley Colliery, which claimed 19 lives at what was to be its last pit, the coalfield never suffered the scale of disasters that others did.

But, Jack says, individual accidents in East Lancashire's mines claimed many more lives that all the disasters put together. "The price of coal was indeed high, not only in the Burnley Coalfield, but throughout Britain -- something we should never forget," he writes.

* Collieries of North East Lancashire, by Jack Nadin (Tempus Publishing, £12.99). Jack has a limited number of signed copies available directly from himself for people, such as the housebound and disabled, who may otherwise have difficulty obtaining the book. Call him on 01282-454927.

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