An exhibition marking the seventieth anniversary of the nationalisation of the coal industry opened this month at the National Coal Mining Museum for England. ‘By the People, For the People’, which runs until December 2017, explores the events that led to the creation of the National Coal Board (NCB) and raising of its flag at collieries throughout the UK on 1 January 1947 (known as ‘Vesting Day’).
The exhibition looks at many aspects of the nationalised coal industry and the culture it created not only within the workplace but also in the communities in which miners and their families lived. Sports and pastimes, art and culture, training and recruitment: these all developed in interesting ways through the state’s investment in coal and welfare between 1947 and the end of nationalisation in 1994.
Derbyshire Record Office will be at the museum on Wednesday 19 April displaying a selection of items from the archive of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Derbyshire Area that complement the exhibition’s main themes. We will be showing how miners and their families spent their leisure time at the Derbyshire Miners’ Welfare Holiday Centres in Skegness and North Wales during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as looking at the social and sporting activities organised by the NCB, NUM and the Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation (CISWO) in the same period.
Please do come and take a look.
Visiting Derbyshire in August, 2017 and would like to see this display. Where is the National Coalmining Museum located please.
Sorry for the delay in replying – the National Coal Mining Museum is in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. It’s perhaps a 90-minute drive from where we are in Matlock. The display is on until the end of the year, and you can find out more about it at this web page: https://www.ncm.org.uk/whats-on/by-the-people-for-the-people-exhibition.