William Rawson: The Brave Son of a Ripley Miner

I recently came across the Rawson Family of Nuttall’s Park and Wright Avenue of Ripley whilst writing a short biography of William Samuel Rawson, who lived in Ripley all his life. This William worked at Ripley Colliery from 1940, but had previously been employed at nearby Britain Colliery, both of which were owned by the …

Markham Colliery Online Exhibition

The Arts and Humanities Research Council have been funding a joint project with the University of Wolverhampton and Northumbria University, known as 'On Behalf of the People', which focuses on coal mining communities from the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947, right up until 1994 when collieries were winding down. Eight different case studies …

My Family’s Claim Against the Butterley Company

One of my main tasks as an archive assistant on the Mining the Seams Project, is cataloguing documents. For me, this involves checking over documents and creating spreadsheets to correctly describe them for future users. Since I started on the project in October 2019, a lot of this has involved looking through various correspondence of …

Mining the Seams Project Update

First of all, I hope you've been enjoying the blog posts about some of the interesting things that have been found so far during the project, which seeks to catalogue the archive left to us by the National Coal Board. The project has a particular focus on the medical and compensation aspects, but as it's …