Wigan Album

Mike,these photos show the pit after the underground connection with Bickershaw and the re-organization of the coal handling system so that all the output came up at Bickershaw. Then there was no need for the sidings and rail connection to the main line at Golborne so they had all been ripped up as you see. A new stores and materials compound was later built there. The dismantling you can see would be of the link gantry from No. 3 shaft, the former coal winding shaft, to the screens. Obviously they weren't needed any more either and were themselves demolished shortly after. The chimney would have gone too a bit later when they built a new boiler house.

yes chris & that really signaled the demise of golborne as a pit . when they wanted to close the complex down they had to make golborne run at a loss to justify doing that. so they pumped money into a new nerve center & a new stores which put the pit into a deficit & when golborne went so did the others.

Chris, Whups.

Thanks for your comments which confims what I thought must have been the case.

It never ceases to amaze me that even after all these years people still believe Goebbels Scargills propoganda

fact is horace this strategy comes from the 50s when my dad worked at park colliery (stonse"s)in ashton. they put brand new hydrolic chocks & cutter on the faces ,did a cut of coal , then shut the pit on supposedly economic grounds when there was a couple of hundred yrs of coal left. but spending a million on the new machinery made the pit run at a loss & it made it justifyable to shut it . nothin to do with scargill in both counts.

And it never ceases to amaze me that supposedly intelligent people are either sufficiently naive or are just simply “away with the mixer” that they cannot see that the Tories bent over backwards to “shaft” the miners, whom they have never forgiven for their part in bringing down Ted Heath's lot in 1974.
Yes I would agree, “King Arthur” wasn’t necessarily always the brightest tool in the draw - and at times wiser counsel might have prevailed with other NUM leaders before him, but in essence on this one he was dead right.

When you pick up your next gas or electric bill, reflect on this fact:-
There are hundreds and hundreds of millions of tons of useable workable coal supplies under this once great country of ours; all of which could and should have provided cheap energy for the people of this nation for hundreds of years to come. More than enough time to hunt around for other sustainable forms of energy without being stampeded down the road we have now been thrust along by short sighted government ….. “Wind farms, tidal energy” what a joke.
Now in the so called energy market we find ourselves at the mercy of greedy middlemen playing the market and other nations who have no love for us and use their privileged position to disadvantage us. I can recall no instance in the days of Empire, of the British coal industry restricting supplies to any country to disadvantage them.
To paraphrase a great leader who did understand the value of coal to the nation, "Never was so much lost, by so few, to the detriment of so many,”!

It is a supreme irony that having gone to such great lengths to destroy a whole way of life some twenty five years ago and supposedly prevent the country from “being held to ransom” by the colliers; that we now see a Tory led coalition government facing the same possibility of a similar situation occurring if the fuel tanker drivers should go on strike. You couldn’t make it up if you tried.

hear hear dave taylor, my sentiments exactly.

A big, big yes of support to Dave Taylor in his comprehensive answer to Horace !!!!. I was a miner at Bold, Golborne, Parsonage and then Park Side. It was as plain as the nose on your face what the intentions of the Tories was, when they got in power in 1979. Why does Scargill seem to get all the stick, yes maybe there was a better way of going about it but did circumstances not stop it???. I supported the strike all the way, along with my family and really believed in the just cause to try and protect jobs, not only jobs that provided a living but also kept their local community ticking over. Anyway, I can go on all day about this subject but I'll let someone else have a say. Well done again Dave 10/10.

To ste stonehouse it was me who got your frank a job in the headings with les holts and colin brown don,t know how to get on the website only neck down man.We went over to parsonage they stopped the headings in the peacock seam and sent us there did not like it there so i left and went to work for cementation allso think i was set up

In your guy’s opinion to somewhere who was only born in 1987 but is really interested in local history & the history off coal mining. When they shut golborne in 89 how many years do you reckon they could off carried on mining in golborne if things had been different?
I know it was already an old pit when it shut but did it still have big reserves? If golborne pit was still open when I left school I would off been straight down there!