The Bolsover Colliery Company was a major mining concern established to extract coal from land owned by the

Duke of Portland Duke is a male title either of a monarch ruling over a duchy, or of a member of royalty, or nobility. As rulers, dukes are ranked below emperors, kings, grand princes, grand dukes, and sovereign princes. As royalty or nobility, they are ranke ...

. At its peak the business was a constituent of the FT 30 index of leading companies on the

London Stock Exchange London Stock Exchange (LSE) is a stock exchange in the City of London, England, United Kingdom. , the total market value of all companies trading on LSE was £3.9 trillion. Its current premises are situated in Paternoster Square close to St P ...

History

The company was founded in 1889 by Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge, a

Northumberland Northumberland () is a county in Northern England, one of two counties in England which border with Scotland. Notable landmarks in the county include Alnwick Castle, Bamburgh Castle, Hadrian's Wall and Hexham Abbey. It is bordered by land ...

born mine owner, who secured a lease from the

for land at

Bolsover Bolsover is a market town and the administrative centre of the Bolsover District, Derbyshire, England. It is from London, from Sheffield, from Nottingham and from Derby. It is the main town in the Bolsover district. The civil parish for th ...

Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands, England. It includes much of the Peak District National Park, the southern end of the Pennine range of hills and part of the National Forest. It borders Greater Manchester to the nor ...

and started shaft sinking to reach the coal in 1891. The general manager of the company at this time was John Plowright Houfton, who was knighted for his work for the local community in 1929. Bainbridge secured the rights to mine coal at Creswell in 1894 and shaft sinking for Creswell Colliery began under the direction of J. P. Houfton in September that year. Coal was reached at 450 yards and production began in 1897. The colliery had two shafts and access to between three and four square miles of coal reserves. By 1901 the colliery was producing 2700 to 3000 tons of coal daily and in the July, 3001 tons was delivered to the surface in one day, a world record for coal production at the time. A model village was built to accommodate some of the workforce. In 1899 Bainbridge secured a further lease from the Duke of Portland for land at Crown Farm near Mansfield in

Nottinghamshire Nottinghamshire (; abbreviated Notts.) is a landlocked county in the East Midlands region of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west. The trad ...

: coal was reached in 1905. Subsequent leases were secured from

Earl Manvers Earl Manvers was a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1806 for Charles Medows Pierrepont, 1st Viscount Newark. He had already been created Baron Pierrepont, of Holme Pierrepont in the County of Nottingham, and Viscou ...

and Lord Savile allowing collieries to be established at Rufford,

Clipstone Clipstone in north Nottinghamshire is a small ex-coal mining village built on the site of an old army base and close to the site of a medieval royal palace. The population of the civil parish was 3,469 at the 2001 census, increasing to 4,665 a ...

and Thoresby in

where coal was reached 1913, 1922 and 1928 respectively. In 1933 the company's Bolsover, Clipstone, Creswell, Mansfield, Rufford and Thorsby Collieries employed 9,369 men extracting 4.5 million tons of coal from the Top Hard, Waterloo and High Hazel seams.

Demise of the business

The company's collieries were acquired by the

National Coal Board The National Coal Board (NCB) was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the United Kingdom's collieries on "ve ...

on nationalisation in 1947. Bolsover Colliery closed in 1993 and Creswell Colliery closed in 1991.

References

External links

Victoria County History, Bolsover Colliery

{{Authority control Non-renewable resource companies established in 1889 Coal companies of England 1889 establishments in England Mining in Derbyshire Companies based in Derbyshire Companies formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange Non-renewable resource companies disestablished in 1947 Bolsover Energy companies established in 1889