What have you done today with your Austin Seven

[Dave Mann]

Give the shovel a rest and try oil Hedd.

[Hedd_Jones]

Dave

Trust me it has been discussed.

Mind, I couldn't get any Diesel to light up with either locally. So used Veg oil laced with white spirit instead (also for cleaning the paint).

[Tony Griffiths]

Coal per ton of the grade "best house" we paid:
November 2010 £322
January 2020: £347
September 2021: £350
February 2022: £394
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time. Aneurin Bevan .

[Duncan Grimmond]

I seem to recall M.Thatcher did for the mines and Brexit did for the fishing industry…
Both industries are pretty much redundant today owing to greed and a lack of foresight, we’ve overfished as a species and while we led the world in fluidised bed clean coal combustion in 1982, a spiteful revenge for E Heath’s humiliation did for the NCB combustion Research facility

[Dave Mann]

I've never understood why M Thatcher is blamed for closing coal mines, by the early 1960s Britain had 50m tons of coal stockpiled in every available disused quarry in the country and during the 1960 s coal consumption really fell off and under Lord Robens 406 mines were closed. I came across some photos of slack coal from Peak Forest being loaded into railway wagons from grossly overloaded Bedford S trucks at Dove Holes. Now Peak Forest doesn't have any coal mines just limestone quarries and it took a long while finding the answer, eventually I wrote to the book's author a retired locomotive driver who worked the trains involved. From his information I worked out that about 84,000 tons had been stored at Perseverance quarry Peak Forest with an further unknown quantity at Grin Low quarry south of Buxton. From there I learnt more from the National coal mining museum, a rather embarrassing situation which has naturally been kept quiet.

[Duncan Grimmond]

I recall great difficulty in obtaining anthracite for the Rayburn in 1987 as the Welsh finest was no longer available and we were eventually buying South American second grade, reputedly dragged out by 12 year-olds working in appalling conditions but whether that was true or apocryphal I never found out.

[Reckless Rat]

The coal mine in our village, St Florent sur Auzonnet was sunk in 1950, the main shaft being dug to a depth of just over 800 metres. The coal is mainly anthracite, with seams over 2 metres thick. During the short life span of the colliery it was the most productive deep mine in Europe. However, with anthracite being mainly only suitable (art the time) for ships and railway locomotives, the change to diesel/electric caused the market to dry up and the pit closed in 1974. This, and the move to nuclear was the death knell for deep mined coal throughout France as none of it was suitable for coal burning power stations that preferred the brown stuff from Poland. As far as I am aware there is no longer any coal mining in France although huge stocks remain unexploited. Opencasting carried on for a few more years but closed down over 20 years ago. No maintenance has been carried out underground so the infrastructure is lost.

The main shaft was dynamited in 1975 and very little remains apart from a few, very old ex-miners and a small museum.

[Tony Griffiths]

As we were closing the last Welsh anthracite mines, Germany was keeping theirs open using the quite proper excuse that they were a "National Security Issue". BTW four times as many coal mines were closed when the socialists were in power than the conservatives. Was the reason for most closures politics? No, the pits were uneconomic to exploit further and demand for coal was tapering off. When I last drove through Germany five years ago, I came across a giant open-cast mine whose vast extent one could just make out between the forest of windmills that appeared to surround it. French coal mining? In the north, one of the giant spoil heaps has been turned into a rather attractive dry ski slope.

[Dave Mann]

It took me a while to find it out because if you Google coal all you get are millions of entries about M Thatcher and the miner's strike. 1947 was a very severe winter with coal being rationed, (not many will remember that the mains voltage would drop and if you had a TV the picture would reduce in size) exports banned and the government was considering importing coal. Then in 1948 the newly formed NCB set about modernizing the coal industry, this was followed by the 1956 clean air act, ships and railways converting to diesel and homes to oil or gas, I was on the last Manchester Liners coal burner the Manchester Port in 1962. My parents exchanged their solid fuel Aga for an oil one in 1968.

[Duncan Grimmond]

IIRC the main tenet of the Tory party 1979 election campaign was to “Stop being a manufacturing economy and become a service economy”( @M Thatcher)
In doing so the Industrial Training Board was gradually dismantled and we stopped training apprenticeships leaving the country with fewer people “to bang in the nails”.
This was clearly evinced in the late 1990s when I started visiting sites to find that many of the plumbers were Russian and the joiners were Polish.There were very few young British craftsmen and I ascribed this to the loss of a half generation of new craftsmen coming forward to replace those retiring.
I’m pleased to see that at last Amazon has met their comeupance and are likely to have to accept that their exploitative labour practices are being contested by union organisation.