Subscribe to my you tube channel for 210+ more coal mine tributes and counting. The tandem headstocks on the site of Brinsley Colliery date from 1872. The coal reserves at Brinsley were exhausted by 1930.D.H. Lawrence connection- Although Lawrence travelled widely, it was Eastwood that had the most influence on his writings. How he felt about his birthplace varied with his age and mood. Shortly after his mother’s death in 1910, he claimed that he had always disliked the place and in his essay, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Country’, he describes Eastwood’s, ‘ugliness, ugliness, ugliness’, but in 1918, he wrote, ‘Eastwood. For the first time in my life I feel quite amiably towards it. I have always hated it. Now I don’t.’ In Lawrence’s lifetime, the industrialisation of England horrified him. He visited England in 1926 and saw that the landscape of his youth had all changed and been despoiled. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he describes his feelings -
‘It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all.’
His father worked at Brinsley Colliery, which he blamed for his father’s condition. The great quadrangles of houses, which the mine owners, Barber Walker & Co. built, Lawrence described as “sordid and hideous.” Brinsley Colliery stopped producing coal in 1930, ironically, the year that D.H. Lawrence died. The colliery headstocks have been returned to their original site outside the town and are now within a conservation area.It was reported on East Midlands News 21/12/2023 that the UK`s last remaining example of wooden tanden headstocks was removed due to safety reasons after having previously had it`s winding wheels removed for safety reasons.The local council made no mention of replacing this historic treasure with a new replica-SHAME ON THEM.