I present a daily show on a local community radio station, Amber Sound FM, and often get requests like this. We’re allowed in to people’s workplaces and homes every day, so there was a good chance someone remembered the camp, or knew someone who did.
To tell the truth, I did….
Flashback to around 1964. My parents and I went as day visitors to the camp, to see my grandma – my mum’s mum – staying there on her own, as she had done for a few years now. My grandad – a coal miner all his working life – had died in 1959, at the age of 70. After ten years on crutches with a badly damaged leg – caused by a rock fall – gangrene had set in, and carried him off as he was about to have the leg amputated. I remembered her spartan, but clean, room, the bed impeccably made: not for nothing had my grandma been in service in her younger days.
The interview went out on air and online, accompanied by social media posts, and the messages immediately started: to the station, and to my personal Facebook account. People saying they remembered the camp, asking to know more about the forthcoming coach trip, disclosing long-held secrets of their childhood holidays. It was one of those moments when you know an idea has taken hold, is taking on a life of its own. It even turned out that Stuart, who I spoke to, knew my dad’s cousin Ken, a former miner who – with his wife Janice—kept Heanor Miners’ Welfare for many years.
I wonder: how many of us, reading this, right now, can say we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the coal industry? How many of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on down the family line, met because one or both of them moved to a different area to work in the mining industry and found not just a job, but love, a family. A new branch of the family in a new area, miles – hundreds of miles even – from the place they first saw light, took their first breath, screamed their heads off to be fed.
There’s always been a rhythm to life. It’s changed over the years: speeded up, mostly, though sometimes we all feel the need to leap free of that hamster-wheel, with its endless churning.
Some years ago, bitten by the family history bug, I uncovered whole swathes of family I didn’t know about, in a place near East Midlands Airport called Long Whatton. There they were, a succession of Williams, Roberts, and Georges, from the sixteenth century onwards, in the parish register. From 1831, they appeared in the Census, where they were recorded as Ag Labs: Agricultural Labourer was too, well, laborious to write out in full.
On the male side, there was that progression, that rhythm: from Scholar to Ploughboy to Ag Lab, the womenfolk recorded (as was the way in those days) according to their relationship to the head of the household, and that’s the way it seemed pre-ordained to carry on.
Until around 1860, anyway. Until mechanisation began to advance in the farming industry. That’s when things started to go awry. That’s when great-great-grandad George suddenly becomes an ‘FWK’ (Framework Knitter: I had to look it up) on the 1871 Census for Long Whatton, and then, on the 1881 Census, there he is in Heanor, recorded as ‘Coal Miner’.
Bailey Brook Colliery, where George, his son Bill (my great-grandad), and Bill’s son Bob (my grandad) worked, was opened in 1874 by the mighty Butterley Company. From iron bridges to railway carriages to ironclad battleships to dairy farming, they needed coal to keep their enterprises running, and they stopped at nothing to keep it coming. In 1874, disputes throughout the mining industry led to a Butterley Company miners’ strike. The strike was declared on 13th April, and the striking miners returned to work on 7th May. All except for eleven men, who were considered ringleaders, and refused further employment with the Butterley Company. Feudalism evidently wasn’t dead just yet: the torch was simply handed from the Lords of the Manor to the Barons of Industry (though some were both). Any benefits, any rights, any welfare was grudgingly handed down from on high, as before. The Butterley Company, for instance, used to hold Christmas parties for the children of its workers. If, however, you happened to die in their employ, as my grandad Bob did in 1938 (of pneumoconiosis, at the age of 31), access to those company benefits stopped. To the end of his long life, my dad remembered the shame and mockery he’d endured as a seven-year-old that he could no longer attend those Butterley Company children’s Christmas parties, as many of his cousins could.
That’s what was revolutionary about the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Centre: it was for the benefit, the welfare, of all Derbyshire coalminers and their families. It was by the workers, for the workers. But we’re jumping ahead a little….
By the start of the twentieth century, the mining industry had grown into the behemoth it was to remain for another eighty years. However, instead of one, monolithic, Coal Board, as there was to be after January 1st, 1947, there were numerous private colliery owners. These could be industrial giants like the Butterley Company, or members of the gentry such as the Miller-Mundy family at Shipley Hall who, legend has it, were so offended by the sight of their own miners walking to work that they had the footpath rerouted. It was going to be a long, hard road from that to the opening of the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Centre in 1939. First, though, came the Derbyshire Miners’ Convalescent Home.
In the late nineteenth century, a convalescent home for injured miners from Ilkeston was established in Skegness by an industrialist – and somewhat roguish figure – called Edward Terah Hooley. Hooley’s eventual financial difficulties, in the early years of the twentieth century, led to the home’s takeover by the Derbyshire Miners’ Association, and a new governing body led by Barnet Kenyon, the DMA’s President. Kenyon secured the support of mine-owners, and mineworkers paid a subscription towards the home from their wages. This was given a further boost by the Mining Industry Act 1920, which introduced a mine-owners’ levy on coal production, in order to establish a national Miners’ Welfare Fund, aimed at promoting ‘the social well-being, recreation and conditions of living of workers in or about coalmines’. Little by little, the groundwork was being laid.
It was evident from those early days that a larger home was to be needed sooner rather than later, and in January 1916 the DMA’s Council granted a loan to the Convalescent Home Committee for the purchase of land from Sir Charles Seely. It was to be 1925, however, before a new site on Winthorpe Avenue, Skegness, was acquired, with funds provided by increased contributions from mineworkers, the Miners’ Welfare Scheme, local branch committees, and colliery owners. The resulting new Derbyshire Miners’ Convalescent Home opened on 10 March 1928, providing accommodation for 120 men and 30 women. So far, so good….
The next step on the road to the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Centre was the establishment of a paid annual holiday for mineworkers. The Coal Mines Regulation Act 1908 had already established the eight-hour working day, an idea proposed by Robert Owen for textile workers as early as 1817. Eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure time, and eight hours of rest per day was the guiding principle: why not a week, or even a fortnight, of annual, paid holiday for mineworkers? Once again the Derbyshire Miners’ Association took the lead.
If one man can be said to have been the driving force behind the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp, that man was Harry Hicken (1882-1964). Leaving school at at age of twelve, he’d risen through the ranks to become first, in 1920, Secretary of the Derbyshire Miners’ Association then, from 1928, the organisation’s President. The importance of Northern English Nonconformist religion, Socialism and the Temperance movement cannot be overestimated, both in the trade union movement, and in the passionate moral crusading of Harry Hicken. Though he later became an atheist, that passionate Methodist, Socialist zeal never left Harry, who wanted Derbyshire mineworkers and their families to have holiday facilities to rival those opened in Skegness in 1936 by Billy Butlin.
In 1937, the DMA entered negotiations with the Ministry of Labour to establish a Holiday Savings Scheme that would enable mineworkers to take a week’s paid holiday per year. In 1938, nine acres of land adjacent to the Miners’ Convalescent Home were acquired by the DMA, and work could then begin. Another Derbyshire business, Vic Hallam of Heanor, carried out the work on the camp over the winter of 1938-9, using sectional buildings prefabricated at their workshops and transported to the site.
DERBYSHIRE MINERS’ HOLIDAY CENTRE
Opened at Skegness by Sir Frederick Sykes
The holiday centre at Skegness for Derbyshire miners and their families was opened on Saturday by Sir Frederick Sykes, Chairman of the National Miners’ Welfare Fund, who described it as a Pioneer venture. “l do not think there is any other non-profit making camp of the kind in the country. It is a pioneer venture which is being watched with close interest. When we remember that there are some 3,000,000 people in the mining community who are affected by the holidays with pay scheme this year, we can appreciate the importance of the lead which is being given here today.” The main credit for the scheme belongs to Mr H. Hicken, the General Secretary ofThe Derbyshire Miners’ Association, and then to the Derbyshire Miners’ Welfare Committee. The cost is about [35,000 and has been provided by a grant from the National Miners’ Welfare Fund.’
The Derbyshire Times, 26 May 1939. [Quoted in Gration; for sources see below]
And so, on 20 May 1939, the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp was formally opened by Sir Frederick Sykes, the Chairman of the Miners’ Central Welfare Committee. Photographs taken on the day show Harry Hicken (tieless, as ever) giving a speech at the opening.
‘Initially the camp consisted of some 73 large wooden chalets each divided into four separate rooms providing basic sleeping accommodation for four married couples. Flanking the married couples’ chalets were rows of 115 so-called “cubicles” for teenagers and single adults. Along the sea front were a series of large communal wooden buildings housing a children’s theatre, lounge and billiards room. Young children were accommodated in a communal dormitory, originally a wooden building overlooking the sea front, and then later replaced by a brick block.’
[Gration]
Each colliery’s workers were to be allocated one week each, on a rotating basis, in the interest of fairness. However, that first season was a short one, and from September 1939, the camp was to be used to house military personnel (as the nearby Butlin’s was) for the duration of the Second World War.
October 2023, Skegness:
The coach party from Derby arrives at the site of the camp. The Miners’ Holiday Camp itself closed in the late 1990s, to be replaced by a caravan park. The Convalescent Home carried on being used by The Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation (CISWO) until October, 2018, when it was closed down. The building was, according to the CISWO (in the bald parlance of the time) ‘no longer fit for purpose’.
And so, in the present, grab your bingo dobber, and prepare to join in once more with the antics of ‘Uncle’ Mick Millington, a multitalented, multitasking cast, and Derwent Brass, as they tell the rest of the story. We guarantee there’ll be a heap of nostalgia, a good old sing-song (or two!), and you never know…this might finally be your year to win the Knobbly Knees competition!
Sarah Brigham (CEO and Artistic Director for Derby Theatre and Director of WELFARE) said:
“This is an exciting piece of new writing; not only does it reflect on, and put a spotlight on, our local community’s past, but it also tells the story of a slice of working class history we often don’t hear anything about. The Derbyshire Miners Holiday Camp was a cornerstone of Derbyshire Miners lives over the last 100 years. From being the first place miners could take paid holiday, to becoming a refuge for Hungarians fleeing war – its history is complex and rich.”
Sarah Brigham on the development process for WELFARE also said:
“I approached Abi Zakarian with the idea as I was a great admirer of her work and knowing she was born and bred in Derbyshire it felt like the right fit for her. Abi came with us on the trip to Skegness, when we took twelve people related to the camp, ex miners, people who’d gone there as kids etc., on a bus tour. The stories she heard that day, combined with her own personal history, and, of course, a little bit of imagination, has created a story which really speaks of the revolutionary act of Welfare this camp was synonymous with and is all too often missing from today.”
Kelvin Towse (Musical Director and Sound Designer on WELFARE said):
“Derwent Brass will be playing a selection of numbers from across the decades, maybe two or three numbers. And then there’ll be interspersed throughout the show…they’ll also be involved when we get into the holiday camp itself, and they’ll be part of the shows within the show.”
Sources and further reading
- Gration, Geoff [2000]. The Best Summer of our Lives: A Photographic History of the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp ISBN 1 85983 205 9
- Healey Hero [http://www.healeyhero.co.uk]: invaluable online resource on the history of coal mining plus a database of mining fatalities and their causes.
- Derbyshire Record Office website: https://calmview.derbyshire.gov.uk/CalmView/default.aspx
- The National Archives website: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk