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Plan of Coal Commission

Fewer and Bigger Units

In June, 1939, Sir Ernest Gowers, Chairman of the Coal Commission, sent a memorandum to all colliery owners containing an outline plan for reducing the number of coalmining undertakings in accordance with Part 2 of the Coal Mines Act, 1938. Proposals were made for every mining district, beginning with the small, compact coalfields, then taking the larger districts, the Commission indicated how it thought consolidation should proceed.

Cooperation Invited

In a letter accompanying the memorandum, the Commission stated that before deciding on the method of approaching the question it invited the cooperation of the Mining Association and, in particular, asked about the possibility of arranging for local committees to formulate proposals for discussion with the Commission.

South Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and North Derbyshire

These districts were treated as one. Many of the groupings fell partly in one district and partly in another.

The Commission did not propose, at that time, to make any suggestions about the greater part of the area, namely that occupied by the following undertakings:

These companies accounted for two thirds of the total output of the 124 undertakings in the coalfield (62,750,000 tons a year) and 7 of them for 38 per cent of it. But there were comparatively small ones among them, and this region was excluded not because of no room for reorganisation, but because large and small undertakings were so mixed up geographically, that more detailed inquiry was necessary before proposals could be made.

The remaining 100 or so undertakings were mainly in the north west and the south west with a few in the neighbourhood of Sheffield. In the north west, after eliminating those which formed part of larger undertakings with collieries elsewhere, the following undertakings (with other smaller ones) appeared to the Commission to form an area not too big for ultimate consolidation:

To the south of these on the western side of the coalfield were a few others, some of which were acquired by their larger neighbours on the east, and those still independent, the same form of consolidation was suggested as the obvious one.

The largest were:

 

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