As I told you in Post 172, my mum took on the job of Editor for the Northern Mine Research Society in the autumn of 1992. It was something she’d wanted to do for a long time, even though it was an unpaid post. She knew she could make a success of it as she enjoyed editing – and she was lucky enough to have a partner who could help her with the typesetting and design needed to get the publications ready to go to the printers.
But when she looked at the bank balance for the publications account, she got an awful shock. There was very little money in there and, although the previous editor handed over a lot of cheques which he hadn’t had time to put in because of his paid work commitments, there still wasn’t enough to do one publication that year, let alone the two that the society’s members expected.
Mum knew two things, however. The first was that sometimes you have to spend money to make money – and the second was that the society’s general account was looking very healthy indeed. If she put a convincing plan together, she might persuade the committee to hand some of this money over to the publications account. She didn’t think she’d succeed, but to her surprise the majority of committee members agreed – as did the majority of society members who were attending a meeting before the society’s annual dinner.
But, as I’ve said before, mining history was a male-dominated interest in those days and the five previous editors had all been men. Not everyone supported Mum and she knew there were some members of another leading mining history group, as well as some of the Northern Mine Research Society, who were just waiting for her to fall flat on her face.
Mum knew what she was doing, however, and soon she was hard at work on her first publication, a monograph titled The Grassington Mines and written by her partner.
Now this publication was special to her in all sorts of ways, as not only was it her first, but also she’d helped out with some of the writing of it – and she’d also helped out with some of the research over the years, starting with taking part in a huge survey of the mines on Grassington Moor, carried out by members of the Northern Mine Research Society in the 1960s and early 1970s.
And, as the mineral rights on Grassington Moor belong to the Duke of Devonshire, she and her partner had also made several visits to his home at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.
They didn’t go there as tourists, however. Instead they’d made arrangements to visit the archives there where much of the paperwork relating to the Grassington Mines in the 18th century is kept – and, as the library was being decorated at the time, they were going to work in the laundry room which also had a very large table.
Passing the tourist entrance, they were led around the side of the house and through the biggest coal-store Mum has ever seen.
It also seemed to be a graveyard for dead televisions and other unwanted items – and there were some strange things in the laundry room as well, including a laundry list dating from 1959 and an 18th century leather fire-bucket with the bottom hanging off.
But of course what interested Mum and her partner the most were the boxes of letters and leases that the librarian had put out for them. With no mobile phones or digital cameras in those days, the only way they could extract the information was by carefully reading the old writing and copying it out by hand.
They soon realised it was going to take more than one visit, but eventually they got what they needed and Mum’s partner was able to add the information from Chatsworth to the information he’d got from other sources. Over the winter of 1992/3 he wrote the text and added maps and photographs. Then, after Mum had edited it, he did the typesetting and they sent it off to the printers.
By May 1993 Mum’s first publication for the Northern Mine Research Society was ready for distribution, but would it be a success or would the doubters be proved right? I’ll let you know in my next post – meanwhile, take care and stay safe…
Follow my next blog: 191. MY MUM THE STORY-TELLER – PART SEVENTY-NINE
10/03/2022
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 