Fig 1: Miner leaving the airlock at Annesley No.2 shaft in 1999. Photo Credit – Meloni Poole

A Clean Slate / Backbone

Artist and award winning film-maker, Meloni Poole, a coalminer’s daughter, filmed the miners at Annesley-Bentinck Colliery, Nottinghamshire, during its death throes in the autumn of 1999. At the time, Annesley, sunk in 1865, was the oldest working colliery in Britain.

Fig 2: Annesley Colliery in the late 1990’s just prior to closure. Photo Credit – David Amos collection

It was the last working colliery in the former NCB South Nottinghamshire Area, which consisted of eighteen collieries when it was formed in April 1967. The colliery just survived until the new millennium, finishing production at the end of January 2000. It had a working life of 135 years, the second longest in Nottinghamshire coalfield history.

Fig 3: Leaflet for A Clean Slate by Meloni Poole.

In the resulting documentary, ‘A Clean Slate’, she talked to some of the miner’s about their relationship with the pit, what coalmining meant to them and their thoughts on what a new life outside of the coalmining industry in the new millennium would mean to them.

A Clean Slate can be viewed on Vimeo at the following link https://vimeo.com/1041842487?fl=pl&fe=cm

Fig 4: Annesley-Bentinck record-breakers, November 1992. Photo by David Amos

Annesley Colliery was threatened with closure in February 1984 just prior to the start of the year-long 1984-85 miners’ strike. It was part of a three-colliery complex, Annesley-Bentinck-Newstead, with a combined workforce of 3,500. Hugh financial losses at the Complex were eventually stemmed by much restructuring and rationalisation, and against all odds it just survived into the new millennium.

Fig 5: Miners at the end of their shift at Annesley Colliery in 1995. Photo Credit – David Amos collection

Following the British Coal closure in February 1994 and being mothballed for fifteen-months, it went into the reprivatized, streamlined British coalmining industry in May 1995, initially under Coal Investments and then Midlands Mining Ltd, finally finishing production on 30th January 2000.

Fig 6: Third generation Annesley miner, David Amos, at Annesley Colliery on the last day of production on 30th January 2000. Photo Credit – Chad Newspaper

Coalmining historian and academic, David Amos, a third generation coalminer at Annesley, commented

“It was a wonderful pit to work at and was very easy going. Despite many manpower changes from the early 1980’s onwards it retained its family pit atmosphere. It was there that I learned all the important things about life and culture from my peers”. 

Fig 7: Annesley Colliery mining memorial and art work in 2021. Photo by David Amos

A quarter of a century on, Meloni returns to her coalmining roots with ‘Backbone’, a digital immersive experience, which re-examines the footage in ‘A Clean Slate’ twenty-five years on and what the associated traits of coalmining such as camaraderie, having the crack (distinct coalmining humour), community and watching out for each other mean in the third decade of the 21st century.

Funded by the Arts Council, National Lottery and Ashfield Creates ‘Backbone’ is currently at the development stage with a planned film premier later in 2026 (More details to follow).

Posted by Mining Heritage admin – 3rd May 2026