Arley Colliery Sidings

In 1901 an ambitious young mining engineer, Edward 'Teddy' Knox, sank an exploratory shaft in the hope of finding coal. After almost a year no coal had been discovered, at 320 yards below the surface, and it was suggested that work halt. Knox, however, persuaded his co-financier, George Herbert Fowler, to allow exploration to move sideways and coal was quickly discovered. The original shafts had been sunk, it was found, into the geological remains of a two hundred yard wide river bed passing through the coal deposits. The pit started on the 1st January 1901, the first bricks were delivered in March and the first coal was extracted eighteen months after the initial exploratory activity, in 1902. The colliery was situated in an easily mined site in the upper coal measures of the East Warwickshire plateau. Later superceded by Daw Mill locally it gave rise to the village of New Arley as it is today. The houses were built on the hillside with the pithead in the valley below. At its height in 1939-1960 over 1000 men were employed. At around this time other collieries were developing and mining became the source of work an influence on the culture of the area. On 30th March 1968 production ended at Arley Colliery. After sixty-six years, first as The Arley Colliery Company Limited and then as a part of the National Coal Board, it was considered no longer economically viable to mine the area despite the fact that one hundred years of coal remains beneath Arley.

Keith Turton writes:

Arley Colliery

In 1923, the coliery produced 33,600 tons of coal with 1,703 men, a ratio that would terrify the bean-counters in its management when collieries half its age in the Doncaster area were lifting twice as much coal with less men.. That ten years later output had increased to 450,000 tons with 120 less men was an improvement which suggested modernisation underground had been carried out during this decade. By 1940 this had been trimmed down to 1,400 men with a slight improvement in productivity.

There were several long-serving directors in the boardroom, including those who were also directors of the nearby Birch Coppice Colliery of Morris and Shaw Ltd. including F.A.Morris, of Bircher Hall, Leominster, who served from 1923 to nationalisation, C.H. Morris, of Charlbury, Oxon, chairman and managing director; retired Naval Captain J.A.A.Morris from 1937 until nationalisation and who lived in a delightfully named Tamworth residence called The Beanstalk! Other directors were E.C. Knox of Arley, who served from 1923 to 1947, Mrs E.M.E. Ranson, of Thoroton Hall, Aslockton, Notts from 1923 to 1947 and Charles Ransom, of Grantham, from 1933 to 1947. (The registered office of the company was Hall End, Polesworth, the same as that of the Birch Coppice Colliery).

The colliery produced mainly household coal which had a wide distribution in the midlands and southern counties. A particularly large customer was the Co-operative Wholesale Society, coal being billed to the London, Manchester and Bristol offices and sent by the wagon load to various Co-op coalyards in East Anglia, and to twenty-six different major coal merchants in London, the Home Counties, Oxfordshire, Northants and all six major Birmingham coal factors. The widespread Leicester-based Ellis and Everard covered many Midlands counties. Arley coal was very popular in Reading and was sent in quantity to the Mond Gas plant in Tipton and the nearby Hams Hall Power Station.

The wagon fleet is not thought to have been large, possibly 4/500 Initially supplied by the Gloucester RC&WCo., fifty were delivered by the Midland RC&WCo in 1924 and a further hundred by Thomas Hunter of Rugby in 1927 The same builder supplied a further hundred under the emergency wartime wagon building programme in 1942/3 which went straight into the then wagon pool.