Yorkshire Miners Association archives now indexed and catalogued online

Work at the Modern Records Centre to catalogue the archive of the Yorkshire Miners Association is now complete with a catalogue live online at the University of Warwick website.

Poster advertising a Yorkshire Miners Association mass meeting, 1909. Photo: Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

The catalogue also includes the records of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Yorkshire Area and represents a major and significant addition to the collection of NUM and coal mining material held by MRC and now available to researchers.

Charting the union’s history from the mid nineteenth century through the era of King Coal to the decline of the industry and deindustrialisation in the late twentieth century, the Yorkshire archive forms a major part of the MRC mining collection.

Records from the South Yorkshire Miners Association stretch back to 1858, when the union was formed in Barnsley, and those for the West Yorkshire Miners Association begin in 1867 when the union began to organise miners around Leeds and Wakefield.

The two unions merged in 1881 into a single Yorkshire Miners Association which became a founder member of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) in 1889. When the MFGB was succeeded by the more centralised NUM in 1945, the Yorkshire Miners’ Association became the Yorkshire Area of the NUM.

Page from a book of ‘Compensation intimations’, records of compensation claims for Yorkshire Miners’ Association members injured at work. This handwritten page includes entries for collieries at North Stavely, Wombwell Main and Low Laithes in 1907-9. Photo: Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

Publication of the Yorkshire Miners Association catalogue means that work on most of the ‘small’ NUM collections acquired by the Modern Records Centre is now complete. These include the archives of the Cumberland Miners’ Association, Durham Cokemen’s and Bye-Product Workers’ Association,National Union of Cokemen and By-product Workers and Wakefield Friendly Associated Coal Miners.

Catalogues are also now online for the papers of Alwyn Machen, a significant figure in the Yorkshire Miners Association and Yorkshire Area NUM, and Percy Riley, a Communist Party organiser who co-ordinated a scheme to send more 2,000 miners from the South Yorkshire coalfields to assist with the harvest on Bedfordshire farms during the second world war.

The next step at Warwickwill be to add the Leicester Area NUM archives to the collection following their transfer from De Montfort University. Work on producing a public-facing version of the main NUM catalogue will then begin.

The records of the pit deputies’ union NACODS are currently undergoing conservation before they are taken to Warwick.

Conserving and cataloguing the records of the National Union of Mineworkers and related organisations has been a huge undertaking.

A copy of the Yorkshire Miner newspaper, September 1984. Photo: Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

Work began when the NUM called in academic advisers even before Covid lockdowns and a decision was taken to move a major tranche of material from the union’s Barnsley head office to ensure its survival.

Before that could happen, however, the material had to be taken for specialist conservation.

Project archivist Liz Wood has been involved in the rescue mission from the start, and for more than two years has been sorting and cataloguing a collection of material that now fills more than 300 metres of shelf space.

Late in 2024, the project was expanded to take in the newly rediscovered NACODS material, which had been thought lost when the union ceased to exist in 2015 but was rediscovered in the union’s former Barnsley office.