Gerry Brooke looks at a book celebrating South Gloucestershire coal mining

It’s 60 years since Frog Lane, the last of the deep South Gloucestershire pits, bought up its last few tubs of coal.

Although this Coalpit Heath mine closed in 1949, two years after nationalisation, there are still people around who worked there and who can recall much industrial and social history in what was once a very close knit community.

Over the past year there have been talks, exhibitions and old miners’ get togethers but the South Gloucestershire Mines Research Group thought that a book about the colliery – allied to an oral history project – would be a more permanent reminder of the area’s history.

The publication is extremely well researched, as you would expect, but what makes it exceptional are the photos, reproduced from old glass slides, taken both above and below ground, in 1906.

What you see here is just a selection.

But the book doesn’t overlook a wealth of social history – housing, church and chapel, pubs, sporting activities and the like – which this lavishly illustrated book manages to pack in.

Frog Lane Colliery – Sixty Years On is published by Lightmoor Press and costs £12.00

If you have any trouble finding, or even ordering, a copy in a booksellers then please ring Roger Gosling on: 01454 883607.

Copies of the book can be obtained from Roger at: 51, Greenhill Road, Alveston, South Gloucestershire. BS35 3NA.

Post and packing is an extra £2.00 and cheques are payable to: SGMRG.