Lives in Cricket No 49 - Enid Bakewell

7 Workshops and stores were built in 1880 and in the 1890s electricity was generated to light the pit bottom and around the pithead and screens. The village school opened in 1880 as a joint venture between the owners of the land and the Newstead Mining Company. 1 Newstead was a company village: when you came you lived in the “old town”, but if you worked in the pit you could aspire to the newer housing built in the 1920s with indoor bath and toilet. Even in the 1940s, only pit workers and railway employees were allowed tenancies in Newstead. In 1923 the Colliery Welfare Club was built. In 1924 the ‘new village’ was completed providing accommodation for 1,200 men. The village church was added in 1928. Pithead baths were added in 1935 - designed to cater for 1,680 men and a canteen and medical centre were provided seven years later. The Colliery had favourable geological conditions and production grew steadily, even during the 1930s and the Depression. Between the two world wars production remained high. These were massively productive pits, taken over with all the others by the NCB on January 1, 1947 (Enid added: “Dad maintained that the Nation gave the owners of the mines too much money when the NCB took over”). By 1959 Newstead was producing a million tons of coal a year. But what had arisen in the Victorian age was to disappear in the second half of the 20th century. Newstead station closed under Beeching in 1964 and the Great Central line (which ran from Manchester to London) closed along with the goods yard and the locomotive depot in 1966. The Great Northern line closed in 1968 and from a busy railway junction there was now no railway at all. 1 http://newsteadandannesleyheritageproject.co.uk Newstead Newstead, 1960s.