Royal Visit – Selby Superpit

The Royal Visit on 7th December 1989.

In late 1989 Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were due to officially open the Selby Coalfield. As part of the royal visit they were to visit Riccall Mine and go underground onto H443s coalface. Changing facilities of a very high standard were expected for the royal visit and as the existing pit head baths were not quite up to royal standards a new facility was built. Due to the great expense of building a shower facility for one purpose the building was to have a second life as a sports pavilion and rugby pitch. A three month window was given to complete the new changing and showering area with totally separate areas for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip. Ron Bruce and the estates department had the building designed, drawings made and land made available adjacent to the main building at the mine. Needless to say it was completed on time. Sadly the Queen did not attend due to illness. The building was eventually used as a weight training gym, changing area and football pitch for the Riccall Miners.

Thank you to Ron for his memories of the event. It’s always good to speak with experts who contributed greatly to this amazing project and my sincere thanks go to Ron Bruce who contributed the information in this post. Without people like Ron being happy to speak with me, these memories are lost forever.

Video and memories of the day

The official opening of the Selby Coalfield took place on December 7th 1989. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip were due to visit Riccall and visit H443s, a working coal face at the mine. On the day however, HRH The Queen was ill and HRH Prince Phillip attended alone.

The visit was seen as a recognition of all the hard work that went in to the whole project. His Royal Highness was introduced to British Coal Directors and the Mine Manager, the late Stuart Sumnall. He was shown into the concourse where he met with local school children and members of the mining staff. He was taken into the lamp room, had a tour of the surface, and then went underground. Afterwards there was hospitality and speeches with officials, miners and their families. A successful event, and a lasting memory and endorsement of the success of the mine.

The British Film Institute has kindly allowed me to show this video of the Royal Visit on my blog and I am sure many of you will be very interested to see this.

Many thanks to the British Film Institute for their kind permission to use this video and for their agreement for me to show this in four parts because of the upload limitations of this site.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

My memories of the day;

The face was prepared with cover plates fitted over the pan side cable and hose brackets, to ensure that no accidents happened during the visit.

A roof bolting demonstration was given by Dennis Nichols and an Anderson Strathclyde AM500 shearer demonstration was given by Terry Armitage and Phil Matthews. The deputy in charge of the district for the visit was Snowy Varley. During the visit, only a skeleton staff were allowed underground. I remember that three electricians, from our team, were at strategic points to ensure electrical problems were quickly dealt with, one being in the pit bottom substation, one at the main gate end substation and myself as the electrician in charge of the face.

I was waiting in the tailgate when I got a call to say that the face A.F.C. would not start. A very concerned and agitated undermanager appeared in the tailgate to ask me to go and see what was wrong. I quickly went to the maingate to see what the problem was. A power supply fuse had blown in the BFS switchgear supplying the panzer and it would not start. I replaced the fuse quickly and thankfully the A.F.C. started. The visit went ahead as planned with no further problems.