Cobham coal mine

 

I was brought up in Gravesend, Kent and like all children used to play in the surrounding countryside.  One day, in the early 1950s,  I was in Cobham Woods on a 'hike' with the Girl Guides.  We were just to the south of today's main A2 - about opposite the Laughing Water restaurant - near 'Scalers Hill'  (TQ674696).  What I saw  was a line of trucks on rails disappearing into a large hole in the ground at a forty five degree angle going roughly east - there was some other equipment west if this, which I don't remember.  I was quite sure what it was. When I got home I said, rather hesitantly, to my father ' I saw a coal mine today, in Cobham Woods'.  'That's right' he said.

 

I forgot all about it until about eight years ago  when I walked round the site one afternoon.  The A2 has been rebuilt and widened since then but just off the road, in the trees, are some vague depressions and half buried bits of ironmongery - nothing very much.  In Gravesend Library I discovered that I was not the only person who has been on the track of the Cobham Coal Mine. It has actually been quite well written up. Of course the Kent Underground Research Group (Newsletter 1/85) have had a look and there is an account in their Kent and East Sussex Underground (Meresborough 1991).  I have also a photocopy article by a Mr. Sydney Champion - given to me, source unknown.

 

In the 1940s the Cobham Coal Mine had produced brown lignite for many years on an opencast basis for the local estate owner. In 1947 a mining company was formed to exploit it. They found a 3ft seam of bituminous coal, the Coal Board came and had a look, and Corys were employed to remove it.  However, there seems to have been some confusion over samples,  methane was encountered in the mine, Cory's became less than happy.  In 1953 it all ended.   Nothing very much of a story for those who live in coal producing areas - but this is Kentish Thameside.  Perhaps it just goes to demonstrate that the whole island really is built on coal.

 

So, anyway, I must apologise to Rod Legear for my behaviour at his excellent lecture to the Blackheath Scientific Society on Underground Kent.  He always starts his lectures with a trick question - 'where is the nearest coal mine to London?'  No one, he says, has ever known before. Sorry, Rod,  - but  I did see it, I really did.