Fluorspar in the North Pennines
Edited by R. A. Fairbain, 
ISBN 0951893939
Friends of Killhope
£8.50

In October 2001 the Friends of Killhope held a day school entitled ‘The
fluorspar industry of the North Pennines- a retrospective view’. This
pocket-sized book of 131 pages comprising six chapters sandwiched between
short pre- and post-scripts (both written by Forbes) proceeds directly from
that day. The six authors are well-known and respected in their fields and
they and the contents of the book are comprehensively eclectic. The high
standard of authorship expected from these people is achieved.

There are three short chapters, all less that ten pages, on the geology and
origin of fluorspar (Young), fluorspar collectors and mineral dealers
(Hacker) and the relationship between British Steel and North Pennine
fluorspar mining (Graham). Rick Smith has a fifteen page overview of the
rise and fall of fluorspar mining in the North Pennines, Paul Younger a
longer chapter (approximately 25 pages) on the mining history of Frazer’s
Grove Mine but the longest chapter by far, approximately 55 pages and
nearly a third of the volume is by Almond and gives in abundant detail the
various beneficiation techniques employed in the orefield. It is difficult
to fault the contents of these chapters and together they manage to both be
highly informative and to humanise the industry, so that it seems the
voices of the mineworkers, which of course include some of the authors, are
never far away. 
There are plenty of photographs, drawings, diagrams, references,
quotations, even poems and anecdotal asides to give shading to the main
tone of the book.

 It is a cheap book (less than ten pounds for a conference volume!) and a
very specialised one (although plugging a hole in a niche market) and sadly
some production values reflect the price for example many of the
photographs have been reproduced darkly making some of the detail difficult
to discern. But it is the editing or rather the lack of a proper final
proofing that does most damage. In addition to the (few) and expected
typographical errors pages 48 and 49 are transposed and the long chapter is
riddled with extra hyphens disrupting many polysyllabic words so constantly
breaking-up the concentration that is needed to read and absorb this
fact-filled chapter. This lack of proofing reflects poorly on the editor
and production team, the Friends of Killhope and, of course, unfairly on
the authors. It is a great pity.
 
The book cannot be described as light-reading (it is too full of facts) but
as a specialist resource or read more quickly as a technical-social history
it deserves to have a wide audience. Laporte Chemicals paid for my Ph.D
(fluorspar in the South Pennines) and I have written on the mineralisation
of the North Pennines for decades and so believed that I was
well-acquainted with Pennine fluorspar but almost everything in the book
was new to me. Only now do I understand the context to the ups and downs of
Pennine fluorspar mining something I watched from the side-lines and
assumed to be due to internal problems- not so. 

The Friends of Killhope are to be congratulated on publishing the book and
will hopefully have the courage to go on to produce similar, but better
proofed, volumes. 

Rob Ixer

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Dr Peter Claughton, 
Blaenpant Morfil, nr. Rosebush, Clynderwen, Pembrokeshire, Wales  SA66 7RE.
   
Tel. 01437 532578; Fax. 01437 532921; Mobile 07831 427599

University of Exeter - School of Historical, Political and Sociological
Studies
(Centre for South Western Historical Studies)
E-mail:  [log in to unmask]

Co-owner - mining-history e-mail discussion list.  
See http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/files/mining-history/  for details.

Mining History Pages - http://www.exeter.ac.uk/~pfclaugh/mhinf/

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