| Administrative History | The company was first established in 1790 as Benjamin Outram & Co, which was concerned at the very beginning with the extraction and selling of coal and ironstone from the Butterley Hall estate. The Butterley area had been worked for its minerals for centuries, and the company reopened coal and ironstone pits on the estate. The next development for the company was the making of iron by constructing its own ironworks. The company prospered in the early years, partly due to the opening of the Cromford Canal nearby, which allowed it to connect to the wider canal network. In 1808 the company became known as the Butterley Company.
The need for coal to supply the increasing number of their iron works at Butterley and Codnor Park drove the Company to sink their own collieries in the area. There was a particular drive of new collieries in the 1820s, with the sinking of Butterley Park, Portland, Ormonde and Langley (better known later as Bailey Brook). Britain Colliery was developed in the mid 1840s and Exhibition Pits sunk in 1851. Housing was built for many of its colliers (and iron workers) at Codnor Park, Ironville, Riddings and Ripley, with schools, churches and local amenities creating strong local communities. In the mid-19th century the company enjoyed generally good industrial relations with its workforce. The company had benefitted in the early days from the canal networks, and they also benefitted from the advent of the steam-powered railway networks in the mid-19th century.
The second half of the 19th century saw the continued acquisition of collieries. By 1870 they owned or operated 17 collieries, including Brands, Marehay, Hartshay, Loscoe, Upper Birchwood, Waingroves and Whiteley. Other sites were leased to establish coal mines, the Denby Hall estate in 1876 and the Kirkby estate just over the border in Nottinghamshire. In 1882 the Silverdale Colliery in Staffordshire was purchased, although it proved difficult to mine effectively.
The company became a private limited company in 1888, known as the Butterley Company Limited, although it remained under the control of the Wright family who had dominated the company for the previous three decades. Frederick Channer Corfield had been appointed Agent and Manager for all the company’s collieries in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in 1883, and he continued in that role until his death in December 1904. He was succeeded by Henry Eustace Mitton, a mining engineer who would soon begin a programme of modernisation to improve the efficiency of all the collieries. He also tried to improve industrial relations, although strikes inevitably occurred, including the major national strikes of 1912 and 1926. He had a far-sighted approach to the company’s coal reserves, looking to sink new pits in north Nottinghamshire. Although he failed with his first-choice site at Farnsfield, he was able to develop a new colliery at Ollerton, which was built in 1920s along with a new village to house the workers and their families.
In 1947 control of all their collieries passed the Butterley Company to the National Coal Board as a result of the nationalisation of the coal industry, the collieries being Denby Hall, New Langley, Ormonde and Ripley in Derbyshire and Kirkby and Ollerton in Nottinghamshire. After the loss of the collieries, the company continued its iron foundry and engineering business, but began to concentrate on brickmaking, with the development of brickworks and expansion of their operations. |