IN 1979, the National Coal Board took out a full-page advert in a national newspaper. It showed a drawing of Britannia, wearing a miner's hat and holding a lump of coal in her hand. "Britain has the energy to carry on for at least another 300 years!" boasted the headline.

To us, today, it's a boast that seems utterly crass.

But when that advert was published, it was only a couple of years since the Selby coalfield had been inaugurated, seeming to offer the promise of plentiful coal for decades to come.

When Environment Secretary Anthony Crosland granted the National Coal Board permission to work the new coal bonanza at Selby in 1976, it was hailed as a 'new mine for the Eighties' and a 'windfall for the nation'.

The new jewel in the NCB crown was also seen as the catalyst that would breathe new life and optimism into a declining and demoralised industry. In October 1976, the Duchess of Kent visited Wistow for what was the official inauguration of the new coalfield. There was said to be enough 'black gold' to last 30 years or more. Yet, as we now know, it was all to end in tears little more than 20 years later.

York Press:

The Duchess of Kent at the inauguration of Selby Coalfield at Wistow, October 1976

Cawood historian David Lewis writes about the history of the Selby coalfield in his new book 'Rhubarb, Royalty and the Rings of Saturn: The Story of the B1222'.

"When rumours of a massive new coal field under the Vale of York were geologically confirmed in the early 1970s, this was seen as a huge boon for the nation," he writes. "The Wilson Labour Government of 1974-79 pushed forward with rapid development of this resource, employing techniques and methods that mining engineers came from the rest of the world to marvel at."

Even then, however, not everyone locally was in favour of the coalfield. "Farmers were concerned that subsidence to drainage systems would make their fields sodden," David writes. "There was concern about building subsidence in the villages." One local headmistress even looked for police protection for her 'gels', David writes, asserting that 'the miners will be involved in drunken fights outside my school gates'.

But nothing, it seemed, could halt the march of progress. Concerns about subsidence were countered by the argument that 'there was so much coal down there, columns of coal could be left under habitations to guard against subsidence'.

The political will was there to make the coalfield a success. Yet it all went sour surprisingly quickly.

There was the miner's strike of 1984/5, which pitted miners against Margaret Thatcher's government and left a legacy of bitterness that lingers to this day.

York Press:

Police and pickets clash at the Selby coalfield in June 1984. Picture: YEP

And even though, in the early 1990s, the Selby coalfield briefly produced record amounts of coal, the writing was already on the wall. "Geological problems and ingress of water meant that extracting the coal was neither as easy nor as profitable as many had expected," David writes. "By the 1990s, the nation and the world had found cleaner and cheaper energy resources, and King Coal had been toppled. The final coal extraction from the Selby complex occurred in 2004, and, since then, almost every sign of the existence of pits in the quiet Vale of York has been expunged."

But we still remember...

Rhubarb, Royalty and the Rings of Saturn by David Lewis is available, priced £6, from Selby Library, Cawood Post Office, Naburn Village Shop, Fields Garden Centre, Sherburn and other local outlets.