Somerset Coalfield Life at Radstock Museum’s Bygone Days Talk Team are delighted to welcome Mayor of Midsomer Norton, Paul Myers, who will be presenting his illustrated talk on former local colliery owners, the Beauchamp family.

The talk will take place on Tuesday, 6th March at 7.30 p.m. at Midsomer Norton Town Hall – please note the change of venue for this talk only. Paul has spent several years researching the history of this family, who rose from relative obscurity to the point where they largely controlled the Somerset Coalfield and were a force to be reckoned with.

Generations of the Beauchamp family worked in the local coal industry as far back as 1866. In those days, William Beachim (as his surname was spelt then) was Manager at Vobster Colliery. Around 1868 he and partners, Gullick and Walter Beachim, established a business as coal merchants and wagon traders and repairers, which they named ‘Radstock Coal and Wagon Company’.

The company’s main sources of coal were Welton Hill, Old Welton and Clandown Collieries and around 1876 they had a stake in Old Welton Colliery. It was not long before William and his partners acquired Old Welton, Farrington and Welton Hill Collieries in the late 1800s. Around 1876, William officially changed his surname from Beachim to Beauchamp and the decades of empire building by the Beauchamp family had begun. William’s sons and grandsons would go on to acquire and own collieries and quarries across Somerset and into Bristol, right up to nationalisation of the British coal industry in 1947.

There was a very sharp contrast between the wealth and resulting lifestyle of the Beauchamps as mine owners and the working miners toiling underground in unsafe conditions and working seams of coal often only two feet high. Both sides of this divide will be explored in the talk, with an examination of the Beauchamps’ business interests and the impact of events such as the Norton Hill pit disaster of 1908 on the local community.

Today little apparently remains of the Beauchamp legacy. They lost control of the mines under Nationalisation in 1947. Their magnificent local mansions have since been demolished and their gifts to the town, such as the Jubilee Lamp outside the Town Hall in Midsomer Norton, are long gone.

For details, visit: www.radstockmuseum.co.uk