Another part of history that is going to be lost forever. This great little museum on Cannock Chase closed its door forever on 25th April 2025. The museum housed displays about our mining heritage in the area.

Information about Museum of Cannock Chase

The museum and its outbuildings are on the site of the former Valley Colliery. The colliery opened in 1874 and was originally called the Pool Pit, after the pool that once covered nearby Hednesford Park. In 1887 the mine was connected to Wimblebury Colliery. Coal was brought to the surface there, but the miners still descended from here. In 1940 pithead baths were opened. Miners paid 5d per week to use them. The building later became the Mines Rescue Station, which stood at the top of Valley Road where the houses are today. When coal extraction from Wimblebury Colliery ended in 1962 the colliery buildings were used only for training.

The Mining Training Centre

The Coal Mining Training Centre for the Cannock Chase, Shropshire and South Staffordshire coalfields was here at the Valley Colliery site. It opened in 1946, just before new legislation was introduced that meant miners had to receive training before going underground. The colliery corn store (now the museum’s main building) was converted for training. New recruits were also trained in five Nissen huts from World War Two, which stood beside the museum.

Near to what is now our main car park, surface training facilities that replicated underground conditions were built. By the 1960s, they were being used to train 15-year-old boys who had just left school. The boys weren’t permitted to start work underground until the age of 16, so these surface training galleries provided the only opportunity for them to learn the necessary mining techniques. During its lifetime, over 17,000 trainee miners passed through the Mining Training Centre, many of whom have revisited the site since it became a museum.

The Mines Rescue Station

The Mines Rescue Station, originally based in nearby Victoria Street, moved here in 1972 and remained until the service was relocated out of the district in 1991. In 1997 the building became a public house but was later pulled down after most of it was destroyed in a fire. The houses you see today stand in its place.

The Museum

By 1982, most of the local pits had closed and the Training Centre had closed, too.

The site was taken over by the Council and in 1989 the Valley Heritage Centre was opened. Renamed the Museum of Cannock Chase in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of local coal mining and illustrates the social, industrial and domestic history of the Cannock Chase area. The top of the museum site leads to Hednesford Hills, which is now a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest. As the Valley Colliery buildings once extended onto Hednesford Hills, you may still be able to see signs of its former industrial past as you walk, such as parts of the old chimneys in the undergrowth. You can find out more about the former layout of the site in our Mining Gallery.

The Winding Wheel & Mine Car

The winding wheel outside the museum is from Lea Hall Colliery in Rugeley, which closed in 1990. The wheel was unused and was left in place to give the headframe a balanced appearance. It is one of a small number of remaining winding wheels from the Cannock Chase coalfield. The mine car at the front of the Museum is from Littleton Colliery, in Huntington. It was used to transport coal from underground to the pit surface, where it was emptied onto conveyor belts.

(More details to be added – To be continued)

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The Great War book of Great Wyrley and Cheslyn Hay, seven years in the making has been launched, detailing the lives of soldiers who died in the First World War.
Great Wyrley & Cheslyn Hay Great War chronicles life in the two villages in the run-up to the conflict, followed by extensive information on those who lost their lives – as well as those that survived – before moving on to further community tales. Written by Paul Ford, with contributions from Helen Ralphs and Andy Parsons, as well as help from Soeli Thomas (Graphic Designer of the book), launched by ourselves at Great Wyrley Local History Society.

It is our fifth book to be published. Chairman & Editor, Gary Smith said 50 copies had been produced, which are not on general sale, but would be available in a host of libraries, including Cheslyn Hay, Great Wyrley, Cannock and Walsall, as well as William Salt in Stafford. There will also be copies at the South Staffs Regiment Museum at Whittington. Gary said: “It’s very informative and very well put together, a vast amount of research as gone into producing the Great War book, with many late nights. Heritage Lottery funding of £8,900 was awarded for the project in 2018, but due to Covid-19 there as been a delay in getting the book completed.

The villages are getting closer together as the boarder between Great Wyrley and Cheslyn Hay is starting to blurr.
Full plans have been lodged for the construction of more than 100 new homes on land between Cheslyn Hay, and Great Wyrley. The scheme is for 130 dwellings, public open space, allotments, linear park and groundworks and infrastructure on land south of Landywood Lane. Details of the application by Cameron Homes can be viewed at South Staffordshire Council. Deadline for comments is April 16 by going online via staffs gov. uk/planning or via email to planning@sstaffs gov.uk

The notice also states: “All representations will be made publicly available. ln the event of an appeal that proceeds by way of the expedited procedure, any representations made about the application will be passed to the Secretary of State and there will be no opportunity to make further representations.”

We have had a great evening at the launch of our new Great War Book by Paul Ford. It has taken over 7 years to gather all the information. Helen Ralphs and Andy Parsons have also contributed to this book, adding in their own part of family research. This book wouldn’t of been possible without Roy Myatt that helped get the Lottery Grant that funded the book. Paul Ford spent many years, back and forward to Staffordshire archives researching the information about the soldiers on the Great Wyrley Memorial Gates. This book is not for sale, but will be available on loan from the History Society and Libraries in the area.

This book is arranged into three sections. The first examines Great Wyrley and its neighbours from just prior to the war, through the war years (broken into the individual years to reflect the change), into the post-war period. Each of the war years starts with the important military events, followed by views on more specific home-front topics: understanding the war, views on the enemy, joining-up and shirking, government control of the people, the hardship created by the war, the supporting of the war effort, and trying to go about ‘business as usual.’

The second section is what | was asked to do by the Great Wyrley Local History Society, which is a write-up of the Wyrleyblog project. It opens, however, with further notes on the memorial garden, focusing on the theft of the memorial gates in 1987 and the naming errors that were created by that theft. It goes on with an examination of the names of the fallen soldiers on the replacement plaques to provide both a basic identification and an accepted spelling for their name. This evidence was used to commission the new memorial stone.

The section then goes on to tell the basic life stories of those soldiers that are on the new memorial. This includes one soldier who is not on the old plaques but ironically is on the plaques for those that served and survived. There is no right or wrong way of organising these biographies, however, to be true to the learning curve of the project, I decided to keep them as separate stories and displayed in the order that I researched them. This means that some information is repeated (and it will be noticeable), as the stories were written over years and were never designed to be in read all together in a book format.

Section three is an eclectic mix, which is designed to encompass both community and life. It brings in different authors, Andy and Helen, who will be reflecting on the war experiences of their own ancestors and so have insights that cannot be matched. They also, refreshingly, talk about soldiers that survive.

For my parts, I chose four different tales. One story is that of Frank Emberton: he was the most highly decorated ordinary soldier to appear on a Wyrley memorial, being awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, yet he was more involved with Bridgtown and Cheslyn Hay than Great Wyrley. A second story is that of Wallace Lawson: Lawson was from Cheslyn Hay, but died while returning home and now rests permanently in Great Wyrley cemetery. It is impossible to track everyone that lived in Great Wyrley and then left, going on to be killed in the conflict, however, I wanted to find an exemplar to represent such people in order to show they are included in spirit: as such, the third story is that of the Chilton family, once of Churchbridge. The final story looks at a community within a community, with the experiences of the Landywood Working Men’s Club (Lower Landywood WMC, and now Harrisons Club) over the conflict.

The fact that the Great War was a savage conflict is not disputed, but many have written the conflict off as a ‘bad war’ as the positives that came from it – true democracy and social emancipation for both the working class and women – are seemingly forgotten.

Why? Possibly because of its re-evaluation in light of the Second World War, as it proved that the ‘war to end all wars’ was a naïve hope. The Great War would have the indignity of being relegated – becoming the First World War – and then face further questions as to why it was fought and what it actually achieved: at least the Second World War, it was understood, was fought against an abhorrent ideology.

Most people’s connection to the Great War today, if not from family memorabilia, museums or archives, comes from viewing its war memorials. These memorials have usually been amended to reflect the fallen from the Second World War and this often shows the disparity between the military fatalities from the two wars simply adding to the feeling of ‘waste.’ Originally, such memorials were seen differently: they were places of pilgrimage to mourn the inaccessible fallen and through their use of language (‘honour,” freedom’ and ‘sacrifice,”) a justification of the war – that the men died defending country, family and noble virtues. A message – as the memorials investigated in the book show -aimed at the young and unborn generations as an example of duty.

After the war the country struggled to find different ways to understand, commemorate and interpret what the war had actually meant: initially, celebration was juxtaposed with two-minute silences, and reflective tree plantings with the exhibition of captured artillery. Over time, it was the sombre reflection of mainly non-combatants that won out; this, it can be argued, is evident when looking at the responses to gifts of captured German militaria offered to both Great Wyrley and the Cheslyn Hay Parish Council.

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