| Description | Various papers relating to the search for coal and oil in the Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire area of the Midlands between 1900 and 1926, and the presence of oil in England more widely. They include maps, correspondence, reports, proofs of articles and publicity literature, legal documents, and newscuttings.
They mostly cover the period from 1911 to 1919, and relate to the discovery of oil in August 1911 at Kelham, Nottinghamshire, with one file covering a later peiod (1920s) and focusing on coal borings in Lincolnshire. |
| Administrative History | James Ford was a mining engineer and colliery agent, often working as a consultant. Working in the Midlands and having premises in Doncaster, Newark, and Mold (Wales) between the early 1900s and the late 1920s, he claimed to be the first man to discover the oil strata in England while superintending coal borings in Kelham, Nottinghamshire, in August 1911, at which time he was in a syndicate with Maurice Deacon and CR Hewitt, and advising The Newark Collieries and The Newark Coal & Oil Company. These borings also provided evidence for the eastern extension of the Nottinghamshire Coalfield. The discovery does not appear to have amounted to anything at the time, though oil was later extracted from the area in the 1940s.
In the mid-1920s he became part of a company named the Lincolnshire Boring Syndicate, which had plans to bore for coal and build a power station nearby, thus minimising the expense needed to transport the coal to the power station and resulting in cheap electricity production.
He was a member of the Midlands chapter of the Institution of Mining Engineers (now part of IOM3), and a Fellow of the Geological Society between 1911 and 1936. |