Eastwood Hall Nottinghamshire

Eastwood Hall, Nottinghamshire, a Hotel and Conference Centre currently owned by Principal Hayley’s, has strong historical links with the local coal mining industry and especially the Barber Walker Company. It was the Walker family residence during part of the nineteenth century later becoming administrative HQ for Barber Walker Co. Ltd. Following nationalisation of the British coalmining industry in 1947 it became the HQ for the National Coal Board (NCB) East Midlands No. 5 Area HQ until 1966. After this, it was an Administrative Centre for the NCB then HQ for its Operations Directorate, for its successor, the British Coal Corporation (BCC) from 1986 to 1994. Hayley’s purchased the property in 1997, and by 2000, they had transformed it into a Conference Centre. Principal Hotels brought out Hayley’s in 2007.The Barber – Walker partnership can be traced back to the late eighteenth century when Thomas Barber (1738 – 1818) and Thomas Walker (1752 – 1816) joined forces. The Barber side of the enterprise had been conducting coal business for around a hundred years prior to this, being associated with the Fletcher family during this period. The Barbers inherited the coalmining interests of the Fletcher family through the marriage of Francis Barber and John Fletcher’s daughter in 1731 and later through the bankruptcy of inventor, John Barber, in the 1780’s. In 1790 the Right Honourable George Henry, Earl of Stamford, leased the rights to mine coal in several liberties of Newthorpe and Awsworth, Nottinghamshire, to Thomas Barber of Derby and Thomas Walker of Bilborough. The lease was for a period of twenty-one years dating from 25th March 1790. A further coal-mining lease in 1791, for forty-seven years at Strelley and Bilborough, consolidated the partnership. Other coal leases followed and by the early nineteenth-century, Barber Walker Co. rapidly came to concentrate its activities and to dominate its coalmining business in the central section of the Erewash Valley. In the 1860’s and 1870’s they sunk a number of new collieries around the Eastwood district, which would form the bedrock of the local coalmining industry for the next one hundred years; High Park (1860), Moorgreen (1865), Watnall (1871), Brinsley (1872) and Selston (Underwood) in 1875. In the early twentieth century, they ventured into the South Yorkshire coalfield at Bentley and Harworth.