THE COLLIERY GUARDIAN

AND

JOURNAL OF THE COAL AND IRON TRADES.

Vol. CVII.	FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 1914.	No. 2790.

SECOND NORTHERN COLLIERY AND MINING EXHIBITION

OPENED AT MANCHESTER.

For the second time a Colliery and Mining Exhibition
is being held in the City Exhibition Hall, Manchester.
It was formally opened on Friday of last week by Lord
Aberconway, in the presence of a large company,
representative of all branches of the mining industry,
and it will remain open until Saturday, June 27. Three
years have passed since the last great Exhibition on
similar lines was held in Manchester. Following the
Exhibition of 1911 the Northern Mining Industries’
Exhibition Committee came into being. One of the
objects of the committee was to stay the holding of
exhibitions without due warranty; another was to see
that proper places and times were chosen for exhibi-
tions. In the judgment of the committee it was better
to hold these exhibitions in the North of England rather
than in London, and Manchester was regarded as a
convenient centre for all who had to do with mining
matters in the northern counties.



The Rt. Hon. Lord Aberconway,
who opened the Exhibition.

The organising work has been very well done by the
executive committee, consisting of Mr. W. Yates
(.chairman), Mr. Charles H. Luke (vice-chairman and
exhibition director), Mr. A. E. Mathewson, and Mr. J.
Butterworth.

Inaugural Luncheon.

Before the opening ceremony there was a luncheon at
the Midland Hotel, Sir J. S. Harmood-Banner, M.P.,
(chairman of the Exhibition) presiding. The company
includedLord Aberconway, the Mayor of Salford
(Aiderman Desquesnes), Sir Henry Hall, Capt. T.
Schlagintweit (German Consul in Manchester), Mr.
Marcus S. Bles (Consul for the Netherlands), Mr.
Charles Pilkington, Mr. Vincent Bramall, Mr. Percy
Wood, Prof. Petavel (Manchester University), Principal
Garnett (Manchester School of Technology), Mr. Sydney
A. Smith (secretary, Manchester Geological and Mining

Society), Col. Hollingworth, Mr. W. Yates (chairman
of the exhibition executive), Mr. Charles H. Luke
(vice-chairman of the executive and exhibition director),
and others.

After the usual loyal toasts had been honoured, the
Chairman proposed “ Our Guests.” It was, he said,
his great privilege, on behalf of the committee, presi-
dent, and vice-presidents of the Colliery and Mining
Exhibition, to ask the company to join with him in
drinking most warmly the health of their guest, Lord
Aberconway. He was sure no words of his could
express how pleased they were to see Lord Aberconway
in that great city of Manchester to open this Exhibition
in which they were all so much interested. Man-
chester was always successful in her industrial exhi-
bitions, and in this one he was sure she would be
successful no less than on the former occasion in which
an exhibition of the same sort was held; for Man-
chester was the centre of the colliery districts—if he
might say so — of Great Britain, leaving out South
Wales and Scotland, very important places in their way,
he believed. Manchester also was the centre of such
an enormous industrial development of every sort,
including shipping, that she could show to the colliery
proprietors of this country the lead both in demands for
their coal and the appliances which render those
demands both useful and possible, in view of the very
heavy costs at which colliery proprietors had now to
work their mines. As to the Exhibition, they could
scarcely, he thought, have had a better man to open it
than Lord Aberconway. Lord Aberconway was not
only a member of the House of Lords, he had added to
that assembly the advantages of his great talents in
rendering those services which the Peers were still per-
mitted to perform; and he had been throughout the
whole of his career largely interested in the develop-
ment of the mining interests of this country, and not
only had he been interested in the mining interests, he
was interested also in many of the great engineering
institutions which required so much of the coal, the
firing of which had rendered this country so prominent
as it was in industrial enterprises. Lord Aberconway
was distinguished in his early career as a scholar at
Edinburgh; he was also distinguished as the writer of
able engineering papers, and for keeping the science of
mining and other forms of engineering in front before
the whole of the people of Great Britain. To him also
they owed the fact—he thought they might recognise
that—that Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire - and the
central parts of England had shown such a huge
development in the productions of their coalfields. He
would not say that they in Lancashire appreciated these
things as much as they ought to do, as making for the
benefit of the nation, but they knew they existed, and
that Lord Aberconway had not only found the best
method of dealing with coal by adopting every measure
of safety that was possible for his men, but he had been
able by his ability to add to those advantages machinery
and equipment which alone in these days rendered
Great Britain able to compete with her foreign competi-
tors. He was quite certain Lord Aberconway would
be both proud of the Exhibition, and pleased that the
committee had asked him to become their guest for the
opening ceremony.

Lord Aberconway said that though he supposed the
chairman would regard him as a dreadful Radical in
politics, he was afraid he was a dreadful Conservative
in a great many other things, and he felt a grievance

against many persons who, like those present, repre-
sented manufacturers of mining appliances, because
they would not let the colliery owners alone. He sup-
posed eight out of every 10 present were concerned in
the invention of new appliances and machinery for
showing the poor unfortunate coalowners how much
better off they would be if they would only buy those
appliances. Well, he had been connected with
collieries pretty nearly all his life, and he was beginning
to wish the time would come when the inspectors of
H.M. Government and representatives of the enter-
prising firms at this gathering would let the coal owners
have a little peace and quietness. What the coal
owners wanted was to make a little money; and if they
had got to spend all their profits—or a large part of
their profits—in replacing what the gentlemen before
him called obsolete machinery, and putting down up-to-
date appliances, well, then, all he could say was that the

Sir J. S. Harmood-Banner, M.P.
President of the Exhibition.

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coal trade would become a very poor one. At the same
time, of course, their great object—and he said this in
the name of everybody associated with the English
collieries—was to work their mines vrith safety; safety
for the men, safety for those who had to go down and
win the coal; and, seriously speaking, he did think
they owed a great debt of gratitude to many of those
present for the care they had shown in devising means
of avoiding those horrible accidents. Of course, they
could not hope to make their mines absolutely safe, but
he thought they owed a great debt of gratitude to the
ingenuity of those who were represented at the Exhi-
bition. There was no doubt that when one looked at
the colliery plant of to-day, and compared it with that
of 25 or 30 years ago, they saw there had been a great
advancement. Thanks to men like those present, they
had made enormous strides, Think of the old winding