This is a recuperative post, covering a range of time from March into April 2021, as the UK’s lockdown began to ease, following a 4 step plan: a roadmap enabled by the extensive targeted vaccination programme proceeding since the new year. As the nation recovers normal activities, so hopefully will we!
Step 1 began on the 8th March 2021 with schools returning to face-to-face teaching. Some further easing happened on 29th March with outdoor meetings of 2 households or 6 people.

Ever cautious, the Friends decided on a small volunteer group return to the site on the 10th April. Working safely-distanced and outdoors behind closed gates, it was a positive first step, and a careful but welcome return to site After a Winter into Spring pause, there was lots to do!


Step 2, not before 12th April, saw non-essential retail, hairdressers and some public buildings as well as most outdoor attractions reopening, and hospitality venues opening for outdoor service only.
Bramah Lecture 2021, 19th April 2021

Remaining cautious, the Friends resumed a virtual programme of a activities at this juncture, with Friends Chair Steve Grudgings delivering the postponed Bramah Lecture at 7pm on Monday 19th April 2021.
The annual lecture, before the South Yorkshire Industrial History Society was delivered online via Zoom and covered the ‘story to date’ of the Friends. Entitled “Restoring Hemingfield Colliery – Trials, Tribulations & Triumphs“, it was a well illustrated tour of the site, its context, history and significance, together with insights into some of the challenges which have been overcome so far, the surprises since 2014, the great volunteers, as well as the long road ahead.
Getting back into the swing of things

The Friends assembled onsite once more on 24th April 2021, with the tools to continue seasonal maintenance, and also to pick up where the working parties had left off. It was really beginning to feel a little more like the old normal, even if the new one was still taking shape.

Short back and sides
Strimming and digging were the orders of the day. Catching up with friends old and new under bright blue and sunny skies made for a delightful day.



Next steps…
Reviewing the impact of each loosening, we now await Step 3, no sooner than 17th May, for many indoor leisure and entertainment venues and Step 4, no earlier than 21st June, when legal limits on social contact may be lifted. For heritage site, like ourselves, we hope to review our activities and look forward to being able to safely provide open days and tours later in the year – with the national vaccination programme aiming to cover all adults by July, there is reason to hope that Heritage Open Days in September will see a welcome return to exploring our past.
Viral reflections
As of late April 2021 (60 weeks into the pandemic in the UK), ONS roundup data showed the total number of deaths involving COVID-19 in England and Wales was 138,911 up to 16 April 2021, using death registration data. In 2015, in a prescient historical study, Martin Knight wrote of the unprecedented scale of what became known as the ‘Spanish Flu’, spreading in three waves from June 1918-May 1919:
“Deaths attributed directly to influenza in the civilian population of England and Wales during the 46 weeks of the epidemic numbered 140,989 equivalent to a death rate of 4774 per million (Registrar-General, 1920a). No other epidemic since records began, whether of influenza or any other disease, had such mortality: the closest was the cholera epidemic of 1849, with a death rate of 3033 per million.”
Knight, Martin, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 in the towns of the West Riding and York, PLACE (People, Landscape & Cultural Environmental Education and Research Centre) York, 2015, p.2
At the time, it was felt that there were not many known effective measures, as the Medical Officer for Barnsley County Borough summarised the unprecedented scale of the pandemic:
“The Pandemics of Influenza which swept over the whole world in the summer and later in the winter of 1918, only to re-appear in the spring of 1919, have been, as far as is known, without precedent. Epidemics causing serious mortality have, of course, occurred in previous years, the last serious outbreak being in 1891-1892. Owing to the shortness of the incubation period, the extreme infectivity of all cases whether confined to bed or able to go to work, and the lack of knowledge as to the causative agent, sanitary measures as now practised seem to have effected no beneficial influence on the progress of the epidemic.”
Sharpe, F.A., County Borough of Barnsley. Report on the Sanitary Condition of Barnsley and the work of the isolation hospital in 1918, Barnsley, 1919, p.16