Energy in History

‘Brick Assyrian Temples’: Coal-fired power stations

After the Second World War, Britain’s new nationalised electricity industry concentrated production into a smaller number of giant new coal-fired power stations.

These massive undertakings came to supply a far larger demand from industry and domestic consumers. Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, electricity production grew around six times over, but the number of power stations was less than half that which it had been upon the sector being taken into public ownership in Scotland, England and Wales in 1948. This was all made possible by the integration of nationalised electricity with the newly formed publicly-owned rail and coal mining sectors.

One example of this was the construction of the Rugeley A station in Staffordshire during the early 1950s. Lea Hall colliery was dug purposefully to supply the pit.

Workers' voices

Ken Rochester’s family relocated to Staffordshire from the Midlands so that his father could work at the pit. In 2022 he remembered an era marked by prosperity and opportunity, with coal and electricity at its centre.

"Nearly all of us who left school had jobs, or those that wanted to work. I mean even then you still had one or two that said they didn’t wanna leave the town or whatever. Stafford had the English Electric Factory that made generators you know for power stations. Huge factory. I think it’s still there but in a different company. Bagnalls, we made steam locomotives. We also started making the first diesel electric for British railways. And one of them that I made parts for is in the York Railway Museum!

It’s got a different number on it but it says this used to be blah blah. It’s got Bush Bagnall on the nameplate. And I took one off. I said take a photo, 'I made that!'. There was Dormans that made diesel engines, there was the Universal Grinding company that made grinding wheels. There were other factories. I can’t remember them all. But Stafford was certainly a prosperous town. Ten miles up the road you had Wolverhampton and Walsall. And yeh, it was as far as I could make out as a teenager quite a prosperous area."

Ken went on to work at the Rugeley B station. Rugeley B was significantly bigger than even the A station it stood alongside. It was commissioned less than a decade after Rugeley A, with generation beginning in 1970. Whilst its huge cooling towers and 500 megawatt generating sets create an impression of imposing modernity, Ken also recalled the reliance on dangerous manual human labour in his ostensibly heavily mechanised workplace.

"Some of the jobs. They wouldn’t let you do it. I don’t know how these privatised companies actually work. I imagined they were quite tied to different rules. To 1970. But eh, one of the jobs was One of the jobs was ashing out the boiler. They design everything for simplicity. No! No. The ash would build up inside. You’d end up with scaffold poles up the little door at the bottom. Manual work. Bang bang bang. And just occasionally as it happened a whole mountain of ash would break and fall down. We’re talking molten ash, okay. And it would come out of the door that you were standing in front of. 

You used to throw everything and leap to the side. And you could get a couple of tonnes of red hot ash just come rushing past you. And it was two of us used to do it. Yeh, it was dangerous I thought. It was something you accepted I think because the job had to be done. It didn’t always go like that but certainly on a few occasions you had to be quick.

I got hit when it happened to us once. My friend was standing at the side, and he had his short scaffold pole and when the ash started coming, I ran he hit this pole, and it knocked me out. I spent the rest of the shift limping about. It’s a bit complex. There were many many kinds of jobs like that. Ash and dust. You had to get rid of all the ash and you had to get rid of all the dust. There was an ash plant, there was a dust plant. Lots of pumps, rotating machinery. Pipes that used to break sometimes and throw a thousand gallons of water at you. I think you just accepted it. That’s my job. You know."

Rugeley was a source of civic pride in the Midlands. It represented the achievements of modernity and the role of the coalfields and local engineering in supplying an electricity hungry nation. On 26 January 1962, the Birmingham Post boasted that Rugeley A hosted the "world’s largest cooling tower", built to a unique design that minimised its demands for cooling water. The entirety of Lichfield Cathedral could fit in the design, as could a full-size football pitch. J.E. Farrington, the station superintendent, proudly told the Post that "the eyes of engineers all over the world were on the tower". The Post did have to note though that the power station "is variously considered a blot on the landscape and a thing of massive beauty." (The National Archives, POWE 14/1058).

These  divisions had political implications. The Conservative Housing Minister lampooned the nationalised industry for building "brick Assyrian temples" in the early 1950s. This met the chagrin of Walter Citrine, the head of the British Electricity Authority who was a former trade union leader and a fervent supporter of public ownership. Citrine derided the minister’s "cheap sneer", insisting that the Authority had "consulted the highest architectural opinion" in building its large new stations which fulfilled essential national needs (The Modern Records Centre, MSS 209/5/2 Press Cuttings, 1953-6).