Frank Grimshaw was a photographer for the National Coal Board — his pitmen portraits were probably taken to support a late 1960s recruitment campaign. 

When the Coal Board closed the office where he’d worked, he was able to rescue his negatives, which were set to be thrown out. He packaged them carefully at home and placed them in the bottom of an armoire, where they languished for decades. Frank’s meticulous preservation of the negatives has paid off. Silver Gelatin Test prints of a few select negatives have revealed the work of a skilled documentarian able to make intimate connections with subjects he did not know and likely had met only minutes before the shutter snapped.

These photographs provide an important historic and sociological study of miners’ working lives and their communities in the North West of England in the 1950s-70s.