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Mining Lamps, Badges & Ephemra
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BRITISH MINING ENAMEL BADGES inc STRIKE 84/85

As most NMMA collectors know, I have sizeable collections of Checks, Lamps and Association. In the past I thought of enamel badges as not a suitable historic class of memorabilia to collect. In fact I have sold many badges I acquired, as an aside to buying check collections, at throwaway prices to get rid of them. I don't know what made me start collecting badges, but suddeny I did, and collecting against the Trades Union Badges Guide mining section. Very shortly after this Brian Witts published his fantastic book - Enamel Badges of the National Union of Mineworkers - and this has transformed badge collecting. It is full of colour pictures of 1800 badges from areas across the UK, together with description and history. I understand there is to be a follow up addition of the badges that "escaped" inclusion into the original. This is what I now mainly collect against. If you Google the title, you will get the address where to get a copy, only around £30.
I would encourage any collector to start with this interesting and colourfull section of collecting, I have found it to be very enjoyable and rewarding and would reccomend it to every collector.
However if you go for all areas of UK mining, it will be very time consuming and possibly expensive over the years. I would reccomend you picking an area (possibly where you live or where relatives were in mining) and collect those to start with. If it is a small area, or when you have mainly completed that area, move on to another area. Or there is the 4' x 3' poster done by Brian "Closed by the Tories" that you can collect against. This is a colour poster of the badges of the pits closed by the Tories at the time the poster was produced. I think there are about 203 badges on the poster. It looks fantastic framed up and put on the wall with the actual badges stuck over the badge pictures with blu-tack. I have some badges on mine that are not the actual colour version of the badge, but they are there until I get the actual colour version.
What does any other badge collector or possible badge collector think?

I am nearing the end of what I beleive is the most anyone can collect against the 1800 in the book and only require a few of the most elusive or very rare (and most expensive) ones which I will advertise for in classified section. Don't be put off by the values, as these are only a very small number and percentage of the 1800 badges.

The reason that it is impossible to get all the 1800 is that there are a number (possibly 100 to 200) that are one off only colour samples, originally given to the area official by the badge manufacturer to choose the production colours from. These single one off sample colour pieces will be in the hands of Family or Relatives of that Official, who will not part with them.