Chairman of Historical Society hopes latest project will: "put Tibshelf on the map"

The ‘Miners to Medics’ research project charters the history of the Tibshelf Ambulance Corp. Formed around 1872 by first-aid trained miners – given training to provide medical aid to injured colleagues down at the coalface, the corp became early members of the St Johns Ambulance Brigade.

Gaining a reputation for their skill, they were invited to Windsor in 1893 to perform a demonstration for Queen Victoria. Many of the corps members would go on to join the Infantry Army Medical Corp or Royal Army Medical corp during the Boar Wars and World War One respectively, providing front-line medical aid.

Headed up by the society chairman – Ivan Brentnall, Miners to Medics is one of over 60 other research projects the society has worked on since their formation in 2016. Their mission since then has been to inform local residents about Tibshelf’s past and to inspire a “sense of civic pride".

It has taken Ivan and other volunteers a painstaking three years of trawling through library records, newspaper archives, and obituaries to piece together the storied history of Tibshelf’s Ambulance Corp and Nursing Association.

“It’s been difficult because of Covid. We try to do our research as a team but that was a problem with Lockdowns,” says Ivan adding: “We’ve lost things and we’ve re-discovered things. We’ve had lots of problems along the way, but because of lockdown we weren’t able to have our usual get-togethers.”

After all the society’s hard work through unprecedented times, and thanks to research funding from the National Lottery Heritage Trust, the Miners to Medics Project is approaching its conclusion. Ivan and the team can look back on the efforts with pride. He says: “It’s a fascinating story. The more we dug in, the more we found out what a worthy history they had.”

The society has also put together a book gathering together all their research about the Tibshelf Ambulance Corps’ story. The book is going to be launched on April 15, at The Mission building on Boundary Gardens. In the afternoon there will be a free exhibition, open to the public between 2pm and 5pm.