Coal mining has always been a dangerous profession, conducted with pride, dignity, physical strength and perseverance in the dark underground. The coal mining heritage of Nottinghamshire has a remarkable and unexpected intersection with the exquisite upper world of ice dancing embodied by Notts’ legends: Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean — best known as Torvill & Dean. In the early 1980s as youngsters, Jayne and Chris skated their way into the hearts and mass public consciousness of Notts and all of England, becoming local heroes and national treasures with their repeated European and World Championship gold medals and their magnificent win at the 1984 Olympics.
All the while, Britain was beginning to undergo the labor strife and dramatic “Thatcherian” economic shifts that would erupt into the great miners’ strike of 1984-85 almost on the eve of T&D‘s final winning competition.
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Making this story all the more interesting is that Christopher Dean (born 1958) grew up in Calverton, a mining village eight miles east of Nottingham, where his father was a coal miner. This was their reality, as summarized by the University of Birmingham Conference “Remembering Coal: Legacies, Memory and History “ (June 16, 2025): “A century ago over one million workers were directly employed in the ‘winning’ of coal, facing a range of underground hazards from gas, dust, injury or entrapment. For most of that time the mines were operated as private enterprises, but from 1947 coal became the largest of the postwar nationalized industries under the direction of the National Coal Board (NCB). Once the demand for domestic coal started to fall in the 1950s the number of collieries declined sharply. Nevertheless, at the start of the ‘Coal Not Dole’ strike of 1984/85 [the great miners’ strike] some 250,000 workers were still employed by the NCB. The industry’s rapid demise thereafter was to prefigure wider political debates and environmental concerns with the gradual shift to renewable energy sources.” Whether Calverton or the scores of other colliery villages across Britain’s coalfields, “today there are few physical reminders of the human endeavor that was so pivotal to the nation’s fortunes.” But when Christopher Dean was growing up and well into the Torvill & Dean professional era, Calverton was still a functioning coal town. Its colliery closed in 1999.
Torvill & Dean – almost a fairy tale. This adorable, modest couple from working class backgrounds seem to have given the country and Nottingham in particular a boost in morale at a time of significant social disruption and domestic hardship. As part of the “rebel counties” project we seek to recover memories from Calverton and other coal mining towns as well as Nottingham itself about the T&D years and the experienced build-up to the miners’ strike. These oral histories will be combined with archival research in newspaper and other media files with the goal of documenting and interpreting the simulataneous contrasting discourses about “ice and coal”. Theoretically, the issues resonate especially well with Robert Hewison’s influential study, The Heritage Industry. Britain in a Climate of Decline (Methuenx, 1987).
Torvill & Dean – as Jayne and Chris – did not forget their origins. Barely an interview passed – during their amateur and professional years as well as through seventeen seasons of “Dancing On Ice” – that they did not mention Nottingham. For Nottingham gave them their big break on October 1, 1980 without which the trajectory they achieved might not have been possible. The city authorized a four-year grant to enable them to quit their jobs and devote themselves exclusively to training through to the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo.
The results were immediate. Nottingham’s investment paid off and continued into the present. Jayne and Chris have always spoken with gratitude and fondness about their home and they have returned repeatedly to Nottingham as patrons of local charities, to sponsor a youth development project in St. Ann’s (“Ice Rink On The Estate”), performing, and having a major positive economic impact on the city as the inspiration for the National Ice Centre at the (appropriately named) Bolero Square and Motorpoint.
And one of the most interesting – indeed unique – aspects of Torvill & Dean today is their genuinely intergenerational appeal, as my British colleague, Joshua Bland (University of Cambridge) has observed. There are people, considered “seniors”or almost so, who remember the Olympics and may have followed T&D through their professional years into what appeared to be the final public performance in 1998. New generations of the British public became captivated by T&D when Dancing on Ice began in 2006. This long-lived ITV series attracted viewers in its later years who had never even heard of the great 1984 Olympic victory and simply followed T&D as unusual, delightful TV personalities, on and off the ice.
Continuing with the insight of Joshua Bland, who researches football clubs in former industrial towns, the great manager of Forest Football Club – Brian Clough – led his team to extraordinary and unexpected victories just as Torvill and Dean were surprising England and the world with their own consecutive European and World titles and then the Olympics. In both cases we are dealing with “provincial upstarts”, so to speak, who suddenly put Nottingham on the map. All the while with the crisis in the coal mines about to erupt. Indeed, Brian Clough came out for the miners and even marched in solidarity with them.
Finally, we cannot resist this coincidence: the great American singer and actor, Howard Keel, was from the coal town of Gillespie, Illinois in Macoupin County. Christopher Dean’s father, as stated above, was a coal miner in Calverton, outside Nottingham. At the 1984 Royal Variety, Torvill & Dean were celebrated and then Jayne was surprised on stage when Howard Keel entered with a rose for her. Torvill & Dean had made “Mack and Mabel” one of their most iconic, medal-winning routines. Howard Keel was famous (among all his other accolades) for his rendition of “I Won’t Send Roses”, to which Torvill & Dean skated in exhibition after winning the 1984 Olympcis.
