The origins of the company go back to the early 1860s when the Duke of Norfolk sank a pair of shafts to a depth of 265 yards into the Silkstone seam, a couple of miles from the centre of Sheffield. After only a decade of working, the Duke decided to hand over the operation to a group of businessmen who became known as the Nunnery Colliery Company.The Nunnery Colliery was responsible for producing almost half of all the household coal consumed in Sheffield, and it was also producing more than 200 tons of coke a day for the local steel makers at the beginning of the 1900s. The company built a brickworks which was capable of manufacturing half a million bricks per month, the raw materials being extracted from the colliery.
In 1923 tragedy struck when an accident at the colliery, caused by the breaking of a rope hauling an underground train carrying 90 men and 30 boys, resulted in the death of 7 men and 46 injured.
By 1935 the Nunnery Colliery Co. was turning out 2,000 tons of coal per week. During the Second World War the Nunnery pit was used to store valuable museum pieces and art treasures, including stained-glass windows from Westminster Abbey. Following the end of the War attempts to retrieve the treasures proved difficult. The crates used for packing items had rotted and were buried in mud, due to severe flooding at the mine during the war years. Alot of the glass was rescued, but the drawings for the window designs were sadly missing.Following nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947, the National Coal Board decided that the Nunnery Colliery was uneconomical and it was closed in 1953.