Ivor Brown, lecturer and mining historian

Dr Brown, a college lecturer who had begun his working life as a mining engineer, was involved with the early development of the National Coal Mining Museum at Overton, near Wakefield, and remained its longest serving volunteer.

His last day there, some 30 years after his first, was spent overseeing the launch of a new exhibition.

It was while lecturing at Doncaster College in the 1960s that he began trying to create a mining museum in South Yorkshire. He renewed his efforts on a county-wide basis in 1977.

In the 1980s, as the Wakefield museum begin to take shape on the site of the old Caphouse colliery, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to study mining and tourism in the USA and Australia, spending eight weeks with the movers of similar projects abroad.

With the opening of the museum in 1988, he combined volunteering with part-time consulting on the mining industry.

Two years ago, he and his wife, Iris, were at Buckingham Palace with other Churchill fellows, at a reception hosted by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

She seemed surprised to hear that the Caphouse pit was now a museum, he recalled. The Duke less so, having visited Overton in 2002.

Iris said the Palace event had been an enduring highlight.

“It has been said he was a legend in mining history terms and his work will help future generations who study the past,” she said.

Mining was in Ivor Brown’s DNA and earlier this year, on the 70th anniversary of the nationalisation of the pits - the so-called “vesting day” - he recalled being taken, as a schoolboy, to watch the chippies putting up a National Coal Board sign on the pump room wall at Madeley Wood pit in Shropshire, where his father was chief clerk.

At the same time, he remembered, the Miners’ Federation changed its name to the National Union of Mineworkers, while some of those at the top, the Madeley Wood manager among them, opted for a non-nationalised life in Canada.

Anisha Christison, who spent a decade at the museum with Dr Brown, said: “He had such a love of mining history and was so knowledgeable. He was really good with members of the public and everyone felt welcomed and at ease.”

Dr Brown, who lived at Sandal, Wakefield, was also an enthusiastic traveller and charity worker. A thanksgiving service was held at Sandal Methodist Church.