BS: Regional dialect - coal dust = 'slack' ?

Subject: BS: Regional dielect - coal dust = 'slack' ?
From: Mr Red
Date: 27 Mar 25 - 02:57 PM

Here's a question for the Geordies, Makems and Sand Dancers:

What do the locals call coal dust - colloquially?

Other UK regions are avaliable - to participate. TIA.

I asked a true knowledgeable Geordie and he did not know.
It involves a joke I will put on the joke thread just to wind up certain "opinions" & that will maybe evoke more comment on regional words. see the Joke

Subject: RE: BS: Regional dielect - coal dust = 'slack' ?
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 27 Mar 25 - 03:11 PM

Im my childhood in the Lincolnshire Backwoods, ‘slack’ was low-grade (therefore ‘cheap’) coal which burned very slowly. My parents used slack to ‘bank’ the fire at night, and it would still have burning embers in the morning.

Subject: RE: BS: Regional dielect - coal dust = 'slack' ?
From: DaveRo
Date: 27 Mar 25 - 04:10 PM

See also Nutty Slack

Not 'dust' and not just up north.

Subject: RE: BS: Regional dialect - coal dust = 'slack' ?
From: Roger the Skiffler
Date: 28 Mar 25 - 04:56 AM

In Birmingham in the 40s/50s we called coal dust slack. One of my childhood jobs when money was tight to go down to the cellar and sweep up anything left to use on the fire. When I lived in Cardiff in the early 1960s my landlady called it small coal.
RtS

Subject: RE: BS: Regional dialect - coal dust = 'slack' ?
From: Mr Red
Date: 28 Mar 25 - 03:45 PM

interesting.

Fine bits of coal and dust was called slack.

Certain lumps that didn't burn well reduced to very white lumps of ash. As opposed to normal coal that disintegrated as it fell to ash. We called those lumps "bats".

When I was installing a weighing machine at the Grimethorpe Colliery they scooped up the dust on wet days and sold it to power station for their fluidised beds. Such power stations had to crush coal into small pieces anyway. Fluidised beds were coal infused with air. It made it easier to transport to the furnace and with the extra surface surrounded by air area it burned more efficiently.