The Whitehaven Colliery Through Time

by Alan Routledge

  Acknowledgements

  I owe a great debt of thanks to my friends for the help and encouragement they have given me in putting this book together.

  Bob McConnell has provided several of the older images and more than a few of the new ones.

  Ray Devlin has also found a number of the older pictures and, as a mining historian, has given me a great deal of information and put names to faces in the mining pictures

  Ray Morton, a former worker at Haig Colliery, has also given advice and provided names to faces. Without their help the task would have been much harder.

  The Beacon Museum, as usual, have given all the help they could and their photographic archive has produced a number of useful old images.

  And lastly but by no means least, my thanks are due in abundance to Frances, my wife, for her patience while I spent hours on the computer and looking at hundreds of photographs.

  I dedicate this book to all the workers of Whitehaven, both present and past, and particularly to those who lost their lives in the search for a living for their families.

  First published 2015

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © Alan W. Routledge, 2015

  The right of Alan W. Routledge to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 9781445640037 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781445640136 (eBOOK)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typesetting by Amberley Publishing.

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The Whitehaven Colliery Through Time

  Introduction

  Coal was the very bedrock on which the town of Whitehaven was built. It had been mined since Norman times but only in a small way. However, things changed quickly after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII, in which he redistributed Church lands amongst his favoured supporters. The St Bees Estate, for which Whitehaven was the port, had formerly been in the safe hands of the monks of St Bees Priory, who saw their lands handed over to the Challinors. In the 1550s the estate was purchased by the Lowther family. Sir John Lowther gave his son Christopher the estate to manage and he rapidly developed trade with Dublin, selling general goods, salt and, later on, coal in return for beef, tallow and cash. The level of trade grew to such an extent that he built Whitehaven’s first ‘peer’ to facilitate his coal trade in particular. The coal, of course, came from his own developing mines around the town.

  Shipping ever increasing quantities of coal to Dublin brought another industry to the town – shipbuilding. The Whitehaven yards built smallish vessels, very strong with wide, flat bottoms, sometimes clad in copper sheet to enable them to sit comfortably on the mud when the tide was out. This also made them very suitable for another trade – the slave trade with the colonies, from where they brought back tobacco, and by 1746 Whitehaven was a major player in the tobacco business, bigger than Bristol, Glasgow or Liverpool.

  Sir Christopher Lowther’s son John took over the estate when he came of age, and set about bringing other industries to the town that made use of coal on an industrial scale. In 1698 he persuaded Aaron Wedgewood of the great potteries family to come to Whitehaven and test the local clays. He carried out many trials and decided that in addition to making clay tobacco pipes, good redware (terracotta), stoneware and semi-china could be made. William Gilpin was given the task of finding the most suitable coal for firing the kilns and Whitehaven Pottery started, an industry which would last until the early years of the First World War.

  The coal mines fathered several more local industries including chemicals, iron ore smelting, glass bottle making, foundries, engineering and even the railways, which made use of phenomenal quantities of coal in their locomotives.

  Putting together a book, which should have been a straightforward task, particularly with so much information available, proved to be anything but easy. Old images proved to be few and far between. New images were equally hard to get because there is literally nothing left to photograph. Some sites have become housing estates and others have been returned to grass. Nevertheless, with a little bit of imagination, ninety-two pairs of images have been put together about the Whitehaven Colliery and the industries it spawned.

  The winning of coal was a costly business in terms of lives lost; women and young children were employed, working for twelve hours or more a day, None of this has been, nor must it ever be, forgotten. People figure large in this story about the Whitehaven Colliery and other local industries.

  Alan W. Routledge

  24 July 2014.

  Early Coal Mining

  Semi-commercial coal mining really started in the Whitehaven area in Norman times and there is plenty of evidence of the monks of St Bees Priory granting leases giving local residents the right to dig for coal at Arrowthwaite. With the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Henry VIII’s reign, the Church-run estates were reallocated, by the crown, to their most loyal supporters, who became lords of the manor. The St Bees Estate eventually came into the careful hands of the Lowther family around 1550. Given the estate (then known as the Whitehaven Estate) by his father, Sir John Lowther of Lowther, in 1605, Christopher Lowther quickly realised the value of selling coal to Dublin along with sea salt from his Whitehaven Pans. By 1632 the coal trade was so high he needed to build a new pier, at Whitehaven, to cope with it.

  Wagon-ways

  Initially, coal was mined from the many outcrops of the seams along the west side of the valley, using day holes and bell shaped mines. The valley running from Whitehaven to St Bees is just under four miles in length and the coal had to be got to the harbour somehow. From the earliest times pack horses carrying the coal in sacks were used and later on they went by way of the specially built wagon-ways. On Mathias Reed’s painting of ‘A Birds Eye View of Whitehaven’ in 1738, the line of a new wagon-way can be seen on the left side running from Greenbank Pit to the harbour. These wagon-ways used wooden rails and the wagons had large brakes fitted to control the downwards speed. As the export business expanded, the means of transporting the coal from mine to ship necessarily improved and giant buffer storage facilities (staithes) were built along the West Strand to meet the needs of the trade – storing coal when trade was slack and using the stocks when trade was brisk.

  Ginns and Steam Engines

  At first, coal was raised from seams along the valley sides by using a windlass to raise and lower the miners, coal and materials in buckets or large baskets. The small windlasses were worked by a couple of workmen – hard work and risky for the miners being lowered. The method of raising and lowering the basket was changed to one that used horses to do the work. Usually a couple of horses would work in tandem, walking round in a tight circle turning a large drum or wheel, which operated the baskets. The apparatus was known as a Ginn and gave its name to that district of Whitehaven where they were most in use. In the 1730s the horses were replaced by Newcomen steam engines. The first pit to use the system was Stone Pit, one of several in the Ginns area. Stone Pit was soon renamed Engine Pit. The Ginns pits were plague
d with problems, with water seeping into the working districts, and the engines spent a great deal of their time in pumping it out. This is a restored steam winding engine at Haig Pit.

  Beaver Dorling Steam Winding Engines

  The Whitehaven Colliery has about twenty seams of coal but most are much too thin to be worked in the normal way. Only a handful were worked, the main seam was almost 10 feet thick and the other seams or bands between 3 and 6 feet. As the outcrop areas became worked out, the deeper seams had to be worked to keep up with Dublin’s ever increasing demands. To go deeper naturally required more technically advanced methods of getting men and materials up and down the shafts. The headgear over a shaft became large, with massive wheels and endless steel ropes – some of which were miles in length. The newer image shows a Beaver Dorling steam engine that was at Haig Colliery in 1920, which ran continuously until the pit closed in 1986, raising coal and men in cages. The machines were operated by a winding engineman or ‘banksman’ whose skills were such that he knew exactly where the cage was to be stopped and always delivered the men safely.

  ‘Seldom Seen’ and Wilson Pits

  The small pit called ‘Seldom Seen’ was typical of many of the mines working the coal outcrops. Entry into the mine was by way of a drift or level, along which the workers could just walk in. The relatively primitive mine was not easy work and often involved the whole family. A man, his wife and his children, both boys and girls if old enough – usually about six or seven years of age – were all employed in the work. The old image dates from about 1880 and there is little accessible trace of the mine today. The new image is of the site of the Wilson Pit, located a few hundred yards from ‘Seldom Seen’. Wilson Pit Yard is now used for the manufacture of compost from suitable garden waste collected by the local council. Just recently a large hole appeared in the field between the two pits, which had been earmarked for housing.

  Coursing the Air, Ventilation of the Pits, Spedding and Brownrigg

  Good ventilation of the early mines, which suffered from serious problems with firedamp or methane, was not easy to achieve. The mines then were generally worked using the pillar and stall method, in which large, square areas of coal were removed and equally large pillars of untouched coal were left in place to help support the roof. These pillars, and the roof and walls of the worked areas, released methane gas in quantities that led to fires and explosions. Many miners were killed or badly burned. It became a problem which had to be solved. Lowther’s mining agent, Carlisle Spedding, was one of the country’s principle mining engineers and he introduced a ventilation system called ‘coursing the air’ to Whitehaven’s pits. This involved fitting canvas and wood brattices into the airways, together with stops and doors, allowing the overseers to direct the fresher air to where it was required. At the same time Whitehaven had brilliant doctor and scientist William Brownrigg who, among other things, made a study of the nature of methane. He suggested many improvements for better safety in the mines. The colour picture is of William Brownrigg. Both Brownrigg and Spedding were recognised nationally for their work and were made Fellows of the Royal Society.

  Methane, the Fireman and the Steel Mill

  The battle against methane was neverending – particularly where lighting was needed in the pit to see to work by. The buildup of methane under the roof was often so bad that a man was delegated to ‘fire the pit’ every day before work could be started. This involved the man covering himself with lots of wet sacking and crawling into the workings flat along the floor, holding a lighted candle high above his head on a stick. If methane was present within its explosive limits in air, it fired or exploded, leaving the man shaken and sometimes burned. The mine was then declared safe for a day’s work, using candles to see by. Carlisle Spedding invented a small machine called ‘the steel mill’ which was operated by a small boy turning a handle, causing a milled steel wheel to rub against a flint, producing a shower of sparks much brighter than a candle and thought to be safe! It was better than a candle but foolproof it was not and fires and explosions continued to occur.

  Family at Work

  A staged scene showing mining by candle light and the filling of a corve (the standard basket used to move coal to the surface in the early days of mining). The hewer would get the coal with a pick and a shovel; the filler would load the coal into the basket, ready to be moved to the bottom of the pit shaft for transport to the surface. The colour image is of a similar set-up depicting a family at work with a boy (right) operating a steel mill; father hewing the coal assisted by his daughter, and at the back the mother pushing a loaded basket, on wheels, onto the underground tramway for onwards transport to the pit bottom and then up to the surface.

  Basket House

  All of the early pits relied on the use of baskets or corves for the collection and removal of coals from the workings to the surface and onto the storage banks. Naturally these baskets, because of the materials from which they were made (willow) and the stony materials they carried, needed repairing or replacing from time to time. In the Arrowthwaite and Kells area this work was carried out at Basket House, which was located not more than 20 yards from Thwaite Pit. Other nearby pits included King; Saltom; Kells; Croft; and Wilson pits, all within the Whitehaven Colliery. Basket making on an industrial scale was one of the first supply industries spawned by the coal industry. In later life, Basket House served as a local corner shop run by the Telford family right outside Haig Pit gates and was frequented by miners going on shift and those coming off for sweets or a chew of tobacco. The property was completely demolished by the local council over twenty years ago, seemingly without any thought to its historical value, to accommodate the local bus company.

  Salt, Coal and Saltom Pit

  Saltom Pit was sunk between 1728 and 1732, reaching a depth of 456 feet by 1773, initially to provide coal to heat the salt pans already in operation at Saltom. It was the first coal mine sunk to work coal under the Irish Sea. Originally men were lowered and raised and coal raised from the pit by the horse ginn system, which was eventually replaced by a steam engine. Once the coal had reached the surface it was moved to the bottom of the Ravenhill shaft, which ran up through the cliff a further 200 feet. From there it was taken to the harbourside by horse and cart along the wagon-way and down the Howgill Brake. Sea salt was also shipped from the pans at Saltom to Ireland. The newer image shows the northern part of the pit site, where the sandstone cliffs are now very unstable and slowly burying this important piece of mining history. In his early dealings with Dublin, Sir Christopher Lowther had shown salt to be a very profitable commodity and profit was the guiding light behind the sinking of Saltom Pit, where as its name suggests, salt was king. It made more profit than coal for the first ten years of the pit’s life.

  A Methane Blower and Street Lights

  Saltom Pit continued in production for over 100 years, finally closing in 1848 having reached a working depth of 778 feet. During the sinking of the pit a large methane blower was encountered, which made any further work too dangerous without first capturing the gas and leading it safely to the shaft top, where it could be safely burned off. Carlisle Spedding offered to pipe it to the town and light the streets by gas. This offer was refused by the town and Harbour Board of Trustees on the grounds of cost – like most district councils who never have a penny to spend! Today there is little of the old pit left but what there is has been reasonably well preserved by the National Trust as part of the Whitehaven Coast Reclamation Scheme. They have recently restored some brickwork but believe the sea and the cliffs will win the battle unless very big money can be found. The footpath on which, over the years, many thousands of workers trudged down and up on their way to and from a day under the sea has now been closed for reasons of safety. Unless the area can be fully stabilised soon, these important relics will be lost forever.

  Ginn Walls and Curved Seats

  The original horse ginn used at Saltom Pit to lower and raise men, materials and coal into and fro
m the workings was located at the northern side of the works and the old image shows the remains of some of the circular wall which surrounded the ginn and discouraged the horses from bolting. This early and important part of the pit has already been lost to the slippage of the cliffs. Above the Saltom Pit, part of the work of the National Trust is the restored footpath running from the harbour to St Bees. In order to provide places to rest or just to sit and enjoy the view across the Solway Firth towards Scotland, a number of attractive seating areas have been erected. The pathway to the Haig Colliery Museum is marked by one such arrangement of curved sandstone walls and wooden seating, which with just a bit of imagination seems to reflect the old ginn wall buried on the beach below.

  King Pit and a Bulldozer

  Carlisle Spedding sank the King Pit Shaft approximately 600 yards from the Saltom Pit in 1750. By 1793 it had reached a working depth of 894 feet, which at the time was thought to be the deepest mine in the world. King Pit closed in the 1790s. When the Haig Colliery site was landscaped after its closure in 1986, the landscapers had a lucky escape when one of their bulldozers fell into the buried King Pit Shaft. Fortunately it stuck at an angle near the top and was retrieved and a very large cork-shaped concrete and steel cap was set into the exposed shaft. As a permanent marker, and also to house a methane vent, a beehive shaped cone was built over the centre, which allows any build up of gases below ground to escape safely from the old workings.