Andrew Benson and Face Workers Below Ground
This group of miners pictured under the sea gives a good indication of the working conditions in the pit in the years leading up to its closure. From left to right: Barry Taylor, Billy Burns, Andrew Benson, Dick Cross and Andy Day. Apart from his own choice of working clothing, each man is wearing a helmet lamp and there are also miners’ safety lamps in evidence. There’s not much room between heads and the stone roof in the Bannock Band. Conditions underfoot were also rough. The large chain on the ground, between the miners feet, is the haulage chain for the coal cutting machine. During the time in which this book has been put together, the new West Cumbria Mining Co. has started to investigate the possibility of reaching and mining up to 3 million tons of coking coal per annum, just south of Haig, using modern mining methods such as a long wall coal cutter.
The Final Shift
A night-time photograph taken across the car park the night before the pit closed. When the cages came up for the last time and all the men were safely above ground, the ropes were cut and the cages crashed to the bottom of the shafts, which were immediately filled in with whatever rubbish and spoil was available; even colliery documentation found its way into the shafts. Millions of pounds’ worth of equipment was left below ground. The shafts were sealed and the pit abandoned. This was not just the closing of a pit but the end of all deep coal mining in Whitehaven and West Cumbria. In its heyday in the 1960s Haig employed over 1,600 men above and below ground. The end of several hundred years of coal mining meant the loss of an industry which had been the very bedrock on which the town was built. Today’s photograph, taken from the same place as the older one, shows the car park, now a meadow, the old engine houses almost hidden by trees and a small industrial park in front of the pit. If plans for a new coal mine come to fruition then it will be close to here that it will be built.
The Whitehaven Colliery Through Time Page 6
