Home thoughts of Ashton in the 1970s, ..... part 4 on discovering coal mines by our front door and a dreadful pit accident

Now if I am honest they were just a bit further away and had long ago been abandoned.

I shouldn’t have been over surprised.  After all we had started our life together in the shadow of Bradford Colliery which despite having closed in1968 still maintained its surface gear as a reminder of what had been.

And of course on that long bus ride from town there was always the Snipe to pass.  Added to this Kay was from a mining family who were still working the coal when we met and married.

So coal and all that went with it was pretty much part of the backdrop of our lives.

But that said no one expects to walk out of the house onto Whiteacre Road and be confronted with a coal mine.

This was not in the surveyors report or in the happy helpful comments of the estate agent when in 1973 we became house owners.

In fact the first I knew about it was when I idly thumbed through a copy of Victorian Ashton.*

There on page 89 in the chapter on the Industrial Archaeology of Ashton-Under-Lyne were the coal mines laid out on a map both to the north east of our house and a little to east.

Of course they had long since been closed and capped and all that remained was an open space.

Given of course the history and geography of the northwest it was an obvious discovery, but a little unsettling.

That said my curiosity didn’t last too long and only 40 years after I made that discovery have I decided to dig deeper.

The shafts are clearly marked on the 1853 OS for Lancashire and appear fifty years later as “Old Pits, 1, 2 and 3” and belonged to John Kenworthy and Brothers.

Pits no 2 and 3 were on that stretch of land between Whiteacre Road and Cricket’s Lane while just across Mossley Road was  pit number 1.

This was Heys Colliery and it was here that in the March of 1851 an underground explosion resulted in the deaths of five men.

James Ogden “was killed by the explosion on Monday last, and the others have since died from the effects of the injuries which they received.”**

These were James Wright Andrew, John Booth and William Joule.

The inquest heard that the airways were not kept open and this led to a build up of gas which should not have happened.  Mr Miller, the underlooker who was responsible for this had been warned in the past but chose to ignore the warnings.  "He knew that William Joule worked with his naked lamp, and where [Joule] worked the air should be pure.”

On his own admission the Mr Miller knew that to clear the air roads would “have taken two men a fortnight to have cleared them properly” and this was not done.

Witness after witness pointed to the negligence of Mr Miller and after a short deliberation the jury decided that “these men came by their death by accident; and it is the wish of the jury that a government inspector be requested to examine the mine; and the jury consider the underlooker has neglected his duty”

So far that is about it.  Of the five who died William Joule aged 33 left a widow and three children, the historical record has yet to shed anything on James Ogden who whose only official entry is his death certificate.

That said both James Wright Andrew, and John Booth can be found in the 1841 census returns for Ashton and maybe I will return to follow them up.  As for Mr Miller and the colliery company they have  passed into the shadows.

All of which I knew nothing of until fired by the memory of those disused pits I began looking for their story.

Pictures, from the OS for Lancashire 1841-53 and the OS for South Lancashire 1888-94 courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and extract from the Manchester Guardian March 22, 1851, courtesy of  Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

*Victorian Ashton, Ed Sylvia A Harrop & E A Rose, 1974

**Manchester Guardian March 22, 1851