Clock Face (mine)

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The Clock Face Colliery was a coal mine in the Sutton suburb of the city of St Helens in Lancashire . She promoted from 1904 to 1965 and received its name from the large dial (Engl. Clock Face ) on the premises.

history

Consolidation of society

In 1893 the Bold Hall Estate Ltd. was consolidated . , named after an old manor house on whose land the pit was to be built. According to contemporary reports, the partners included a ship owner, two mill operators, a sugar manufacturer and various notables from the city of Saint Helens, including David Gamble , the founder of the Gamble Institute, the forerunner of St Helens College.

Difficult early years

The company bought a total of 1,500 acres (around 6 km²) of land and at the same time began to drive three shafts into the earth . Shafts 1 and 2 reached 500 feet (170 m) before water ingress stopped all work. There were already the first deaths in the mine. In 1900, all work was stopped because the company was financially drained; 250 workers had to be laid off.

In 1904, the Wigan Coal and Iron Company took over the bankrupt company and continued the devil work. Shaft 1 received a pump to swamp the mine field . Around 700,000 gallons (3,200 m³) of water were lifted daily , of which 500,000 were sold to St Helens for drinking . Soon afterwards, regular coal mining began.

From 1914 Sutton began to grow with the influx of miners. Around the same time, a separate siding to Springs Branch near Wigan was built, from where the London and North Western Railway took over the onward transport.

In addition, a workers' settlement with 122 houses was built, which today form the core of the "Clock Face" settlement. This was also the name of a train station on the line from St Helens to Runcorn Gap, which was shut down and demolished in 1951.

Strikes and wild promotion

The British miners' strikes of the 1920s did not leave Clock Face unaffected. When the mine administration reacted to the nationwide strike of 1926 with a lockout , many unemployed people and their families took to self-help and rummaged in the spoil heaps for coal. This illegal and dangerous undeclared work led to accidents and aroused national media coverage, which further fueled the controversy between the labor dispute parties.

The years of growth

Only in 1939 was an in-house laundry facility set up on Clock Face . Through further modernizations after the Second World War , the annual production could be increased to 160,000 tons of coal, generated by up to 700 employees.

Due to difficult storage conditions, which made further operation appear uneconomical, Clock Face was announced for closure by the National Coal Board in October 1965 and shut down in the summer of 1966. Protests by miners directed against the closure , such as an underground sit- in strike in November 1965, when 250 miners were to be relocated to the surrounding mines at short notice, were unsuccessful.

Search for clues

The "Clock Face Colliery Country Park" has been located on the site of the mine since around 1990, a landscape park with an area of ​​around 57 acres (203,000 m²).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ localhistories.org: Tim Lambert: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ST HELENS. Retrieved July 25, 2010 .

literature

  • OS Nock: Railways at their zenith 1905-1919 . German Zurich edition 1977, ISBN 3-280-00892-1 .

Web links

Coordinates: 53 ° 25 ′ 6.9 "  N , 2 ° 41 ′ 42.6"  W.