Silimpopon
Silimpopon was the name of the only hard coal mine in British North Borneo , today's Sabah state in Malaysia. Licensed in 1904 and from 1905 by the London Cowie Harbor Coal Company Ltd. run mine was mined from 1905 to 1931 coal. In the boom years of the colliery near Tawau , more than 3,000 people lived on the Silimpopon site.
Location
Silimpopon is about 6 kilometers inland at the end of Cowie Bay, which is open to the Celebes Sea . The colliery included a narrow-gauge railway , ship landing stations and a large storage and coaling facility on the nearby island of Sebatik .
Hard coal in a historical context
Towards the end of the 19th century, the expanding great power of Great Britain in the Pacific region increasingly used steamships for civil and military purposes. The enormous amounts of hard coal required for this made it necessary to set up a tight network of coaling plants in Asia. In the region, the mining of hard coal in Labuan began as early as 1849 and the commercial exploitation of the Muara Coalmine in Brunei in 1883 .
history
The search for coal
From 1880 onwards, the search for hard coal in the Sandakan area began . On behalf of Sandakan Goldfields Ltd. EA Philipps began in 1898 first on the mainland opposite the western tip of Sebatik Island with the prospecting of the area. The findings discovered in 1901 on the Ranjit River were encouraging, so work continued. In February 1903, a much thicker seam was found on the Silimpopon River , which was known as the Queen Seam and was considered worthy of mining.
The opening of the colliery
The owners of Sandakan Bay Coalfield Ltd. and their agents Livingston, Halton & Co. then applied for a mining concession , which was granted on March 4, 1904 by the North Borneo Chartered Company . The concession included the exclusive right to mine for coal over an underground area of 2331 km² for the next 99 years and to mark out an area of 51 km² above ground for associated facilities. The production tax was set at 2.5 pennies per ton of hard coal extracted, which corresponds to a current value of around 50 cents . The concession also allowed the company to log in unlimited quantities of the timber required for the pits free of charge.
In November 1905, before the colliery opened, Sandakan Bay Coalfield Ltd. suddenly the financial means ran out and the company dissolved on its own initiative. The resources went to a newly formed company, the Cowie Harbor Coal Company Ltd. , over.
Finally, on July 7, 1906, the first shipload of coal was exported: the Labuan unloaded 25 tons of coal in Sandakan.
The mining operations from 1905 to 1931
The first years after the opening up to 1908 were marked by problems. In the hope of making a quick profit, the coal was initially mined using the open pit method , but after a few hundred tons of coal the pits were filled with water. Another problem in the poorly populated North Borneo was the labor shortage. As in other areas of Malaysia, the focus was on the immigration of Chinese. Chinese coolies made up the bulk of the workforce throughout the life of the colliery. In the isolated position of Silimpopons, restricted by the rules of a foreign, European hierarchy, the frustrations of the coolies erupted into violence and open rebellion. In September 1906, 260 Chinese besieged a house in which the mine director had holed up until, after ten days, the British resident and police troops from Tawau restored order and quiet.
In the years between 1909 and 1917, various efforts were made to keep the mine in the black. The North Borneo Chartered Company averted impending bankruptcy twice, in 1911 and 1913, as it felt responsible for the only mining company in its area. The demand, which had risen sharply as a result of the First World War , brought the breakthrough; production rose to 85,000 tons in 1917.
Silimpopon reached its peak in 1924 with 90,000 tons. Due to the high demand after the First World War, the proceeds were good and the colliery made good profits. At that time around 1,000 miners were employed in the mine.
From 1925, the mining company's luck began to turn. In times of high demand, the poor quality of the coal from Silimpopon was not a problem, but with the increasing conversion of steamships to oil firing, this became more and more a competitive disadvantage. In order to keep the mine competitive, it would have been necessary to purchase expensive processing machines and to increase the delivery rate. Two independent advisory bodies came to the conclusion that the establishment of two more wells would be required in a low-lying part of the coal field, but neither Harrisons and Crosfield nor the Chartered Company as donors were prepared to make far-reaching investments.
Shutdown and liquidation
On May 29, 1931, the mining company withdrew from the business and handed the mine over to the North Borneo Chartered Company, after the operation had caused a loss of seven million pounds sterling in the previous ten months . The Chartered Company continued to operate the mine for a short time and finally stopped mining in 1932.
A large number of workers settled in nearby Tawau after the colliery closed.
The coal railway
Due to the location in the middle of the Borneo jungle, the transport of the coal was the main challenge for the mine logistics. When RW Clarke, the first manager of the colliery, arrived in Sandakan in June 1904, he immediately began planning and building a railway line from the mine site to a loading station on the Silimpopon River about 7 kilometers away . From there, the coal was to be transported by barges to a port on Sebatik Island accessible to ocean- going ships - a further 32 kilometers by sea.
The single-track route between the colliery and the loading station was designed with a gauge of 2 ft (610 mm). The first locomotive to be called Annis Vere was the Andrew Barclay 0-4-0T OC (No. 1101). A total of four Barclay locomotives have been used over the years.
Coaling plant on Sebatik
Since the river to the colliery could only be navigated with ships of shallow draft, it was necessary to make a deep water port available for the export of coal. The Sebatik coaling terminal was therefore built on the island of Sebatik . At the beginning of the dismantling, an area was created for the interim storage of 5,000 tons of coal.
On the way from the pits to the export, the coal had to be reloaded several times:
- First, the coal from the hunt was reloaded into the wagons of the colliery railway and transported to loading point no.
- At loading place No. 2, the coal was reloaded from the colliery railway to lighter . The journey time of the barges from the loading station to the coaling plant was two hours.
- At Sebatik, the coal was transferred to hopper wagons with a capacity of 1 ton. The hopper wagons, which were filled directly on the ship, were lifted out of the barges by means of a steam-powered crane. After being placed on a track, the coal was driven to the storage area and put on the dump.
- Loading for export into cargo ships was initially done by hand, from 1912 on with a conveyor belt acquired from the coal mine in Labuan .
There was no independent loading team for the loading process; instead, every time a ship was announced, miners were withdrawn from the colliery, which had a detrimental effect on the productivity of the mine.
The mine today
After the colliery was closed, the area fell into disrepair and the jungle began to overgrow the buildings and machines. In 1947, a team of geologists from Powell Duffryn Technical Services Ltd. who drew up a cadastre of the coal deposits of Sarawak, Brunei and British North Borneo. They reported that the tunnel mouth holes had collapsed, but the workshops and locomotive halls were still there, as well as one of the Barclay locomotives and several steam boilers and machines.
In the early 1970s the site was cleared by scrap dealers. Today only a few building structures, full weather shafts and machine parts can be found in the densely overgrown area .
literature
- Ross Ibbotson: SILIMPOPON - A Borneo Coal Mine ; Opus Publications, 2010, ISBN 978-983-3987-00-9
- Ken Goodlet: Tawau - The Making of a Tropical Community , Opus Publications, 2010 ISBN 978-983-3987-38-2
- KG Tregonning: A History Of Modern Sabah - North Borneo 1881-1963 , 2nd edition, University of Malaya Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1965, reprint 1967
Web links
- ANM Garry: Overseas Industrial Locomotives - Chapter 5: Borneo ; Accessed January 1, 2012
Individual evidence
- ^ Ibbotson, p. 108
- ↑ Tregonning, page 97
- ↑ a b Godlet, pp. 35-38
- ↑ The Straits Times , issue August 31, 1906, page 5 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Currency Converter , The National Archives; Accessed December 9, 2011
- ↑ a b Ibbotson, pp. 11-22
- ^ British North Borneo Herald , July 2, 1906, p. 130
- ↑ a b Godlet, pp. 51-55
- ↑ Inventory list of the Cowie Harbor Coal Company Ltd. dated October 8, 1931
- ↑ Ibbotson, pp. 87-118
- ^ Powell Duffryn Technical Services Ltd .: Investigations into the Coal Resources of Sarawak, Brunei and British North Bornei (1948), unpublished report, p. 131, commissioned by the Colonial Service
- ^ Ibbotson, p. Viii
Remarks
- ↑ Cowie Bay was also known as Kalabakong Bay in the early 19th century. Sometimes it is also called Sebuko Bay.
- ↑ From every paid ton of hard coal 10% could be diverted for the energy consumption of the colliery, so that the actual production fee was 2.25 pennies. (Ibbotson, p.10)
- ↑ Converted to today's conditions, this corresponds to a loss of approx. 275 million euros.
- ↑ Besides the Annis Vere (factory number 1101) these were the Olive (factory number 1174) and two locomotives with the numbers 1275 and 1413.
Coordinates: 4 ° 19 '55.9 " N , 117 ° 27' 17.4" E