Creating or ‘sinking’ new colliery pits was a dangerous task, almost as risky as extracting coal itself. To begin on untouched ground, digging down without mechanical machines was a specialist activity for pilot drillers, or miners known as ‘sinkers’ or ‘pilots’. Digging could involve drilling, blasting and of course taken away the hewn spoil and the deeper the new shaft was sunk, the more risk was involved. Accidents including fatalities happened. The sinking of the Priory Pits (also known as Bothwell Castle Colliery 3 and 4) was a good example of this.
During October 1895, the new pits were being sunk just eastwards of Craigknowe and Blantyre Ferme Road, near the railway. They belonged to Coalmasters William Baird & Co and are pictured in this map a couple of years later.
A first accident in the early part of that October gave the sinkers a miraculous escape when the rope of their ‘kettle’ (the big container to lower them and raise the spoil) broke. The kettle was hurled to the bottom but all survived.
Two weeks later on Tuesday 22nd October, another shift of sinkers had just started their nightshift and sent the kettle up from the bottom of their ongoing excavation full of digging equipment. The engineman standing at the new pithead at ground level suddenly felt the slackening of the rope and on pulling it up, the kettle was missing! The supposition was that some of the long drills being sent upwards for repair in the kettle had gone stuck on the pit shaft sides, coming into contact with the bracing woodwork of the shaft and causing the rope above the kettle to snap.
Later investigations found that the kettle and all its heavy contents had hurled down the pit shaft a distance of 20 fathoms (about 36.5 metres). Now the shaft was essentially just that. No tunnels leading off in any direction in that early pit excavation, so all 9 sinkers were standing at the bottom and may have heard, but had little time to do anything about the falling heavy iron kettle and drills heading in their direction through the murky darkness!
Two of the men were killed instantly by the falling kettle. They were David Lowrie, a widower residing in lodgings at Dixon Street, Blantyre and John Hall, a travelling stranger who was staying at Newlands in the Village. Indeed, John was new to the pit and his colleagues and only identified by a letter which had came to him from his wife at New Cumnock. Lowries body was taken back to his lodgings and Hall’s was taken to the mortuary in the hospital next to High Blantyre Cemetery.
Of course, there were 7 lucky survivors who miraculously escaped the falling kettle and equipment, perhaps saving themselves by backing up to the wall of the pit shaft bottom. If you have one of these surnames, perhaps you own your existence to their luck that day! Francis and Thomas Keenan brothers of Larkfield, Joseph Parker and Francis Martin of Dixon’s Rows, Thomas Bray of Low Blantyre, James MacKay of Halfway and Patrick Burns of Victoria Hall, Uddingston. These lucky men were attended to by Doctors MacPherson and Forbes of Bothwell who found them suffering from shock but with little injury otherwise. In the case of Patrick Burns, he had been in both the first accident AND this one, two accidents in the space of a couple of weeks!
AI imagines these 9 men moments before this accident.
