Continued from Parts 1 – 5….from the Scotsman, Tuesday 23rd October 1877…..describing events in detail from the disaster morning before. We return to Pit 2 and the bravery of the first men sent down to inspect what was happening. One man, however, who made a very narrow escape with his life—to wit, John Sharp, a […]
Continued from Parts 1 – 3 ….from the Scotsman, Tuesday 23rd October 1877….. The weather during Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st was extremely boisterous and wet, and the sudden fall in the barometer was exceptional. There was during Sunday, it is understood, an unusually large flooding of water in both pits, due alike to the […]
Thanks are offered again to South Lanarkshire Council for cutting down the remaining tall conifers in High Blantyre Cemetery. The trees had in recent decades grown considerably and were obscuring the memorials and gravestones. They had partially been cut in October, so it was welcome news again when this week, the council cut down the […]
Susan Silva contacted me back in January 2017 saying, “I’m hoping to get some assistance on an ancestry matter. My grandmother was from Blantyre, and subsequently emigrated to Canada in the early 1920’s, however her parents remained in Blantyre as far as I know. I am from Toronto, Canada and am planning a trip […]
On 22nd October 1927, Blantyre stopped to remember the great pit disaster in High Blantyre that had happened 50 years earlier. Today, 139 years later we do the same and I thought I’d share a few things about the 50 year remembrance. In 1927, the pit disaster was still relatively fresh in Blantyre’s history […]
Dixon’s Rows – or Dixons’s Raws were former single storey, small miner’s houses consisting of 8 streets totalling 340 houses, of which 306 were lived in, the others being used as stores and a hall. They formed a large concentration of homes, packed into a small area near the northwestern end of Stonefield Road. […]
I’ve been surprised lately to find out how many Colliery Dynamite stores still exist in Blantyre. One at Sydes Brae, another near Craigknowe and one at Bardykes, so I was curious when Graham Carson has contacted me saying, “At the time of the 1957 pictures of Priestfied Terrace were taken I lived in number 3 […]
Just over a fortnight, after the 1877 Pit disaster in Blantyre, the Edinburgh Evening News on Tuesday 6th November 1877 (pg2) reported on a case of mistaken identity. Of the worst kind. One of the bodies of the men brought up from the pit had been identified as a particular person, but it […]