Qualla: West Stanley Pit Disasters

West Stanley Pit Disasters: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. At 3:45 in the afternoon of 16 February 1909, smoke began rising the wrong way out of the Busty shaft at West Stanley colliery in County Durham. Air should have been flowing down that shaft, not coming up it. Fifty seconds later, a fireball followed the smoke into the sky, and a cloud of debris rolled out over the pit yard. One hundred and ninety-eight men and boys were trapped underground. Only twenty-nine would come back alive. It was the second time the West Stanley pit had killed its workers in living memory - in 1882, thirteen men had died in the same colliery. The Tanfield songwriter Tommy Armstrong, who knew the Durham coalfield as well as anyone, sat down afterwards and wrote a five-verse poem to the lost men, sold as a one-penny broadsheet sung to the tune of Cassells in the Air.

Image: Public domain

West Stanley Pit Disasters: The First Disaster

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The 1882 explosion came at one in the morning on 19 April, in the Busty seam. Two men were taking a food break in the north cross-cut district when a great stone - some four metres long, sixty centimetres wide, perhaps thirty thick - fell from the roof above them. The stone had b...

Image: Public domain

West Stanley Pit Disasters: An Electric Mine

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. By 1909, electricity had reached underground. Two electrically driven coal-cutting machines worked the Townley seam, with one each in the Tilley and Brockwell. The largest motors were a 100-horsepower pump and a 100-horsepower haulage motor, fed by a 550-volt three-phase generato...

Image: Public domain

West Stanley Pit Disasters: Recovery and Loss

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The rescue began before the official inspector could arrive. The shaftmen at the pit head began clearing debris from the damaged downcast shaft within an hour, working in the cold February darkness. By two the next morning, the cages could be lowered. Rescue parties descended int...

Image: Public domain

West Stanley Pit Disasters: Remembering

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Two memorials to the 1909 disaster stand in Stanley today. The first, an ornate pedestal and urn, was unveiled in 1913, four years after the explosion - dedicated when the wound was still fresh, when widows still came to leave flowers. The second was unveiled in 1995, eighty-six ...

Image: Public domain