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Iron Man of Park House Colliery
Researched by John Lumsdon
The pupils of the Collings-Harding Mining Schools were, through the courtesy of the Managing Director Mr. Pearson and the agent Mr. H. Owens, conducted over the Park House colliery, ChestertonJune 1910. The party was met at the power house by Mr. Owen, Mr. J. Tomlin, the undermanager and Mr. Moulton the electrician.Here everything is practically in duplicate. The main sets comprising Bellis and Morcam 300 h.p. twin 375 revolutions per minute coupled direct to a Crompton and Co 550 volt 25 cycle 3-phase alternators with an output of 250 kilo amperes at 3 power factor. The alternators are separately exited by Bellis Cropton direct current sets which are also used for lighting purposes. The fact that both alternators and direct current machinery of the latest practice were working in the same house proved most interesting to the students, who were instructed in the primary differences between the respective systems.
After nearly an hour’s instruction in this department the agent invited the party into the office, where a number of drawings and sketches were exhibited and an album of photographs (views taken underground) was shown to the students.
The winding engines, pumping plant and surface machinery were visited in turn and, at five o clock the party proceeded underground to see a coal cutting machine at work on a face 160 yards long. This machine is of the reciprocating and revolving car type, known as the Pick Quick or Hurd Bar machine, made by Cowlishaw, Walker, Co. Stoke-on-Trent. The motor running the coal cutter is 26 b.h.p. running at a speed of 750 revolutions per minute driving the car through level wheel reduction gear to give a speed of 400 revolutions to the bar.
A length of face was undercut for the students to observe the action of the bar and to see the feed gear in operation. The bar was then racked out and placed suitably for the party to make a thorough inspection of the cutter picks and working parts of the machine.
This cutter was the first in this country to be installed for undercutting coal in an ironstone seam and is the only one at work in North Staffordshire.
Such a splendid opportunity of seeing the most modern and up to date machinery at work was thoroughly appreciated and considered a great privilege by all. After visiting the electric haulage and the electric pumping plant the part ascended to the surface having spent 4 hours inspecting and looking round a very serviceable and modern mining plant.
Evening Sentinel 13th Oct 1960 Colliery Cameo
The end of the family pit. In “Coal Magazine” I have read a moving account of the closing of a family pit. The family unit comprising father and sons working together in the pit, year in year out, winning coal. And one could be excused a lump in the throat on hearing that maybe the last one has closed.
I confess that I am old fashioned. The family pit to me is in line with family prayer, a long forgotten source of strength. I have no wish to press the point, for I should be knocked for six, by so called modernists, but I sometimes wonder if in this period of change we replace that which is lost. Sentimentalist Yes!
We have had our family pits in this coalfield, and we have seen them go down one by one before the onslaught of mechanised mining. The family unit has been replaced by the team and I was in at the early merging of these two systems at the old Burley Colliery.
Jog along with me down memory lane. When I left Burley in 1914 to join the Army I took with me all the memory of a family pit, supported by the tang of sweating horse flesh, then smell of dung in the stables mixed with the sweet smell of corn; the quick dash of a mouse, but why go on, except to say that it helped to sustain me through four and a-half long years.
When I came back in 1919 I saw the beginning of change. With the mud of the trenches barely off my boots I joined a family unit in the “Ragman Seam” to install a coal cutter and start the first long wall face.
Bill Edge with his four sons and two friends was to pilot this first venture in mechanised mining. We unloaded the three ton Hopkinson coal cutter powered with the same type of compressed air engine that had driven our torpedoes at the battle of Jutland, near to the coal face and fixed jib and chain.
All set to go; the face climbed up nearly as steep as the side of a house. With a shattering roar and flashing picks biting into the virgin coal, a new day in coal mining at our pit was born.Some called the coal cutter the “Iron Pig” others the “Iron Man”, but whatever the description it was to take the place of the family unit. Only one of that family remains in the mining industry today and he is a recruitment officer at Holditch.
I remember Dick, the first son to leave the family unit for other employment. He used to practice the piano before he went to work at 5 am it set the tune for the day. The family is no more, but stragglers of the family remember a day and generation that made Britain Great. W.H.C.
Evening Sentinel 20th Oct 1960 Letters to the Editor
Coal cutter Sir, On Reading colliery cameo” The end of the family pit” I noticed that he recalled what he terms the first coal cutter in the Ragman seam and the first long wall face, and that Bill Edge with four sons and two friends started the first venture in mechanised mining.
It might have been the first coal cutter at the old Burley and it might have been the first venture for Bill Edge and family, but certainly not the first cutter or venture in the North Staffordshire coalfield.
I well remember, and I hope there are a few more alive who will do, the electric coal cutters at the old New Haden Colliery at Cheadle about 55 years ago. I was a boy of 13 at the time and one of the jobs I had to do was to scrape out behind one of these cutters. There were two of them in the pit and the iron scraper seemed bigger and heavier than me. All this was a long time before the venture of Bill Edge and sons.
W.A.C. Burslem.
Evening Sentinel Oct 31st Letters to the Editor
The long wall coal face.
Your correspondent (W.A.C.) points out that at the New Haden Colliery, a coal-cutter and long wall face were in operation as long ago as 1905; and in a way he chides me for giving the impression that our venture, after the First World War, was the first of its kind in North Staffordshire.I can assure him that not for one moment was that my intention, as I was aware that other pits had long wall faces before Burley. In fact, I was sent to Forge Pit (Skin) to have a preview of a machine face before our installation in the Ragman Seam. I took Bill Edge, sons and friends as the best example I knew of the family unit merging into mechanised mining, and the beginning of the end to the family pit.W.H. Colclough. 62 Ravens Lane, Bignall End.
For nearly on hundred years the name "Cowlishaw"
in North Staffordshire has been associated with the
manufacture of colliery equipment. For over fifty years
Cowlishaw, Walker and Co. Ltd. have manufactured
coal face machinery, first at their Etruria works and
then since 1930 at Biddulph.
Coal Cutting by Machinery 1874
On this subject Mr. Traice, gave a lecture before the Manchester Geological Society. He said, he did not think the history of coal cutting would go further back than 1860. The mechanical problems to be solved were: -
1. To contrive a machine that would cut a groove beneath the coal to a depth of about three feet, such a groove not more than three inches in height.
2. To make a machine so compact in height and arc that it could be adjusted handily in the spaces where it had to work.
3. That the weight of the machine should be such that it could be readily moved from one place to another, and yet that it should be so strongly constructed as to bear the strains and ordinary casualties incident to its work in a coal pit.
4. That its progressive movement when at work should be automatic, or very easily effected if done by hand gearing.
5.That the machine should not require more that two or three to attend it, and do the entire work incidental to the operation.
6. That it is very desirable to have machines adapted to cut in other horizontal planes, and at various heights from the floor.
7. To employ a motive power for driving the machine that could be applied to any part of the mine. It was most superfluous to add that all these conditions might be filled, and by various descriptions of machines and yet mechanical coal-cutting remains a problem virtually unsolved. The inexorable law of supply and demand could not be evaded, and only when machines did the work more economically (and so more profitable) that it was done at present, could their inventors hope to see then generally adopted in the extraction of coal.
As far as his enquiries had gone, the actuating a pick mechanically as much as possible in the style it was so vigorously wielded by the hewers had engaged by far the most attention in attempts to cut coal by power. That was a natural, but apt to be a fallacious, direction for invention to take, for uniformity or diversity within a certain very narrow range was of the essence of mechanical action, whereas infinite variety of movement and adjustment of limb and muscle to varying circumstances, and those guided by intelligence, were the endowments and the birthright of every unit of their toiling millions.
After describing the various machines in the Peel Park Exhibition, he said that there was no likelihood of these machines affecting any sudden revolution in the getting of coal, for it would take long to secure confidence in their use and establish their claim on economic grounds; but coupled with the introduction of air engines not only to actuate them, but also to do much of the other heavy work of the mine, he looked forward to a vast development of these applications of mechanical ingenuity to lighten the toil of the miner, produce more useful coal, decrease the perils of coal getting, and also the costs of its extraction.
Mr. T. Knowles, M.P. who was present on the occasion of the lecture, said though he had not had a machine of this character in use at his collieries, he had not heard a very favourable result of the working of such machines at many other collieries in Lancashire. He thought that anyone who had seen coal-cutting machines in work would agree with him that the simple question was one of expense. Did the machines do the work at any less expense than was necessary to be met when the work of getting coal was performed by hand labour? But even granting that a machine was in use at the colliery, it was necessary to employ men to look after them and to perform certain necessary work.
For instance, after the machine had done cutting in a certain direction, men were required to be there to pull it down, shift the coal and re-level and relay the road before the machine could be used again. Therefore, looking at the whole matter fairly, and taking into account the various operations necessary in fist of all cutting the coal and getting it to the pit bank, he did not think that it was a saving of expense to use a machine.