The Coal Industry Around Glasgow

Coal was the buried empire beneath industrial Glasgow. It heated the city’s homes, boiled its dye-vats and its soap, smelted its iron, drove its steam engines and fired its ships — the black fuel on which every other industry depended. It was dug first by medieval monks, worked for two centuries by men and women who were serfs in law, torn from the great Lanarkshire coalfield in quantities that beggar belief, and paid for in a steady toll of lives. And within living memory, it was gone.

This page tells that story: the ancient beginnings, the bondage of the Scottish collier, the canal that poured coal into Glasgow, the vast field that fed the industrial city, the terrible price it exacted underground, the politics it forged, and the closing of the last pits.

The oldest industry

Coal has been dug around Glasgow since the Middle Ages. The monks were the first miners: in 1162 the lands east of the city that are still called the Monklands were granted to the abbey of Newbattle, whose brethren are known to have worked coal, and medieval churchmen took shallow seams from outcrops across the diocese’s estates. When wood grew scarce and dear in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, landowners turned in earnest to the coal beneath their fields, and pits multiplied around the burgh — on the Gorbals muir among other places — feeding the town’s hearths and its salt- and soap-boilers. Among the early masters were the Dixons, who began as colliery owners at Govan and whose Govan ironworks would later light the south side blood-red by night as ‘Dixon’s Blazes’. It was a small trade, held back by the limits of muscle, water and early technology — but the foundations of an empire were already in the ground.

The bondage of the colliers

Scottish coal carries a history many find hard to credit. By an Act of 1606, the colliers of Scotland — and the salters who worked beside them — were bound in law to their place of work: tied to the colliery for life, unable to leave, transferred with the pit when it changed hands, their children born into the same bondage. For nearly two centuries the men and women who dug Scotland’s coal were, in plain terms, serfs, the last hereditary unfree workers in Britain — and this within the lifetime of the Glasgow that was giving the world the Enlightenment. Emancipation, when it came, came in two grudging stages, by Acts of 1775 and 1799, and it is telling that freedom was granted not out of principle but because the expanding industry needed more labour than bondage could supply. Even after the colliers were freed, whole families laboured underground — women bearing coal up ladders on their backs, young children working the ventilation doors in the dark — until the Mines Act of 1842 at last drove women and the youngest children out of the pits.

Coal for the city

The problem was never only digging coal but moving it, for coal is heavy and low in value, and the cost of carting it a few miles could double its price. The answer, in the 1770s, was the Monkland Canal, cut expressly to carry the coal of the Lanarkshire field down into Glasgow cheaply and in bulk — and engineered, in his early career, by a young James Watt. It transformed the trade. Collieries sprang up all along its route, barges of coal floated into the growing city, and Glasgow’s hearths, its gasworks, its mills and, in time, its steamships were fed from the coalfield to the east. Cheap, plentiful coal was the precondition for everything that followed: without it, the industrial city could not have existed at all.

The empire beneath the empire

What turned a useful trade into a colossus was iron. In 1828 the invention of the hot-blast furnace made it possible to smelt the west of Scotland’s abundant blackband ironstone — which lay, conveniently, in the very same measures as its coal — and the Lanarkshire field exploded into one of the great industrial landscapes of the world. Coal, much of it turned to coke, fed the ironworks and the factories, the furnaces and the foundries, as well as the domestic fires of a fast-growing city; and to win it, mining spread across Lanarkshire in a rash of pitheads, bings and miners’ rows. Underground, the coal was first won by the old ‘stoop and room’ method, pillars of coal left standing to hold up the roof; later the pits moved to longwall working and, by the 1920s, to coal-cutting machinery — much of it made by Anderson Boyes of Motherwell and exported around the world. At its Edwardian height the coalfield employed tens of thousands of men, and the mining communities strung across the county — Blantyre, Bothwell, Cambuslang, Rutherglen, Uddingston, Coatbridge and a hundred more — lived and breathed coal.

The price in blood

It was bought with a terrible and recurring toll of life. Firedamp explosions, roof falls, floodings and winding accidents killed miners in ones and twos every week and in scores on the worst days, and the Lanarkshire field saw the worst day of all. On the morning of 22 October 1877, an explosion tore through pits No. 2 and No. 3 of William Dixon’s Blantyre Colliery, a few miles from Glasgow, killing 207 men and boys — the youngest a child of eleven — and leaving, in a single stroke, ninety-two widows and some two hundred and fifty fatherless children. It remains the worst mining disaster in Scottish history, and Blantyre suffered further fatal explosions in 1878 and 1879. Nor did the danger end with the Victorians: as late as 1959, an underground fire at Auchengeich colliery, north-east of the city, killed forty-seven men. It was far from alone: the memorials in the mining towns around Glasgow record disaster after disaster, generation after generation, the ordinary price of the coal on which the city’s prosperity was built.

Coal & politics

Out of that hard and dangerous life came a formidable politics. The miners were among the first workers to organise, and the coalfields around Glasgow became a cradle of the British labour movement. It was as a Lanarkshire miners’ leader that Keir Hardie rose — the self-taught pit boy who went on to found the Scottish Labour Party and to become the first independent working-class Member of Parliament, and the father-figure of the Labour Party itself. The county’s miners’ unions were a power in the land; their solidarity was tested in the bitter national lock-outs and in the General Strike of 1926; and the militant traditions of the coalfield fed directly into the wider current of Red Clydeside that runs through the region’s modern history. The coal seams have closed, but the politics they forged did not.

The fires go out

The decline, when it came, followed a familiar course. By the 1930s the older seams were working out and the industry was contracting; the pits passed into public ownership under the new National Coal Board with nationalisation in January 1947, greeted by the miners as a hard-won victory; and through the post-war decades the deep mines of the coalfield closed one after another as the accessible coal ran out. Dixon’s own Blantyre colliery wound up in 1957; and at last Cardowan, at Stepps on the north-eastern edge of the city, the final deep pit of the Glasgow area, raised its last coal in 1983. A trade that had begun with medieval monks was over. Today Glasgow’s coal survives mostly underfoot — in worked-out seams that still, now and then, subside beneath a builder’s foundations — and in the settled former mining communities that ring the city’s east and south, where the pitheads are grassed over but the memory of the pit runs deep.

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