Lumley Park Colliery Explosion – Chester-le-Street – 1727

LUMLEY PARK. Chester-le-Street, Durham. 1727.

In 1667 it was recorded that the collieries were the greatest in the north and produced the best coal which was exported to Sunderland. The pits had a drain for water which was drawn by two engines, one of three stories and the other of two. All the pits for two or three miles around put their water into these drains. The pumping arrangement formed a feature of the colliery and probably there were chain pumps. When the water failed the pumps were worked by horsepower.

Daniel Defoe wrote about a colliery explosion of which he was told, as he travelled in Durham. The exact date and place of the disaster are not mentioned and there is a possibility that he may have been referring to the explosion at Flatfield Colliery in 1708:

Here at (Chester-le-Street), we had an account of a melancholy accident which happened in or near Lumley Park, not long before we passed through the town. A new coal was being dug or digging, the workmen worked on the vein of coal until they came to a cavity, which was supposed, had formerly been dug from some other pit but be it what it will, as soon as upon breaking of the hollow part, the pent-up air got to vent, it blew up like a mine of 1,000 barrels of gunpowder, and getting vent at the shaft of the pit, burst out with such terrible noise as made the very earth tremble for some miles around, and terrified the whole country. There were nearly three score of people lost their lives in the pit and one or two, as we’re told, who were at the bottom of the shaft, were blown quite out through sixty fathoms deep, and were found dead upon the ground.

REFERENCES
Annals of Coal Mining. Galloway, Vol. 1, p.253.

Information supplied by Ian Winstanley and the Coal Mining History Resource Centre.