Qualla: Hamstead Colliery

Hamstead Colliery: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Mabbett, Public domain. Just before midnight on 4 March 1908, fire broke out in the workings of Hamstead Colliery, deep below the north-western edge of Birmingham. Thirty-one men were below ground when the smoke began to rise. Six made it out before the poisonous fumes filled the roadways. Twenty-five never did. Rescue parties from Yorkshire pits at Tankersley and Altofts arrived by train and went down again and again with breathing apparatus that was still new technology, but the heat and gas drove them back. It took a week for the mine to clear enough to recover the bodies. The names on the memorial today read like a roll-call of the Black Country: a father and son among them, and an Altofts rescuer, John Welsby, who collapsed and died from the heat the day after.

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Image: Andy Mabbett | Public domain

Hamstead Colliery: Sinking the shafts

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ordnance Survey (UK), Public domain. The Hamstead Colliery Company was formed in April 1875 to work the South Staffordshire Thick Coal, an extraordinary seam thirty feet deep in places that had made the Black Country famous as the workshop of the world. The company bought land in Perry Barr, then in Staffordshire, f...

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Image: Ordnance Survey (UK) | Public domain

Hamstead Colliery: Fires, collapses, and the disaster of 1908

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Mabbett, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hamstead's history was punctuated by trouble before the catastrophe. A fire in 1898 had closed the mine for nearly two years, putting eight hundred men out of work, but the Midlands faced an acute coal shortage and the pit reopened on 8 January 1900. In October 1905 a coal fall t...

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Image: Andy Mabbett | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hamstead Colliery: Modernisation and closure

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Mabbett, CC BY-SA 4.0. Boreholes sunk after the disaster found more of the seam to the north, bringing reserves back up. Hamstead kept producing through the First World War, the Depression, and the Second. After nationalisation in 1947 it was modernised by the new National Coal Board, with bigger pumps...

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Image: Andy Mabbett | CC BY-SA 4.0

Hamstead Colliery: The memorial at the junction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Mabbett, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Hamstead Miners Memorial Trust, registered as charity number 1098711, was established to record the colliery and the men who worked it. On the centenary of the disaster, in 2008, the trust erected a memorial at the junction of Hamstead Road and Old Walsall Road, a few hundred...

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Image: Andy Mabbett | CC BY-SA 4.0