Qualla: Markham Colliery disaster

Markham Colliery disaster: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Douglal, CC BY-SA 4.0. There are 106 steel figures walking together at the edge of Staveley. Each one carries a name stamped on a bronze tag at the chest, and each name belonged to a man who went to work at the Markham Colliery and did not come home. The figures arrived in stages between 2013 and 2022, paid for by collections and grants and patient years of fundraising. They commemorate three separate disasters at one pit: a 1937 explosion, another in 1938, and a cage that fell to the bottom of the shaft on a Monday morning in 1973.

Image: Douglal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Markham Colliery disaster: The Pit at Staveley

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Douglal, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Markham Colliery worked the deep coal seams of north Derbyshire, just outside Chesterfield, in a landscape stitched together by railways, ironworks and the dark heaps that mining leaves behind. By the interwar years it was one of the busy pits feeding the foundries and power ...

Image: Douglal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Markham Colliery disaster: 1937 and 1938: Explosions Underground

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Douglal, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first of the great Markham disasters came in 1937, when an explosion underground killed nine men. The community had barely steadied itself when, less than a year later, another explosion tore through the workings. The 1938 blast killed seventy-nine miners and seriously injure...

Image: Douglal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Markham Colliery disaster: 30 July 1973: The Cage

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Douglal, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the morning of 30 July 1973, twenty-nine men stepped into the descending cage at Markham. The cage was a double-deck steel box, lowered on a winding rope under controlled deceleration. As it approached the bottom of the shaft, the winding engine man saw sparks beneath the brak...

Image: Douglal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Markham Colliery disaster: Walking Together

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Douglal, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Markham pit closed in 1994, swept away with most of the deep mines of central England. The headstocks came down; the spoil heaps softened into grass. What might have been left was silence. Instead, in 2013, the sculptor Stephen Broadbent installed the first of his steel figur...

Image: Douglal | CC BY-SA 4.0