Seven minutes past nine on a Saturday morning, May 28, 1887. Most of the 184 men and boys working the Udston Colliery had put down their tools to eat breakfast. Three hours into the shift, somewhere in the Splint Seam, an unauthorized shot — a blasting charge fired without proper precautions — ignited the coal dust suspended in the workings. The explosion roared through the underground galleries, rolled up the No. 2 downcast shaft in a column of flame, then erupted seconds later from the No. 1 upcast, setting the wooden head-frames on fire. By the time the fires were quenched and the choke-damp ventilated, 73 men were dead. The site is now a quiet housing estate on the western edge of Hamilton — but for two generations afterwards, every miner's family in the district could name someone who never came home that morning.
The colliery had been opened in 1875 at the top of Hillhouse, a small pit by Lanarkshire standards, employing about 200 men and boys in three coal seams running as deep as 1,000 feet underground. The workings extended for 150 acres and pressed up against the boundaries of three neighbouring mines — Blantyre, Earnock, and Greenfield. That morning, 184 had descended. The Splint Seam was the deepest and the most dangerous, because the coal there shed fine dust that hung in the still air of the galleries. When the blast came at 9:07 am, it was so violent that miners in Greenfield Colliery, separated by 135 feet of solid coal, heard it through the rock. In Blantyre — where 207 men had died ten years earlier in the worst disaster Scotland had yet seen — the vibration kicked up dust so thick it temporarily blinded the morning shift.
Rescue began within minutes. Volunteers descended first, joined quickly by experienced miners from the neighbouring pits, men who knew exactly what they would find because they had been in galleries like these all their working lives. By three in the afternoon, the men in the upper Ell and Main Coal seams had been brought out — those seams had not been damaged by the blast itself, though five men in the Main Coal shaft died from choke-damp seeping up from the Splint workings. The Splint itself had to be ventilated before anyone could enter. It took 45 hours of fighting bad air and collapsed timbers to recover the bodies. Two men were found alive at the bottom of No. 2 pit. The other 71, almost without exception, were not. Dr. Robertson of Hamilton examined each body and recorded the official causes: 53 burned, 20 suffocated. The dead earned, on average, about three shillings and threepence a day.
Within days, Keir Hardie — then Secretary of the Scottish Miners' Federation, soon to become the founding figure of British Labour politics — denounced the deaths as murder. The inquiry by the Inspector of Mines, Ralph Moore, concluded what every miner in the district already suspected: the explosion had been a coal-dust ignition triggered by unauthorized shot-firing, the practice of blasting without the proper safeguards that regulations required. The men who died had not been killed by some unforeseeable act of nature. They had been killed by a choice somebody made about how to get coal out faster, in a pit that should have known better after Blantyre.
The Udston Colliery kept working for decades after the disaster. The last buildings and the pit waste were finally removed in 2002, and Hamilton's western expansion has put houses where the headstocks once stood. In December 2001 the South Lanarkshire Council placed a plaque on the miner's statue outside Brandon Gate council offices in Brandon Street. The plaque was accepted by Jimmy Glen, who was 96 years old and the oldest surviving retired coal miner in Hamilton. He had started work in 1917, at the age of 13, at the screening tables of the Bent Colliery — fourteen years too young to remember Udston, but old enough to have known many men who did. In 2002, a second plaque went up at the Priestknowe roundabout in East Kilbride, dedicated specifically to the six East Kilbride men among the dead.
Site of the former Udston Colliery: 55.77°N, 4.09°W, at Hillhouse on the western edge of Hamilton in South Lanarkshire. Cruising altitude 3,000-4,000 feet AGL gives a view of the Clyde Valley with Hamilton spread below and Glasgow visible to the northwest. Nearest airport is Glasgow (EGPF), 12 nm west; Glasgow Prestwick (EGPK) lies 25 nm southwest. The site is now a housing estate with no visible colliery remains, but the wider Lanarkshire coal field shows in the pattern of former pit villages strung along the Clyde — Hamilton, Blantyre, Bothwell, Motherwell — each marking a colliery that drove the Victorian boom and closed in the deindustrialization of the late twentieth century.