Kennox Colliery Flood (1943)

A sudden inrush of water flooded Kennox No. 7 mine, Douglas, trapping three men of one family; a thirteen-day national rescue effort ultimately failed to reach them alive.

Cause

An inrush of water from old or adjacent workings broke into the section of Kennox No. 7 mine where twelve men were working, flooding the roads behind them faster than the trapped three could reach the escape routes the other nine men used.

What happened

Twelve men were at work in Kennox No. 7 mine, Douglas, on the afternoon of Sunday 30 May 1943 when water suddenly broke into their working section. Nine of the twelve escaped to the surface by the colliery's escape roads, but three men -- William Davidson Clark (58), a hewer; his 23-year-old son, William Victor Clark, a drawer; and his nephew, John Newbigging Reid (21), also a drawer, all of the nearby village of Glespin -- were cut off by the rising water. What followed became a national news story, reported almost daily in the Scottish and wider British press over the following fortnight. Rescue teams and colliery officials began pumping immediately, but the scale of the inundation -- eventually estimated at some 20 million gallons -- meant progress was slow: at the operation's peak, pumps removed water at up to 1,800 gallons a minute, and by the tenth day roughly three-quarters of the flood had been cleared. Mining engineers calculated that the men's oxygen supply, if they had reached a pocket of trapped air, could last around eleven days, and hope remained high even as that estimate passed: officials publicly drew comparisons with a celebrated rescue at Redding Colliery in Stirlingshire more than twenty years earlier, where miners trapped for a comparable length of time had been brought out alive. Three of John Reid's brothers kept vigil at the pithead throughout the operation.

Rescue & recovery

Scotland's Chief Mines Inspector, A. H. Steel, and the Senior Mines Inspector for Western Scotland, H. H. Wilson, personally inspected the flood water and conferred with colliery management and the Miners' Union on rearranging the pumping machinery to increase output. On the tenth day, 9-10 June, a pumping breakdown halted progress; exhausted workers laboured for six to seven hours through the night to repair the fault, by which point the water level, previously falling at over a foot an hour, had stopped dropping altogether, and officials suspected the flood was being fed by a second, undiscovered source -- an inspection was made of the banks of a nearby stream. Rescue parties, working in shifts of up to twenty hours out of twenty-four and equipped with breathing apparatus, forced their way through stone barricades and flooded roadways toward an airlock where the men were believed to have taken refuge; during one of these final pushes, on 11 June, a section of roof collapsed and the rescuers themselves narrowly escaped being killed. With a dangerous concentration of black damp gas now detected near the suspected refuge, the search was abandoned late that night or the following day, 12 June, the mine officially presumed to have claimed the three men by suffocation. Their bodies were finally recovered by the Coatbridge Mines Rescue Brigade in the higher workings on or shortly before 21 June 1943, three weeks after the flood; it was concluded the men had most likely died of asphyxiation from black damp rather than by drowning.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• Twelve men were working in Kennox No. 7 mine on 30 May 1943 when water suddenly broke into their section; nine escaped by the colliery's escape roads, but William Davidson Clark (58), his son William Victor Clark (23), and his nephew John Newbigging Reid (21) were cut off. ¹
• The rescue effort ran for thirteen days, pumping an estimated 20 million gallons of floodwater at rates up to 1,800 gallons a minute, with Scotland's Chief Mines Inspector personally overseeing the operation; a pumping breakdown on the tenth day and a roof collapse during a later rescue attempt both set the effort back before it was abandoned on 11-12 June owing to a dangerous concentration of black damp. ¹

Related terminology

Mining terms this disaster is structurally linked to, with the nature of the relationship.

• Breathing Apparatus (contextual relationship)
  Named in this record’s rescue and recovery: “…in shifts of up to twenty hours out of twenty-four and equipped with breathing apparatus, forced their way through stone barricades and flooded roadways…”
• Colliery (contextual relationship)
  Named 4 times in this record, first in the narrative: “…working section. Nine of the twelve escaped to the surface by the colliery's escape roads, but three men -- William Davidson Clark (58), a…”
• Hewer (contextual relationship)
  Named in this record’s narrative: “…escape roads, but three men -- William Davidson Clark (58), a hewer; his 23-year-old son, William Victor Clark, a drawer; and his…”
• Inrush (contextual relationship)
  Named twice in this record, first in the summary: “A sudden inrush of water flooded Kennox No. 7 mine, Douglas, trapping three men of…”
• Putter (contextual relationship)
  Named twice in this record, first in the narrative: “…Clark (58), a hewer; his 23-year-old son, William Victor Clark, a drawer; and his nephew, John Newbigging Reid (21), also a drawer, all of…”

Sources

1. (primary) Kennox Colliery, 30 May 1943 — Scottish Mining Website (reproducing contemporary newspaper reports)
2. (primary) Kennox Colliery Co., Ltd. — Durham Mining Museum (drawing on Colliery Year Books and government List of Mines returns)

Record created: 30 August 2026 · Last researched: 30 August 2026