Kelty Colliery

Overview

The Fife Coal Company's colliery at Kelty, which grew from 521 people in 1894 to over twelve hundred by 1900. Two of its shafts, Nos. 4 and 5, were renamed the Lindsay after the company's first chairman, and it was there that nine men died in 1957.

History

Coal at Kelty was the Earl of Moray's in the 1850s and the Beath and Blairadam Coal Company's in the 1860s. The Fife Coal Company was formed in 1872 to take over and develop that company's pits, and Kelty became one of its own.

The Lists of Mines show it growing fast: 521 employed in 1894, 685 in 1896 and 1,208 in 1900 — a thousand of them below ground — on household, manufacturing and steam coal.

The colliery's shafts were numbered, and Nos. 4 and 5, which began sinking in 1873 in the south-east corner of Kelty about two miles north of Cowdenbeath, took the name of the Lindsay Pit after the Fife Coal Company's first chairman. On 14 December 1957 an underground explosion at the Lindsay killed nine local miners and injured others; Kelty Community Council held a memorial service for the sixtieth anniversary at the community centre in December 2017.

Geology

The colliery worked the Coal Measures of the Fife coalfield at Kelty. Neither source names the seams, which is a gap.

Geological setting: Sedimentary Beds and Seams (well documented example)

Workings

A numbered group of shafts. Nos. 4 and 5 began sinking in 1873 in the south-east corner of the village, about two miles north of Cowdenbeath, and were afterwards known as the Lindsay Pit.

Closure

The closure date is not known for Kelty Colliery as such. The Lindsay, its Nos. 4 and 5 shafts, is recorded as producing until 1965 and abandoned two years later.

Related mines

• Dunnikier Colliery — Both passed to the Fife Coal Company, which by its height ran fourteen collieries in the county and is the operator this archive holds them both under.

Disasters & major incidents

• Kelty Colliery sinking accident, 1894
  8 May 1894 · Winding / Shaft Accident · 3 fatalities

  Three sinkers were knocked off the kettle as they rode up the shaft at the Fife Coal Company's Kelty colliery on the morning of 8 May 1894.

  At half past ten on the morning of 8 May 1894 three sinkers at the Fife Coal Company's Kelty colliery, Charles Clark, David Graham and Thomas Wood, were riding up the shaft on the kettle when they were knocked off it and fell to their deaths.

• Kelty Colliery hoist accident, 1898
  28 May 1898 · Machinery · 2 fatalities

  Two thirteen-year-old pithead girls at Kelty Colliery were killed on 28 May 1898 when a loaded hutch fell from a hoist cage onto the box where they sat.

  On 28 May 1898 a boy at Kelty Colliery was lowering a surface hoist cage that had risen too far when a tub carrying an iron pipe was pushed onto it. The cage fell away before the hutch had been secured, and the hutch fell off and struck two pithead workers, Agnes Bain and Euphemia Brown, both 13, who were sitting on a box near the foot of the hoist. Both girls were killed.

• Lindsay Colliery explosion, 1957
  14 December 1957 · Explosion · 9 fatalities
  Shortly before four o'clock on the morning of 14 December 1957 firedamp was ignited on the No. 3 Unit of the Glassee seam at Lindsay Colliery, Kelty, and the explosion was carried along the intake gate by coal dust. Nine men were killed and eleven injured. Sir Harold Roberts's public inquiry found that the gas had been lit by a match struck to smoke a cigarette in a locked safety-lamp mine, that it had gathered in the waste because the air was too slow to clear it, and that smoking underground was common knowledge.

What's uncertain

Points where sources disagree or the record could not be settled; both accounts are kept. All open questions in the archive.

• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a Mining Remediation Authority abandonment plan titled 'Kelty' (catalogue 7898, Kelty Main, dated 1895); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain) ³

Recorded claims

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

• The colliery was the Earl of Moray's in the 1850s and the Beath and Blairadam Coal Company's in the 1860s before passing to the Fife Coal Company Limited. The Lists of Mines give 521 employed in 1894, 685 in 1896 and 1,208 in 1900, producing household, manufacturing and steam coal. ¹
• The Lindsay Pit, whose shafts were originally Kelty Nos. 4 and 5, took its name from the Fife Coal Company's first chairman; it began sinking in 1873, stood in the south-east corner of Kelty about two miles north of Cowdenbeath, employed an average of 820 men and produced until 1965, being abandoned two years later. ²
• Nine local miners lost their lives and others were injured in an underground explosion at the Lindsay Colliery on 14 December 1957; Kelty Community Council held a memorial service for the sixtieth anniversary at the Kelty Community Centre on 15 December 2017. ²
• The BGS mine-plans catalogue holds a Mining Remediation Authority abandonment plan titled 'Kelty' (catalogue 7898, Kelty Main, dated 1895); the catalogue gives no location and the plan's details do not clearly tie it to this working, so it may belong to another of the same name. (uncertain) ³

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (primary) Kelty Colliery — Durham Mining Museum
2. (secondary) Lindsay Pits, Kelty — Fife Pits
3. (primary) BGS / Mining Remediation Authority mine plans: KELTY — British Geological Survey / Mining Remediation Authority

Record created: 10 September 2026 · Last researched: 24 September 2026