Mount Osborne Colliery

Overview

A Barnsley pit remembered for the morning of 21 or 22 November 1841, when an explosion killed seventeen people: four miners, eleven hurriers, a man riding up the shaft in a corve and the foreman who was suffocated going in after them. The colliery was working before that and worked on for forty years more, passing from Day and Twibble through William Making to William Day, and was still on the official list of collieries at work in 1880.

History

The Twibell family of Barnsley were timber traders with a warehouse on the bank of the Barnsley Canal, and they had a small colliery in the town called Mount Osborne. It was the property of Day and Twibble at the time of the explosion, and by 1844 it was occupied by William Making. About six o'clock on the morning of 21 or 22 November 1841 a man who had been ordered out of a working road by the steward went back for his tools with a naked light and fired the gas. Four miners and eleven hurriers were killed. Edward Walton lost his life as he was riding up the shaft in a corve, though two boys going down in the same shaft came out alive; Mitchell, the foreman of the works, was suffocated during the rescue. The pit appears in the Northern Mine Research Society's list of Yorkshire coal mines as working from 1854 to 1883 and is marked on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet, and the official list of collieries at work in 1880 gives it to William Day, who also held the Agnes and Old Mill pits in Barnsley. Its horse-keeper Abraham Stables lived on the site, as the job required, with the ponies that came up to grass only for the fortnight of the summer shutdown; his son Charles was born at the colliery on 29 June 1865 and was working there as a labourer at sixteen. By Charles's marriage in 1894 the pit had closed and he had gone to work for Barnsley Corporation, though the family went on living at the colliery, where Abraham died in 1902.

Geology

Unknown.

Workings

The pit was worked from a shaft, up and down which men and boys rode in corves — the wicker baskets in which the coal itself was raised. Hurriers dragged the coal from the face to the shaft bottom; eleven of them were killed in the 1841 explosion.

Closure

The Northern Mine Research Society's list of Yorkshire coal mines closes the pit in 1883. A Barnsley family history, following the horse-keeper who lived on the site, puts the closure at about 1894, when his son left the colliery for work with Barnsley Corporation.

What remains

Unknown.

Redevelopment

Unknown.

What's uncertain

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

• Worked from 1854 to 1883. (disputed) ⁴
• Closed about 1894. (disputed) ²

Recorded claims

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

• The property of Day and Twibble in 1841. ¹
• Occupied by William Making in 1844. ²
• Held by William Day and at work in 1880. ³
• An explosion about six on the morning of 21 or 22 November 1841 killed seventeen people, eleven of them hurriers. ¹
• The gas was fired by a man who returned with a naked light to a working road the steward had ordered him out of. ¹
• Worked from 1854 to 1883. (disputed) ⁴
• Closed about 1894. (disputed) ²

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (secondary) Mount Osborne Colliery Explosion, Barnsley, 1841 — Northern Mine Research Society
2. (secondary) The Stableses of Barnsley — Stables Family History
3. (secondary) List of coal mines UK 1880 — Coalmining History Resource Centre
4. (secondary) Coal Mines in Yorkshire 1854: M — Northern Mine Research Society

Record created: 17 September 2026 · Last researched: 24 September 2026