Whitwood Colliery

Overview

Whitwood, at Normanton between Wakefield and Castleford, was the headquarters colliery of Henry Briggs, Son and Company — the firm that in 1865 turned itself into a limited company in order to share its profits with its workmen and put seventeen of them on its board, one of the earliest co-partnership experiments in British coal. The village the company built around the pit was given to C. F. A. Voysey to design, and his terrace, institute and memorial hall stand there still, long after the shafts were filled.

History

Henry Briggs came into the Whitwood ground through a lease from Lord Mexborough dated 1 December 1841, taken jointly with Charles Morton of Normanton, allowing them to work seams on the south side of the river Calder. The first pits were small — Fairies Hill, then Ratten Row, Speedwell and Common. Morton left the partnership in 1850 on being appointed District Inspector of Mines, and from 1860 the deeper pits followed: Whitwood Haigh Moor, Good Hope and Don Pedro. Between 1860 and 1865 a series of strikes, including one of thirteen weeks in 1863, convinced Henry Briggs and his son to try something unusual. A new limited company was registered in 1865 whose rules divided the profits, after depreciation and a return on capital, equally between shareholders and employees — as a bonus on shares for those who held them and on wages for those who did not. Seventeen workmen shareholders served on the board. The scheme ran until 1886, when the growth of the Miners' Union in the district led the workmen directors to resign and ask that the union handle disputes in future. The company's own historian records the moment as the death blow to its attempt to put arbitration in the place of the strike. Under the limited company the Whitwood Silkstone pit was sunk, with an 18-foot downcast shaft and a 20-foot upcast, and an expected output of 1,000 to 2,000 tons a day. Company output was 598,000 tons in 1876 and 660,000 tons by 1881. In 1883 the small coal that had been near worthless was put to use in a carbonising plant built with Dempster Bros. of Elland on the cleared Good Hope pit site, making coke, benzol, sulphate of ammonia and town gas as the Whitwood Chemical Company. Coke went to Scandinavia and the benzol to German dye works. Whitwood was worked as a group of named pits rather than a single shaft, and the Mines Inspectors' returns list them separately. In 1905 Don Pedro employed 450, Haigh Moor 429, Saville 677 and Silkstone 1,364. Don Pedro finished in 1910 and its place in the company was taken by the new Water Haigh colliery at Woodlesford. Silkstone grew steadily — 1,746 in 1910, 1,826 in 1915, 1,964 in 1923 — while Beeston rose from 66 in 1910 to 1,580 by 1933. Arthur Currer Briggs, chairman from 1893, was also chairman of the West Yorkshire Coal Owners' Association and of the Mining Association of Great Britain, sat on the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies in 1900, and was Lord Mayor of Leeds; it was he who raised the fund that built the Mining Department at the Yorkshire College. He died in 1906. In February 1926 Mary Alnie Kaye, nineteen, of 19 Whitwood Terrace, was killed in the Beeston seam while walking out from the coal face with a party of students. Her father, the undermanager Redfern Kaye, was leading the party; a bar gave way and between three and four tons of stone came down, the largest piece about ten feet by three and a half. It took an hour of breaking up the stone to reach her, and she had died at once of a fractured skull. Summing up at the inquest in the Memorial Hall, the coroner said it was the first time a woman had been killed in the mines in that district. The colliery assets of Henry Briggs, Son and Company passed to a holding company, Briggs Collieries Ltd, at the end of 1939, and to the National Coal Board on nationalisation in 1947, when Whitwood employed 2,376 people. It still employed 1,734 in 1954, working the Beeston, Little Coal, Silkstone, Warren House and Yard seams.

Geology

Whitwood stood on the Middle Coal Measures of the West Yorkshire coalfield, about two and a half miles west of the line at which the coal measures dip beneath the Permian. The seams worked over its life were the Beeston, Silkstone, Haigh Moor, Stanley Main, Rotten Row, Shale Coal, Warren House, Little Coal and Yard.

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

Workings

The two shafts were sunk between 1871 and 1878 and stood 74 yards apart. Both were downcasts, unusually, because the seams here were ventilated from other pits of the same company. The Beeston shaft was 14 feet in diameter and 501 yards deep, though it was not sunk below the Silkstone seam until 1914; the Silkstone shaft was 18 feet in diameter and 415 yards deep and drew the whole output of both seams. The Silkstone winder turned a semi-conical drum widening from 17 and a half to 20 feet, described at the time as something of a rarity at a British colliery, and raised three-decked cages carrying four tubs a deck. The cage alone weighed ten tons and ran with a clearance of two and a half inches, which is why it was guided by eight six-inch pitch-pine guides rather than the usual two. A red brick power house was completed in 1926, holding a twelve-stage turbo air compressor by Daniel Adamson and two General Electric turbo-alternators; the compressed air went down the Beeston shaft through a ten-inch cast-iron main.

Closure

The pit is recorded as having finally closed at about 1970. A firmer date has not been found in the sources read for this record.

What remains

The colliery itself is gone. Voysey's buildings in Whitwood Common Lane survive and are listed Grade II: the former Miners' Welfare Institute, now the Rising Sun public house, the terrace of nineteen double-fronted cottages built for colliery officials, and the Briggs Memorial Hall behind the institute.

Whitwood Terrace still stands, its nineteen cottages roughcast with stone trim and tile bands under big tiled roofs with tall chimney stacks and deep-swept eaves. The institute is L-shaped and single-storeyed with a four-storey square tower at the corner for the manager's house, crenellated around a pyramid roof.

Redevelopment

The colliery land was bought in 2003 by the HE Plant Hire Group, which built Diggerland Yorkshire on it.

Related mines

• Ledston Luck Colliery — Both passed to Briggs Collieries Ltd, the holding company formed at the end of 1939 to hold the colliery assets of Henry Briggs, Son and Company.
• Snydale Colliery — Both Briggs pits: Snydale was bought in 1897 to replace the worked-out Streethouse, and Whitwood was the company headquarters.

Nearby mines

• Wheldale Colliery — 2.4 km E
• Ackton Hall Colliery — 3.8 km SE
• Allerton Bywater Colliery — 3.9 km N
• Glasshoughton Colliery — 4.0 km E
• Snydale Colliery — 4.7 km S

Straight-line distance, within 15 km. Show on the map.

Recorded claims

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

• From 1865 to 1886 Henry Briggs, Son and Company divided its profits equally between shareholders and employees, after depreciation and a return on capital, and seventeen workmen shareholders sat on its board. ^1,2
• The Durham Mining Museum's Pitwork account gives the two shafts as sunk between 1871 and 1878. Altofts Cricket Club's history of the pit gives the sinking as 1874 with coal reached on 14 December 1876, which falls inside that span rather than contradicting it. (uncertain) ^3,2
• The Pitwork account makes the Silkstone shaft 415 yards deep. The company's own history describes the Silkstone pit as sunk for a prospective output of 1,000 to 2,000 tons a day from 440 yards, a figure likely to be the working depth rather than the shaft. (disputed) ^3,1
• Mary Alnie Kaye, aged nineteen, was killed by a fall of roof in the Beeston seam in February 1926 while on a student visit led by her father, the undermanager Redfern Kaye. The coroner said it was the first time a woman had been killed in the mines in that district. ⁴
• The Miners' Welfare Institute, now the Rising Sun, and a terrace of nineteen double-fronted cottages for colliery officials were commissioned from C. F. A. Voysey in 1904 and built between 1906 and 1908. The Briggs Memorial Hall behind the institute is now thought not to be Voysey's design, though sympathetic to it. ⁵

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (secondary) Henry Briggs, Son & Co Ltd — Woodlesford (New Woodlesford)
2. (secondary) Whitwood Colliery - Past & Present — Altofts Cricket Club
3. (secondary) Whitwood Colliery (Pitwork) — Durham Mining Museum
4. (secondary) Whitwood Colliery - Tragic Accident — Methley Village
5. (secondary) Voysey buildings: Whitwood, Normanton, West Yorkshire — The Voysey Society
6. (observational) Whitwood Terrace (Geograph 7957217) — Geograph Britain and Ireland, Stephen Craven
7. (secondary) Whitwood Colliery — Durham Mining Museum

Record created: 11 September 2026 · Last researched: 11 September 2026