Stall

The working place at the coal face — a room or chamber driven into the seam in which a collier and his mates cut the coal, with coal or packed waste left between one stall and the next to carry the roof.

Historical usage

Stall is the word for the working place across South Wales, the Midlands, Yorkshire and, as an older usage, Scotland; it is not the North East word. Gresley's 1883 glossary records it both as a place — the definition of bank, in his fourth sense, is 'the whole or sometimes only one side or one end of a stall or working place underground' — and as the name of a whole system of working, pillar and stall, which he marks as South Welsh. Stall work was simply working coal in stalls, and a stallman was the man who held one, in some districts under a butty. In South Wales the length of face a collier was answerable for was his stent: a hundred-and-fifty-yard face might be divided into fifteen or eighteen of them.

How it worked

Stalls were driven off a heading, a few yards wide, each separated from the next by a pillar of coal or, later, by packs built of stone from the ripping. The collier holed under the coal, brought it down, timbered his own roof as the face advanced, and filled his own trams: the stall was a unit of work, of payment and of responsibility all at once. As the face moved forward the ground behind it was allowed to settle, or was packed, and when the district was worked out the stalls were left standing empty.

Why it was used

Stall working suited seams and markets where coal was cut by hand and paid for by the ton. It needed no expensive plant, it let a colliery open several faces at once with small gangs, and it made every collier the manager of his own place — which is also why the practice of a colliery could vary from stall to stall in the same district.

Risks & limitations

Two dangers ran through stall working. The first was the roof: a man timbered his own place, and the inspectors' reports are full of falls at the face where a prop had not been set or a sprag had been crushed out. The second was what stood in the stalls nobody was working any more. Gas gathered undisturbed in old stalls and waited for a light: it is the recorded cause of the Eaglesbush explosion of 1848, where the gas standing in the abandoned stalls fired first and the gas in all the others followed.

Regional variation

In Northumberland and Durham the working place is a board or bord, and the system bord and pillar; Greenwell's 1849 glossary of the northern coal trade has no entry for stall at all. In Scotland the word was used but the system is stoop and room — Barrowman's 1886 Glossary of Scotch Mining Terms disposes of it in three words: 'STALL, See Stoop and Room.' Gresley records post and stall as the Yorkshire form and pillar and stall as the South Welsh.

Related terminology

Goaf, Longwall, Room and Pillar

Sources

1. (primary) Glossary of Scotch Mining Terms — James Barrowman (1886), via Scottish Mining Website
2. (primary) W. S. Gresley, A Glossary of Terms used in Coal Mining (1883) — W. S. Gresley; digitised by the Internet Archive
3. (secondary) Glossary of South Wales colliery terms — Welsh Coal Mines

Record created: 4 September 2026 · Last researched: 4 September 2026