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A little bit of our History
Posted by Norman on 6/4/2026, 12:04 pm
Miners in Jarrow called their Pit 'The Slaughterhouse'
In 2008 workers on the new Tyne Tunnel at Jarrow came across old mine workings that were the remains of Jarrow Colliery which was abandoned in 1854. The Tunnel workers found the old shaft,the only entrance to miles of tunnels seven hundred feet or more beneath the surface & even extending under the river The pit was called the Alfred Pit and it was opened in 1803, but the pitmen had another name for it, The Slaughterhouse because more than a hundred and fifty men died in seven explosions at Alfred Pit in little more than a generation. If anywhere deserves the distinction of being the birthplace of the miner’s safety lamp it is Jarrow. At the beginning of the 19th Century the large rural parish of Jarrow included the colliery villages of Hebburn, Heworth and Felling. When a terrible explosion at Felling Colliery killed 92 men and boys in 1812 the Reverend John Hodgson at St Mary's Church in Heworth contacted Sir Humphrey Davy a British Chemist & Inventor and asked him to create a oil lamp that could be used underground. As we know because I've had the Davy Lamp Invention story on here before, Sir Humphrey did go ahead & invent the safety lamp & tested it using bottles of Methane Gas in his laboratory. Once he knew it worked he had it tested underground in Hebburn 'B' Pit close to where St Oswald's Church was later built. PS When I was at Hebburn Technical College 1959-60 they arranged a visit to the Pedestrian Tunnel in Jarrow. We were shown around beneath the floors & escalators and saw a seam of coal about 90ft below the surface. That seam was called the 'Monkton seam'.
