Commemorating coal
On Sunday 12 September 2021, several hundred people gathered at the northern edge of the Lanarkshire village of Moodiesburn. Local school children, representatives from the Church of Scotland and Catholic Church, and people of all ages from the surrounding area were joined by visitors from elsewhere in Scotland as well as Durham and Yorkshire. Trade union banners commemorating the coalfield struggles and ambitions of the 20th century were arranged around a memorial (shown opposite) dominated by a statue of a miner donning a cap lamp looking across at a colliery winding wheel.
The Auchengeich Miners’ memorial service is an annual commemoration which remembers the worst loss of life in the Scottish coal industry during the 20th century. On 18 September 1959, the Auchengeich pit disaster claimed the lives of 47 Lanarkshire miners following a fire caused by mechanical faulting in a colliery fan. It demonstrates how identities and associations with origins in coal mining still reverberate in the former coalfields almost 40 years after Cardowan, the last colliery in Lanarkshire, closed in 1983, and nearly 20 years after deep coal mining came to an end in Scotland following the closure of the final drift mine at the Longannet complex in West Fife.
Willie Doolan is a lifelong Moodiesburn resident whose father attended the disaster as a member of the Mines Rescue Service. During an interview in 2019, which was recorded to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the disaster, Willie explained the scarring effect this experience had on the local community. He recalled starting to attend school shortly afterwards alongside pupils who had lost fathers, uncles and older brothers to the colliery fire. His own father never spoke about the experience. Willie rationalised his silence by explaining that ‘mining was a dangerous game, a dangerous industry to work in. Deaths were pretty commonplace within the industry. Fatalities were a common thing’.
A miners’ life
Willie’s own life serves as a helpful vignette for understanding the impact that the long-term contraction of mining employment has had on the economic and cultural life of towns and villages in the Scottish coalfields. By the time Willie left school aged fifteen in 1971, the
