SCOTLAND’S FIRST

Series

Series Name

Mining Review 18th Year

Issue

Issue No.

9

Date Released

May 1965

Stories in this Issue:

1. 1DOGS ALLOWED
2. 2SAFETY FIRST
3. 3LUCY’S TABLE
4. 4SCOTLAND’S FIRST

Story

Story No. within this Issue

4 / 4

Summary

BFI synopsis: Killoch Colliery, the first in Scotland to raise a million tons of coal in a year.
NCB Commentary - A miner from another coalfield, riding into Ayr on the bus, was told he had passed Killoch Colliery on the way. "I don’t think so" he said. "I passed a new factory, though - all concrete and glass, that was all."
But it’s a colliery, right enough, with 12 hundred underground workers on two coaling shifts each day.
It’s a proud colliery ...
... and behind the modern good looks ...
... it’s an efficient one.
Some say this is the best-looking colliery in Britain ...
... and the view from its canteen the most satisfying.
Killoch is in the centre of the Mauchlin basin of coal, round the rim of which the old pits are worked out. It’s half-mile-deep shafts are now exploiting coal which older collieries could not reach.
Up these shafts now come 5,000 tons of coal a day.
They have raised 27,000 tons in a week.
But it has not been easy. They have a six-foot seam of good coal, every district has been heavily faulted.
To shallow-seam miners the pressures were something new...
... the geological faults often big enough to threaten defeat.
Robert Crockett, the Manager, will take out a sheet of paper from his right-hand drawer. It is a list of the targets they set themselves, one after the other.
To start with it was 2 1/2 cuts a shift ...
Then 1000 tons a day.
Then handling 1000 minecars in 24 hours.
1000 tons from one face in one day ... then 2..3..3 1/2 thousand tons a day ...
5,000 tons a day.
To reach this target, which had once seemed impossible, and to be the first colliery in Scotland to do it, took the best that men and machinery could give.
Behind the Ranging Shearer, cutting and loading, Hydraulic props and sliding roof-bars, and caving ...
.... CRASH! ....
On the day Mining Review filmed these scenes on the coalface, at 10 am. March 16th 1965, Killoch Colliery become the first in Scotland to raise a million tons of coal in a year.
How have they done it? Sheer guts, persistence, and quietly moving on to the next target as each was passed.
Killoch has a right to be proud.
But the Killoch men have come up the hard way, and they’ve learned too much to boast.
They’re a million-ton pit now.
But they won’t risk predictions about the future.
They’ll just go on raising their targets.
"A million and a quarter tons next", says Robert Crockett.
"If you had our conditions" said some visiting Midlands miners, "you’d beat the flipping world."

Keywords

Mining

Locations

Scotland

Written sources

British Film Institute Databases   Used for synopsis
Film User   Vol.20 No.231 January 1966, p41.
The National Archives COAL 32   /13 Scripts for Mining Review, 1960-1963

Credits:

Sponsor

National Coal Board

Production Co.

National Coal Board Film Unit