Wigan Album

Very daunting indeed if it isn't your cup of tea! I hung over Chisnall Hall shafts a couple of years back and the idea of people falling down these in days gone by are not worth thinking about!

brilliant photo's allan, have you got anymore of the winstanley area?? or old mines from the winstanley??

I don't think so Paul but I will keep looking.

cheers allan, i used to go up to windy arbour mine with my dad in the late 70's, always looked like an abandoned wild west town to me as a kid. i think i was around 9 when they took it down. always fascinated me, as did Baxters pit in winstanley.

I worked there for a few months in the sixties.

Thanks for those comments. I had forgotten that the pit half way up the hill was Baxters, I had got confused and called it Blundells, which was of course Pemberton colliery. Baxters was also called the 'Basket pit' beacause miners used to travel up and down the shaft in 'baskets'. The headgear was still there when these pictures were taken, but I don't whether or not it was also a drift mine, it probably was. Unfortunatley I never took any photos of it.
I use to know the manager of the Windy Harbour mine, a Welshman, a nice man but I can't remember his name. That was how I got inside Pony Dick to take that picture. Incidently, if you look closely at that picture yopu will see that there had been a recent roof fall.
But that is another story.

No H on the Arbour!

I have 2 paintings of the run-down Windy Arbour Colliery done in the 1970s. I will scan and post.

Allan, the mine manager's name in the '70's was Williams.

He was Bill Williams if I remember correctly. His wife was Eunice. Lived in the managers house on Tan House Lane when I was a kid.

It was indeed Bill Williams. Originally from Gresford in N.Wales, he left Windy Arbour when it first closed around 1976 and became an undermanager at Leyland Green drift, part of the Quaker House colliery co. Lovely man.