Wee Alex perished in mine
“You watch yersel’ doon that mine the day, boy,” yelled Mrs Stewart as her son, Alex, put on his cloth cap and headed out the door of their Victorian hovel in a collier’s row at the Thorn.
“Ach, aw right, maw, stoap worryin’. Ah’ve been doon a mine tons o’ times. Mind an’ hae ma dinner ready the nicht when ah get hame.”
With that farewell, Alex Stewart walked the familiar mile to the Benston coalfield between Johnstone and Howwood where he toiled daily at the thick, ebony seam ‘doon the mine.’
His journey took him along the Beith Road, past Springfield and Greenend Farms, where Tam Gillespie and Jimmy Buchanan were milking the cows just after dawn.
Ludovic Houstoun, the ageing Laird of Johnstone, was still asleep in his magnificent tree-embowered castle overlooking the lime-washed colliers’ houses at Quarrelton village where miners’ wives were hanging out washing in the communal back greens. John Salmon, the laird’s
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estate-factor who lived at nearby Linn House, was admiring the autumn leaves and checking his accounts when Wee Alex passed by.
And at the Quarrelton School, headmaster Gilbert Lithgow and his three pupil teachers were preparing the day’s lessons.
October 23, 1860, should have been just another working day in the closeknit mining communities reaching from Elderslie, the Thorn and Johnstone in the east to Quarrelton, Corseford and Howwood in the west.
But it was to go down in history as one of the district’s saddest days.
Because Wee Alex Stewart - just 14, remember - never returned home for his bowl of broth and boiled potatoes.
Today, 142 years later, he is still ‘doon the mine’ - along with pals John Hendry, 22 from Johnstone; Robert Alexander, 24, from Quarrelton; John Alison, 28, from Corseford; and William McMillan, 45, from Elderslie.
They perished when hundreds of gallons of slimy, suffocating water from an old working flooded the underground gallery where they hewed coal with picks, axes, shovels and wagons, alongside 40 other men and boys.
Most of the miners were hauled to safety by engine-man William Houston who showed great presence of mind amidst the chaos.
But Wee Alex and his team never made it. Cut off by deep pools of putrid water, rising two feet every hour, they couldn’t be reached - despite valiant efforts by rescuers who risked their own lives in that underground chamber of horrors.
Entombed by mud, water and collapsing mine shafts, the bodies of the trapped colliers were never recovered.
Their bleached bones still lie deep below the ground.
And, if local legend is to be believed, you can still hear the ghostly ring of picks and shovels as their grey phantoms toil timelessly on their final shift ‘doon the Benston coal mine’.