My father’s six years working underground in the Big Mary Mine
The Big Mary Mine, officially known as Mary Colliery, stood on the edge of the village of Lochore. It was located in west Fife, Scotland. It was about a mile north of Ballingry and a few miles from Loch Leven. It was part of the vast Fife Coal Company network that once linked the mining towns of Benarty, Crosshill, and Glencraig. Today the site lies within Lochore Meadows Country Park. In my father’s youth, the skyline was ruled by winding gear and chimneys. The rhythmic sound of cages moving men and coal through the shafts filled the air.
My father, Hugh Donlan, began working at the Big Mary Mine in 1919. He stopped working there in 1925, when he went to America. He was fourteen, a boy from 146 Waverley Street, already part of a family of miners. My grandfather John Donlan still worked at the pit then. So the rhythm of shifts, paydays, and danger had already shaped the household. When I was born, my father was forty-four. The mine was long behind him, and what little he said of it came in fragments, more silence than story.
The more I learned about those years, the more I understood what that silence meant. The Big Mary Mine was one of Fife’s deepest and most treacherous pits. It drew men from just about every row house in Lochore and claimed more than a few before their time.
1919 – The year he went down
Before my father ever took his first cage ride, the pit had already shown its temper. In June 1919 a miner named William Craigie was crushed by a fall of roof. The official record notes simply, “26 June 1919 – Roof fall; injured, died 28 June, Mary Pit.” My grandfather would have known him. News of accidents traveled fast through the pit yard and along Waverley Street before nightfall. My father was still a boy at that time. He watched his own father head out the door each morning. The workplace never promised a safe return.
When he joined the crew later that year, he stepped into the same dark geometry of timber props, wet walls, and shouting voices.
Waverley Street and the men who lived there
By the early 1920s nearly every house on Waverley Street held a miner or a miner’s widow. The names in the records are the names of neighbors. Around 1924 a man named Joseph Kane lived at 87 Waverley Street. Joseph was struck by a large stone that dropped from the roof of the Mary Pit. The report in the Fife Pits archive describes it without ceremony. But in a village that small everyone would have known what happened.
A few doors away, my Donlan family heard the same cage bell every morning. It is easy now to imagine my grandmother standing at the window. Her eyes watching the men walk down the lane to and from the pithead.
The routine of risk
The years 1920 to 1925 blur together in the records – falls of roof, runaway hutches, crushed limbs. In 1922 a miner named Patrick Murphy was buried by a roof collapse. In 1925 another, Christopher Bell, was injured in March and died that December from the same wounds. My father never mentioned their names, but the pattern of such loss must have been impossible to ignore.
Firing the shots
By the time he left the Big Mary Mine, my father had learned to drill the coal face and set the dynamite charges. The men called it “firing the shots.” They drilled narrow holes, packed them with powder, pushed in the fuse, and sealed the clay. Once everyone was clear, they lit the fuse and ran. The difference between skill and disaster was measured in seconds.
A 1924 report from the Big Mary Mine describes a miner “badly burned about the face and hands when the charge fired prematurely.” That could have been any of them, even a man working beside my father. Shot firing demanded precision and luck in equal measure, and the air after an explosion was thick with dust and gas.
The long silence
When I was growing up, my father spoke little about those six years at the Big Mary Mine. By the time I was born, he had already worked another eighteen years in the coal mines around Scranton, Pennsylvania. The same habits followed him across the Atlantic. He kept the early mornings. His clothes were sooty. The steady pace that mining life imprints on a man remained with him. He once suffered a deep laceration on his forearm from a jagged piece of machinery underground, a reminder that danger never stayed behind in Fife.
He seldom spoke of any of it. But when he did mention those earlier years in Lochore, his voice slowed. It was as if the smell of oil and damp stone were still close by. Surviving that span was its own quiet triumph. He grew from a fourteen-year-old boy in the Big Mary to a middle-aged miner in America.
Monument to the miners of the Big Mary Mine
The Big Mary Mine itself is gone, yet part of it endures. The tall reinforced-concrete winding-gear frame still stands in what is now Lochore Meadows Country Park, a skeletal monument to the men who labored below. Nearby, a memorial honors every miner who once descended those shafts. When I stood there years later, looking up at the same structure my father would have seen daily, I realized the mine never truly disappeared. Its shape remains in the land, in the families it raised, and in the silence my father kept.
For more on the history of the Fife pits visit here.
If your family has roots in Fife’s or Pennsylvania’s coalfields , I invite you to share your memories in the comments below. Together we keep the memory of these miners alive.
For another coal mining story click here: Two Coal Fields, One Life: My Father the Miner
(The photos/images in this article are either artistic interpretations created from the author’s descriptions of the Big Mary mine and miners, or from the author’s private collection).
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