William Coulson

William Coulson (1791-1865) was a mining engineer and master shaft sinker who was responsible for sinking more than 80 mine shafts in North East England along with others in Prussia and Austria. He was also notable for leading the rescue and recovery team after the Hartley Colliery disaster of 1862. Early life William Coulson was born in 1791 in Gateshead to William and Barbara Coulson. His father was a pitman at Eighton Banks Colliery. William began work at about 8 years old as a trapper boy spending twelve hours underground opening and closing a door to enable the ventilation system to function properly. He progressed to work as a putter, hewer, borer and blacksmith at various collieries on Tyneside. Apparently after an eight hour shift as a hewer in a Newcastle colliery, Coulson then travelled to a pit south of the river to work as a collier trimmer in order to augment his income. The sinker In about 1812 he began as an independent mining contractor with a contract for winning coals at Thornley Colliery in County Durham - he was said to work sixteen hours of the 24 in a day. A few years later he started sinking shafts, with one of the first being at Whitley Colliery in Northumberland. In 1820 he made his name as part of a team at Hetton Colliery trying to drive a shaft through the magnesian limestone plateau to determine if there was coal underneath. Earlier attempts by others had failed. Below the plateau the team encountered water flowing at up to 150 litres/second. Coulson overcame this problem by improving the traditional iron tubbing that lined the shaft with four wedging cribs to hold back water, as well as developing piping systems to drain off water and vents to ease gas pressure. The team reached the High Main and Hutton seams, so marking the beginning of the development of the East Durham coalfield and the movement to large collieries employing perhaps hundreds of men. For the next 40 years Coulson led shaft sinking operations mainly in the Great Northern Coalfield. His team of master sinkers included his brother Frank and his three of his sons: William, Robert and James. In the early 1850s he worked in Wales (with the Cardiff and Newport Colliery and Ironstone Co) and Lancashire and following these activities his team was recruited by the Irish surveyor and entrepreneur William Thomas Mulvany to open up the Ruhr coalfield. Work began on the Hibernia mine in Gelsenkirchen on St.