Bickershaw Colliery

Bickershaw Colliery was a coal mine, located at Westleigh, in Leigh, then within the historic county boundaries of Lancashire, England.

Bickershaw is located on the Wigan Coalfield, part of the Lancashire Coalfield, and required the sinking of deep shafts to access the coal. However, access to transport via the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Plank Lane made the distribution of the product relatively easy.

The first shaft at Bickershaw was sunk in 1830 by Turner and Ackers. A tramway connected the pit to the canal which was used for transporting coal until August 1972 when road transport took over local distribution. In 1872 work started on two new shafts; No.1 (489 yards (447 m)) and No.2 (492 yards (450 m)) at Plank Lane beside the canal. The seams worked from these shafts were the Crombouke, Pemberton Five Feet and the White and Black mines. In 1877 shafts No.3 and No.4 (both 690 yards (630 m) in depth), were sunk to the King Coal mine. No.5 pit was completed before World War I.

By 1907, Bickershaw was part of Moss Hall Collieries, which owned collieries at Platt Bridge and Abram, which were subsequently purchased by Pearson and Knowles and Company.

In 1933, Abram Colliery closed and its shafts to the Arley mine were taken over by Bickershaw. This consolidation resulted in a modernisation scheme to open up the Peacock and Plodder mines, and an additional area of Wigan seam. Nos. 3 and 4 shafts were deepened to 779 yards (712 m) yards and 787 yards (720 m) yards respectively, taking the shaft bottoms just below the Plodder seam. By 1937 an electric winder was installed on both shafts, with cages to accept ten-ton capacity skips in No.4.

Created by Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government to run nationalised industries, the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act received the Royal Assent on 12 July 1946, and the National Coal Board was formally constituted on 15 July, with Lord Hyndley as Chairman. The number of companies taken over by the Board was about two hundred, at a cost of £338 million.

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