Fife Coal Company

The Fife Coal Company was formed in 1872 to acquire the small Beath and Blairadam Colliery with its pits in Kelty.

The first meeting of the directors was held in Edinburgh in September 1872, under the chairmanship of William Lindsay, a shipowner and Lord Provost of Leith.

It was resolved to form a new company and for £22,000 to buy the Beath and Blairadam Colliery which held a number of small pits in Kelty, in Fife.

Shares were allotted in January 1873 and the task of modernising the Kelty pits and the construction of new collieries began.

Given their ambitions, the directors decided they needed a new managerial leader and recruited the 24-year-old Charles Carlow from a neighbouring colliery.

The management also looked for more profitable coalfields and in 1876 leased the Methil field, financed by a loan from the British Linen Bank.

A continued process of adding fields, taking leases and sinking new pits took output up to 794,000 tons in 1893.

A particular source of difficulty was over labour rates which typically varied with the price of coal, and a four-month strike in 1894 cost the company around 150,000 tons of output.

[8][4] The first half of the 1900s saw the acquisition of four smaller collieries but the most important event was the sinking of the Mary pit on the recently purchased Lochore estate, with its eventual output of 250,000 tons a year.

[8][4] If the period from its formation to World War I had been one of almost uninterrupted growth, the inter-war years was a more troubled time and output never regained its former levels.

[11] This was short-lived and 1921 saw a slump in prices; coal owners lost money and pressurised miners to accept lower wages, leading to a national dispute.

Pumping was suspended and the damage from flooding meant that some pits took months to recover after the ending of the dispute.

[8] Fife Coal was still losing money well into 1927 but foreign competition began to wane and in 1929 exports reached 2.5m tons out of total output of almost 4m.