Lamp Cabin and Washhouse

The lamp cabin and bathhouse at Elrington Colliery were not the buildings people wrote about. They sat at the pit-top, practical and plain, while attention went to the two concrete-lined shafts sunk 1,190 feet to the Main Greta Seam below. But for the men who worked the mine, these surface welfare buildings were the hinge point of every shift. Lamps were issued and returned here. The bathhouse was where underground work ended and ordinary life resumed. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited developed Elrington to supply coking coal to the Newcastle steelworks, with shaft-sinking commencing in early 1925 under the mine's first manager, H. M. Hindmarsh. The two shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, reached the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. Coal production commenced in 1930. BHP had designed the mine for a target output of 3,000 tonnes per day, intending it as a test case for mechanised extraction methods on the Hunter coalfields. That target was never reached. During the 1940s the mine employed approximately 275 workers underground, and actual output in 1950 ran to around 1,500 tonnes per day, roughly half of what the planners had projected. By December 1962, persistent operating losses had made the economics unworkable. BHP closed the mine that month, with approximately 90 men affected. Large reserves of coal remained untouched in the seam at closure. The colliery had never grown into the operation BHP had planned for it. The lamp cabin and bathhouse recorded here in 2017 are what remained of the surface welfare infrastructure after the rest of the pit-top was gone. The main mining structures were reported demolished by the late 1960s. These buildings stayed. They are quiet evidence of a workforce that went underground here for more than three decades and came back up again, shift after shift, until December 1962 when they did not return.