Reader recalls another local canal disaster - your letters, plus Vikings and Saxons descend on Trysull in a 1977 archive picture

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​More echoes of canal disaster

In the aftermath of the Shropshire canal drama I was interested to read the recent account of the Dudley Port disaster, when part of the canal collapsed. It reminded me of another, less well known, disaster on the Stourbridge Canal at Silver End, between Dudley and Stourbridge.

Here there was a basin on the West side of the canal, known as Wheeley's Basin, between the Brettle Lane road bridge and the GWR railway bridge. On Saturday 14 November 1903 a large section of the bed of this basin, together with a stretch of the tow-path, collapsed into old mine workings and resulted in the draining of a considerable length of the canal, from the bottom of Delph Locks, to the top of the Stourbridge 16 locks as well as the Fens branch and part of the Stourbridge Extension Canal. The resultant huge rush of water inundated the brickworks, ironworks, and coal and clay pits situated around the canal.

As the disaster happened on a Saturday when all the works and pits were closed for the weekend, there was no loss of life, apart, sadly, from one unfortunate pit pony that could not be rescued in time. By superhuman efforts through traffic was resumed on the canal on December 14, and most of the works re-opened, but many of the miners did not return to work for some time after that until the huge volumes of water still in the pits had drained away.

The aforementioned is an outline from the bookley "The Brettle Lane Canal Didaster 1903" produced by Amblecote History Society.