Buckham, A. Fraser, Coal deposits on Vancouver Island

Nanaimo Historical Society Fonds
Series 2. Sound Recordings

Tape 16

Interview with A. Fraser Buckham by Don Schon concerning coal deposits on Vancouver Island.
October 2, 1966

Transcribed by Glenys Wall
May 2005

(Note: Mr. Buckham's voice is very frail and at times hard to understand).

(tape starts in mid-sentence, speaker sounds like William Barraclough)..Historical Society and Dr. A. Fraser Buckham at his home 45 Linden Avenue, Victoria, was made Sunday afternoon October 2nd. 1966. Dr. Buckham spoke with some difficulty arising from his physical condition and referring to his notes on the subject of coal deposits on Vancouver Island. Mr. Schon presented a summary of the interview with Dr. Buckham before Nanaimo Historical Society, Tuesday October 18th, 1966.

Don Schon: This is the second of our series of meetings this Fall commemorating the Centennial, in our own way, for Nanaimo; the first one on the peoples and this one is on the mines. Tonight it is our pleasure to have an interview between myself, Don Schon, and Dr. A.F. Buckham. Dr. Buckham has quite a history of experience in the Nanaimo coalfields especially, and also the Cumberland fields. He came first to Vancouver Island in 1939 with the Geological Surveys of Canada to map the extent of the coalfields there. He returned in 1943 to do a similar job in the Nanaimo field and this work continued until 1947. In 1947 and '48, he returned to Ottawa to work on other projects. In 1948, Dr. Buckham left the Geological Surveys of Canada and joined Canadian Collieries as the Chief of Exploration. He continued in this position until 1959, when Canadian Collieries left the mining field, especially on Vancouver Island. His work in the Nanaimo field was mainly on seeking new locations for mines and developing new mines and in this he had to review all of the plans and underground maps from all the former mines that had been in the Nanaimo field to see what was left. The objective of this evening to develop as clear a picture as possible of the Nanaimo coal mining industry, that is the major industry that had its beginnings in the Autumn of 1852 and its end in November 1953.

First of all, we should define the extent of the field involved. We are speaking of the field that supported and included the mines from Cassidy to Lantzville. We will discuss the geology of the field, a brief history of the mining companies and trace the development of the mining methods.

Starting first with the geology of the field, Dr. Buckham could you describe for us the Nanaimo series, its extent, geological age and possibly the origin of the coal seams?

Buckham: Yes. The coal bearing rocks on Vancouver Island occur in five phases and we are concerned with the Nanaimo basin and this is defined geologically as about 80 miles long from Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island to Orcas Island off the State of Washington. It's greatest width is about 20 miles, average width about 9 miles and its area about 700 square miles. Of course coal was not mined from all this area but chiefly from the Nanaimo coal field proper to the northern end of the basin. The rocks of the Nanaimo basin are known to geologists as the Nanaimo series and these rocks are about the Cretaceous Age. Now, they're sedimentary rocks, conglomerates, sandstone shales and of course coal. These sediments had to be laid down in a basin or laid down somewhere and from studies made on Vancouver Island we know that the topography in Cretaceous times was not too different from today; that is, there is a mountain range running up the backbone of the Island and another mountain range over in the Coast Mountains across the strait and in the area of the Strait of Georgia in the coastal lowland there were sediments laid down.

Schon: Could you, could you give us a description of the thickness of the seams and their dimensions as far as they're known from the developments of the mines?

Buckham: There are two main coal horizons in the Nanaimo series. First that of the Wellington seams and second that of the Newcastle and Douglas seams. The lowest seams, the Wellington, occurs about 700 feet above the base of the series and the Wellington seams were found workable from the most westerly outcrop of the seams which was west of the Wellington Valley and west of the Extension Ridges and from north to south it ran down from Lantzville to the Nanaimo River. The feature of the structure of the Nanaimo coal field is the occurrence therein of numerous strong faults; these dislocations cross the whole field and their extensions to the north and to the south show they're part of a major fault zone and these faults run from northwest to southeast in the Nanaimo area and they've been proven there by actual work within the coal seam. In the south end of Nanaimo the major working there was known as the Douglas Mine and here the coal seam outcropped overlooking the Harewood Flats and for a time it dipped down with about 12 degree dip but as they got deeper and deeper on the seam, they found that it appeared to roll over. The old plans show that this apparently baffled them and they decided to find out just what was going on. So finally they erected a staging in the mine with a windlass on it and followed the seam down in a sort of a shaft or a winds hoisting the coal out in buckets. It was dug by hand to get down. They followed this down a considerable distance and apparently discovered that there was quite a big downthrow from the land to the harbour.

Schon: Was this downthrow, was it continuous coal, it wasn't a shearing actually, it was continuous coal as they went down? So they were actually mining in coal vertically?

Buckham: Yes. Oh yes, well it was sheared in a way. You see when you get it down throughout this sort, there's a considerable shearing of the coal but they followed continuous coal.

Schon: Right down?

Buckham: Yes.

Schon: But how wide would it be, have you got any idea in this downthrow section?

Buckham: Well it may have been as much as 5 feet, and it may have been more but with this shearing of which you speak, although they were following coal, it was ground along the fault so that I don't know how thick it was.

Schon: How deep was this downthrown portion?

Buckham: Er.. the harbour downthrow from the mine on the uphill side, the Douglas Mine I have just motioned, it was the same as 400 to 500 foot downthrow to the Number 1 mine site, which was all beneath the harbour of Nanaimo. Well this underground shaft they sunk, they figured out what was going on, went out and drilled some holes along the shore of the harbour and went out in the harbour and built little platforms on piles and drilled some holes there and found there appeared to be...the seams went on beyond the downthrow, so that the harbour downthrow was quite important in the mining history of Nanaimo. As I said it represented a downthrow of 400-500 feet. Well on the uphill side they just went down to the edge of it because when they sunk the shaft to find out what was going on, it was very costly, but they couldn't properly plan the development of the field until they had a clear idea in their minds as to what was going on and this they got. This took place before 1880. Mines around this harbour downthrow were being operated by the New Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company, an absentee English company, whose chairman or general manager in London is quoted as saying: "Nanaimo, with all thy faults, I love thee still". So you can see that faults spoke large in his eyes. [unintelligible] in the Nanaimo series, that of the Wellington seams and that of the Newcastle-Douglas seams. The lowest seam, the Wellington seam, occurs about 700 feet above the base of the Nanaimo series and the Newcastle and Douglas seams are from 25-100 feet apart, averaging 60 feet apart. The Newcastle is the lower, and they overlie the Wellington by about 1000 feet and they're separated from it by a considerable thickness of measures. It may be of interest to you to note that this Wellington seam underlying the Douglas and Newcastle seams was proven by a borehole that was put down on Newcastle Island and the borehole was put down at the request of Mr. James Richards, who was then company engineer and Mr. Richards is also Premier Bennett’s wife's father and Mr. Richards told me he thought the Wellington was down there and they drilled a down drill hole and found it.

Schon: How far down would that be, have you got any idea how far it was below the er...?

Buckham: About 1000 feet.

Schon: About 1000 feet below the Newcastle.

Buckham: Yeah. Well up in the northern part of the field the main workings were those of the Wellington colliery. Those were the ones that paid for Craigdarroch Castle Hatley Park and they were in the Wellington seam. First of all the main Wellington seam, now this runs from the Wellington Valley down to within a mile or so of the shore and the ...and.. from the northern end of the Wellington Valley almost down to where Westwood's farm now is and the seam's buried from..oh from perhaps 6 feet to 12 feet thick. That's the thickness of the coal and that thickness is the bottom seam, the main Wellington seam. Now above the main Wellington seam there's a seam called Little Wellington above it of an average of 35 feet. Now this seam is perhaps not of great importance for mining but it was the Little Wellington that when Dunsmuir made his find at Wellington he first lit on the Little Wellington and then later on looking around more, he found the main Wellington seam and of course seeing it was so much better and thicker, he moved his crew of miners and tools over there and that was the start of the Wellington Colliery. Of the second, upper group of seams, the Newcastle seam is a very patchy and limited occurrence. It outcrops on the north edge of Newcastle Island and it was not workable going south from there much more than to the south end of Nanaimo Harbour. But it was worked to Number 1 Mine and Brechin Mine and above that is the Douglas seam which also outcrops about the north end of Newcastle Island and it extends down to as far as to Cassidy, or the Cassidy Mine.

Schon: In your 1947 paper to the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, you mentioned that the actual outcrops of the seams were actually geographically, let's say, in the middle of the seam and they were probably thickest at the outcrop. Could you comment on this now?

Buckham: Yes, well it would be about the middle of the seams as originally laid down and for instance where Mr. Richards found the Wellington seam under Newcastle Island, it was not workable. It had numerous bands of shale in and not too much coal and the same thing applied in all these seams going seaward, they tended to become dirty and contained shell bands in the coal themselves and mixtures of...er ... when the seam was laid down what must have been mud or silt and when later on as we now found the seams, this mud and silt that was mixed in with the coal seams would give you a situation where you were taking a bucket of coal into the stove and you were taking out two buckets of [unintelligible]. As I have just pointed out it looks as though the outcrop's about the middle of the coal as deposited so that to the west and where the coal seams appear to pitch up into the air, there must have been about half the Nanaimo coal field [unintelligible]....down at the bottom of the Strait of Georgia mixed in with the muds under the strait, there must have been an amount of coal approximately equal to what's been won from the whole Nanaimo field and there's another thing comes in with the faults. This actually disturbs the coal seams and made them vary in thickness because from a geological standpoint, coal in a section of rock which has been disturbed or faulted, it acts about the same as axle grease. Now, south of Nanaimo Harbour, going down to the southeast, the Douglas seam displayed great variations in thickness according to this faulting and disturbance so that a miner might be driving a place ahead, one day he'd be in 20 or 24 feet of coal, a couple of days later he'd be in 2 feet of coal. But the seam would come back.

Schon: So that there were inclusions of dirty coal or shale almost unpredictable, due to this faulting in any direction of development?

Buckham: No, the effect it was something like the coal seam was like toothpaste in a tube and you squeeze it and you get paste, you get a big blob, and then it tears(?) out into a long, thin thing and where it goes in a big blob, that's your 20 or 24 feet of coal, and where it tears out that's your 2 feet. This sort of thing gave them a great deal of difficulty. There was one place there where they sunk a diamond drill hole and found they had 8 feet of coal so when the time came, the workings got down there, they drove passed it on one side and they had no coal at all, so they moved over a bit and drove in the direction down the dip of the seam and so they were on both sides of it. And both these tunnels were barren. Then they continued the tunnels down some distance and at right angles to them drove other tunnels above where the bore hole was supposed to be and below where the bore hole was supposed to be and not a one of these holes showed any coal at all. So they ended up they'd square pillar 100 feet on the side and all the sides of this pillar were barren of coal but inside it a diamond bore hole showed 8 feet of coal and this worried them as to how far they could trust their diamond bores so they had the surveyor lay off a line and drove for the diamond bore and they discovered that the bore did indeed hit 8 feet of coal but this was just a pocket of coal. With the example I used, a sort of a blob on the toothpaste and if the bore hole moved 20 feet in any direction they wouldn't have hit it. So you could see that the working of these mines was not always simple. The problem that was brought about by the faulting and disturbance was the matter of blowouts. In the extreme southern part of the area at Numbers 5 and 10 by South Wellington in the Cassidy Mine of the Granby Company, the Douglas seam was highly sheared and disturbed and in Number 10 in Cassidy blowouts or outbursts of coal and gas are common and greatly interfered with the operation of the mine. Thus in those mines if a blowout occurred all the workings in the mine would be filled up with gas, methane gas, which is explosive and dangerous and so much gas would be given off that the very adequate ventilation systems were overcome and couldn't, for perhaps a day or so, move the gas out and it is my opinion that the famous explosion in Number 1 Mine was caused by the same thing, that it is happened about the time the workings were just coming up from beneath the harbour down seam where the seam rolled up and I think the miners encountered this highly disturbed place and what happened was a strong outburst of gas and perhaps coal in Number 10 Mine, one of these outbursts threw out something like100 mine carts of powdered coal from a relatively small hole in the face. If that had happened in Number 1 Mine, and in those days they mostly used open lights, all through the mine and gas accumulated in such amounts that the ventilation system couldn't handle it. This gas would explode with the open lights and the 150 or so men who were killed at that time would have been due to them running into a blowout. As I say this is my personal opinion, although going down to the south there's a record of a similar occurrence in the Reserve Mine and then going further south they had such outbursts to a limited extent in Morden Mine. They had them to a considerable extent in Number 10 Mine and the had them to a great extent in the Cassidy Mine.

Schon: It was my understanding that in Number 10 Mine, blasting was used to..er..at the face, whereas in Cassidy Mine this wasn't permitted due to the gas and it's my understanding that Canadian Collieries' argument for blasting at the face was that it relieved the stress in the coal and permitted the gas to come out just after or with the shot and whereas a miner working into a gas pocket or gassy coal would break into this and all of a sudden he would have a bump in his face where the powder had actually done this in Number 10 Mine. Could you comment on this?

Buckham: Yes well you could put it this; what you've said is substantially correct. Blasting was the trigger that set off the blowouts, it was not the cause of them but it was the trigger. And when they first encountered these blowouts in Cassidy they didn't properly understand them and they tried various things like drilling holes ahead and they hoped this would drain off the gas that was caught in there, but it didn't so they had no other cause but to cut off certain mine workings and the Provincial Mines Department forbade men to work there. The system that was used in Number 10 Mine was thought up by Mr. Bill Frew (?) and the thing was that the floor and the roof became polished and shiny and the seams sometimes got thin and you were coming close to a place where there might be a blowout, but you could always probably tell when a blowout was coming but you couldn't tell whether it was happening on Monday or Wednesday or Friday and that's a very cold comfort to a miner who is working down there, knowing some time in the next week she's going to blow. And after considerable thought, Frew decided each of these places, where it looked as though a blowout was imminent, that if they loaded them quite heavily and only exploded the dynamite when the men were withdrawn from the mine, and even if a blowout was induced and it was giving off a great deal of gas, which filled up the mine, this could be readily determined from the ventilation system and men weren't endangered. So for that reason the Mines Department permit them to use this system; it [nailed] them the crossover from a very, very hazardous standard of working to a relatively safe method of working.

Schon: Could we get into some of the history of the development of the mining companies in the Nanaimo field? The essential lines of development I think are important, and I think your background of research into them should give us a fairly good picture of how the lines of company development occurred. Could you give us a little on that?

Buckham: Yes indeed. Well of the companies that operated out of the Island, there were two main branches and one branch was the Vancouver Coal Company, Western Fuel Branch. This branch operated chiefly in the City of Nanaimo, and it was the oldest in point of time because its forerunner was the Hudson Bay Company. And the later branch was the Dunsmuir Branch and that had a number of sub-branches. There was Robert Dunsmuir & Sons Wellington Colliery; that was the Wellington Mines and then there was the E & N Railway, which the Dunsmuirs played quite a part and occasionally, apparently for financial reasons, some of the mines, notably in the early days of the Extension Mines, were operated [unintelligible] in proprietorship, the E & N Railway. Then the final branch was up at Comox, the Union Coal Company, which later changed its name to the Wellington Colliery Company. Well now, getting back to that first Vancouver Coal, Western Fuel Branch, and now we get into what is more a history proper. With the occurrence of coal on Vancouver was first made known in 1835 and it was too close to adjacent areas: Beaver Harbour which is very close to Port Hardy and Suquash, which is about 13 miles southeast of Beaver Harbour.