John Hedley (1817-1864)
1858 Resident Engineer of the South Hetton Colliery.[1]
1865 Obituary [2]
John Hedley was born in 1817 near Fatfield in the county of Durham, and served his apprenticeship with Mr. Robert Clark at the Lambton Collieries, and was afterwards manager at the Bishopwearmouth Iron Works, Sunderland.
n 1841 he was for a short time engineer at Whitworth Colliery, and thence went to South Hetton and Murton Collieries, where he remained with the exception of a short interval till 1863 when he resigned from ill health.
At the Murton Colliery he erected all the machinery with which the well known Murton winning was sunk through the immense feeders of water contained in the sand underlying the magnesian limestone.
He was also extensively engaged in general practice as a mechanical engineer and in the valuation of colliery plant ; and was the inventor of "ring cribs" for strengthening the cast iron lining of pit shafts, and of an improved system of guides for cages, in which malleable iron rails are substituted for the ordinary wooden slides.
He was elected a Member of the Institution in 1858, and died at Newcastle-on-Tyne on 11th September 1864, at the age of forty-seven.