BY Daniel Harkins | March 18 | 
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Stained glass tribute to mining disaster victims
Bishop Joseph Toal of Motherwell has blessed two stained glass windows in memory of the victims of Scotland’s worst mining disasters in the home parish of many of those who lost their lives.
For more than two years, St Joseph’s in Blantyre has been renovating the Church, installing new electrics and roofing, and restoring a pre-Second Vatican Council mural behind the altar. The centrepiece of the renovations is a set of stained glass windows that pay tribute to the lost miners. A group of 214 workers, some as young as 13, were killed in the 1877 explosion in the Lanarkshire town.
Also remembered in the windows is the parish priest at the time of the disaster, Fr Thomas Frawley. Fr Frawley, only weeks in the parish and just 27 years old, celebrated the funeral Masses for many of the victims, and would soon after move to Australia suffering from stress and ill health, where he would die of Tuberculosis, four years after the mining disaster.
Bishop Toal celebrated Mass in St Joseph’s last month and blessed the windows to those killed as a result of the explosion. Stained glass workers from Rainbow Glass of Prestwick were present at the Mass on February 21, and were thanked for their beautiful work, which brings to completion a £700,000 renovation programme.
During the hours of darkness till midnight the windows are backlit by a computerised lighting system which floods the main windows with different coloured lights and projects out into the street.
Beneath a window displaying the Holy Spirit as a dove, the first memorial window shows Fr Frawley blessing the miners in Dixon’s Row and the second depicts a dark evening, a mother and her child looking out at the pits following the explosion. A total of 215 dots of light adorn the windows (right main), with one each to represent the victims and one to represent Fr Frawley.
More than half of the victims were Catholic. Amateur historian Sean Quinn, who researched the parish history for a recent DVD, said the deaths most likely took a mental toll on Fr Frawley, who would die not long after celebrating the funerals for so many of the victims.
Fr Brian Lamb, the current parish priest at St Joseph’s, said he was delighted with the work and added that the project is being very well received in Blantyre.
—This story ran in full in the March 18 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.
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