Decommissioned strut-frame headframe and winding-engine house of the western-field shaft at KWK Knurów colliery, subject to a local heritage campaign.
Szyb Foch I is the first of two shafts sunk on Pole Zachód (the western field) of the Knurów hard coal colliery in Upper Silesia. Shaft sinking began in June 1908 under German management, extending the colliery westward from its original Pole Wschód workings. The shaft was numbered IV in the original German sequence and was renamed Foch in September 1922, following the transfer of the Knurów mine to Polish administration after the Silesian Uprisings, in honour of French Marshal Ferdinand Foch.
The shaft served the colliery throughout the Polish interwar period, the German wartime occupation, and the postwar nationalised period of expanded production. In later decades its operational role diminished as newer infrastructure was developed. By December 2018 Pole Zachód, including both Foch I and Foch II, was recorded as inactive.
Following the modernisation of Szyb Foch II into the colliery's main transport shaft, Szyb Foch I was identified for liquidation. A local community campaign was mounted to save its strut-frame steel headframe and winding-engine building from demolition. The headframe remained standing as of the most recent photographic and press records available.
The Knurów colliery was initiated in June 1903 under the direction of Gustav von Velsen, a departmental director at the Prussian Ministry of Trade and Industry in Berlin. The first shaft — Velsen-Schacht, later von Velsen I — was begun on 15 June 1903 on what would become Pole Wschód. A second shaft, von Velsen II, followed on 19 December 1903. Both reached depths of approximately 462–463 metres by 1905–1906, with initial coal production beginning in 1906 at around 9,721 tonnes.
The development of the colliery's western field began in 1907, when preliminary work on a third shaft was started but then abandoned. Sinking of the fourth shaft on Pole Zachód commenced in June 1908. This shaft — designated Schacht IV in the German numbering and associated with the Foch surface complex — represented the principal westward expansion of the Knurów workings. A new headframe for the von Velsen II shaft was erected in 1910 alongside a coal-sorting plant, and a coal-preparation plant was built by 1913.
By 1908 the mine workforce had reached 902 and annual output stood at 70,600 tonnes. Prior to the First World War the mine employed foreign workers, and during the war prisoners of war were put to work underground. A coking plant was established adjacent to the colliery, growing to four battery units by 1918; its output was partly used to heat Knurów's public buildings. In 1917 an underground fire killed eleven miners. In 1927 an ammonia plant was added, linking the mine, coking plant, and chemical works into a locally integrated industrial group.
Following the three Silesian Uprisings and the 1921 plebiscite, Knurów was incorporated into the Second Polish Republic. The Prussian administration formally transferred the mine to Polish management at the end of June 1922. On 22 September 1922 a ceremony attended by Wojciech Korfanty renamed the colliery's shafts: von Velsen I became Piotr, von Velsen II became Paweł, and — at the suggestion of the French personnel then managing the colliery under the Skarboferm Polish-French company — Schacht IV on Pole Zachód was named Foch, honouring Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The mine passed into the structures of Skarboferm, which also oversaw the associated coke and chemical operations.
The interwar economic crisis led to severe workforce reductions: from 3,790 employees in 1924 to 1,033 by 1934. Despite sustained losses on coal production, the profitability of the Skarboferm group as a whole prevented the mine's closure. Output in 1936 recovered to over 501,000 tonnes. In 1938 daily production reached 2,050 tonnes and the 650-metre level was brought into use. Following the German occupation in September 1939, the mine was taken over by the Preussag concern. In 1944, during the wartime occupation, Szyb Foch was deepened to reach the 685-metre level.
As German forces withdrew at the end of the war, the electrical infrastructure was damaged, but a group of 73 miners prevented the flooding of the mine. Coal production resumed in January 1945. In the first postwar months daily output did not exceed 1,300 tonnes, but by 1948 the mine had produced over one million tonnes annually. In 1947 the mine was incorporated into the Gliwice industrial coal group. The coking plant resumed operations following the Soviet takeover, and by 1947 a gas-compression station supplied coke oven gas by pipeline as far as Warsaw. Output continued to grow: daily production reached 4,000 tonnes within four years of the war's end, and by 1961 stood at 6,333 tonnes per day with a workforce of 5,773.
In 1944 Szyb Foch had been deepened to level 685; subsequent decades saw further technical development of the Pole Zachód infrastructure. A companion shaft, Szyb Foch II, was sunk between 1960 and 1963 to level 696, operating as an intake-air and winding shaft with twin skips drawing output from level 650. This left Szyb Foch I in a supporting role on Pole Zachód. By around 2006–2007 production on level 650 had ceased entirely, with extraction concentrated on level 850 served by Szyb Jan on Pole Wschód.
With the abandonment of level 650 operations, Szyb Foch II's skip-winding function became redundant and it was converted to an intake-ventilation shaft only. The Pole Zachód surface complex — including both Foch I and Foch II — was recorded as entirely inactive (nieczynne) by December 2018 in photographic and press sources. A ten-year modernisation programme began on Szyb Foch II from around 2009, converting it into a large-capacity cage transport shaft capable of handling heavy and oversized loads for both the Knurów and Szczygłowice workings. This modernisation programme, completed progressively to around 2019, made Szyb Foch I redundant, and its liquidation was identified as the consequence.
A local community campaign — documented on the iKnurów platform — called for the preservation of the steel strut-frame headframe of Szyb Foch I together with its shaft-top headgear building and winding-engine house, proposing adaptation to a community or heritage use. Campaigners pointed to the rapid loss of industrial monuments in Knurów, including the former Piotr headframe demolished in 2011, as evidence of the need for intervention. The headframe of Szyb Foch I is described in those sources as a strut-type (zastrzałowa) steel tower. As of the most recent available documentation the headframe was still standing, but its long-term survival remains uncertain pending any formal heritage designation or municipal commitment to preservation.