Senghenydd centenary:
Dan O'Neill on the nation's worst mining disaster and the terrible cost of coal. Oct 2013 12:03 > > Today marks 100 years since the Senghenydd mining disaster. Dan O'Neill looks at the tragedy and the terrible cost of coal throughout the centuries.
We do not know his name, any more than we know the name of the first man to fall in the killing fields of the Somme.
He is the Unknown Soldier of that war against nature waged in Wales since the first coal was mined at Neath in 1248. But in 1668 his was the first recorded death.The first recorded death, for without doubt there were many before him. While we know beyond any doubt at all that there were far too many after him. Down all the years since his death the bells have
tolled, signalling sorrow in villages from Ferndale, where 178 men and boys died in 1867, to Cilfynydd , and the deaths of 298 in 1896. And in our own time for the 31 victims of Clydach Vale's Cambrian Colliery explosion in 1965, the 45 who died five years earlier in Abertillery's Six Bells Colliery and then the final four, only two years ago at the Gleision
Colliery in West Wales.
Deaths so frequent that as the 19th Century dawned a coroner's inquest was regarded as unnecessary if the corpse was
"only that of a collier". The true cost of coal, then. And to those communities who knew so much woe over the years we can add the most heart-breaking name of all: Aberfan. > >
But this month we remember Senghenydd. And if you think of mining as a constant battle in the blackness below ground, a war against nature with billions of tons of ancient rock above, a single shrug of the earth's shoulders bringing
devastation and death, why then, Senghenydd is our Passchendaele. For here is the most appalling wound ever suffered by an industry so often visited by disaster.
October 14, 1913. A date chiselled on so many tombstones in the cemetery at Penyrheol, only faintly visible now though, weathered by a century of winds and reservoirs of rain, but still evoking the horror of that day. No date speaks more eloquently of a mining apocalypse, no date so vividly tells of the true and terrible cost of coal.
Perversely, in that year when the coal cascaded down from the valleys, the mine-owners and shipping tycoons counted the cost in a different way. What profits they piled up from the record-breaking 57m tons shipped from the Bristol
Channel ports, what back-slapping in the Cardiff Coal Exchange. It worked out to 123,000 tons for each of the 439 men and boys killed in Senghenydd. Killed by the blast that ripped through the pit at 8am, that laid waste to a valley, that stole the heart from a community, an explosion that left 205 women widowed with 542 children and 62 old, dependent parents. No
much-maligned Welfare State to turn to in that bleak and unforgiving October. And no succour from a management that cut the wages of the dead, because they hadn't completed their shift.
The Echo brought the news to the people of Cardiff, men and women for whom at that time Senghenydd was
unknown territory, as remote as Tibet. But now the name would echo around the world. > > TERRIBLE COLLIERY DISASTER the headline blared, and below it, smaller headlines: "Explosion at Senghenydd Pit . . . Mine on Fire . . . Over 400 Men Below." At 4.15pm "Mr Herbert Lewis of the St John's Ambulance Brigade gave the figures," the horrifying figures. "Went down, 921. Brought up, 436. Still below, 485. > > How did it happen? Investigators painfully pieced together the story. Soon after 8am a miner's lamp went out. Dai Davies, master haulier, took it to be relit at the lamp station. By one of those sudden flicks of fate which so often change history, at the moment Dai held out his lamp the roof collapsed 200
yards away. A jet of gas escaped. Naked flame plus gas equalled - inferno.
Another explanation: sparks from an electrical signalling device triggered the blast. Whatever, Senghenydd's agony had begun. The sound of the explosion , so loud it was heard 11 miles away in Cardiff, made mine manager Edward Shaw race from the lamp room. He found men already removing the body of John Mogridge, a banksman. A two-ton cage, hurled up
the shaft by the blast, smashed into the platform he was standing on, and a chunk of wood took off his head. > > Down below in the eternal darkness William Hyatt lay dead with one of his sons, Brinley, at his side. His two other sons had climbed to safety with the 489 men and boys from the east side of the pit. Charles Baker and his 14-year-old son Charlie were found
together in death, never again to see Charlie's little sister, born the previous Saturday.
That night sightseers flocked to Senghenydd as bodies were brought up by hundreds of rescue workers. One of the nurses
tirelessly tending the bodies found that one of them was her son. He was 14. He had started work that day. In her tiny terraced house Edith Lillian Humphries lay in bed with her baby. She was 19, and had been married for
just a year. "My grandmother came running in," she would recall in old age, "and told me the pit was gone. People rushed up there but I was not one of them." She knew that her husband was dead. She would join him 81 years
later in 1994 when her coffin was carried to her grave among those tombstones marked by a date that had been burned into her brain, branded into her heart through all the lost years:
October 14, 1913. > > Chapels lost most of their deacons. When the village rugby team finally began playing again three years later it fielded 13 players under 16, there were so few older players left. A generation had been wiped out.
Then , as fires still smouldered below, Senghenydd witnessed the first of the heart-melting marches so often seen on the streets of South Wales. A river of men shuffled in silence behind the coffins of those victims who had been
recovered from the depths and they would return, week after week, for the funerals would go on until mid-November when the last bodies were brought to the surface, each one a melancholy milestone in the history of mining. The fate of those men and boys of Senghenydd was decided not on that October morning a century ago, nor on the day in 1891 when they sunk the first shaft. They died because 300m years before man had walked the earth the leaves of a towering fern were swallowed by a swamp. Multiplied by millions, fern and trees buried by layers of mud and sand were transmuted, from plant to peat to coal. And because of this women would weep for their men at pitheads across our valleys while other men would become
fabulously rich and in time be handed titles, like David Alfred Thomas of the mighty Cambrian Combine. He became Lord Rhondda, a man known as The Czar of the Coalfields. If he was a Czar the men who ripped out the coal
that made him millions were serfs working for paltry payments. In 1901 when the coal-owners made £20m profits, records show that Noah Jones week's take-home pay from the Albion (Cilfynydd) Colliery was six shillings
and sixpence. Of course, the future Lord Rhondda might say, he had his rent, 6s 3d taken out of his pay plus his sixpence for the accident fund. But when the price of coal dropped by two shillings a ton the following year Noah
Jones was told to take a 10 per cent cut.
What could he do? Rebel, and he would be evicted from the company-owned cottage. Strike and the troops
could be sent in.
It's been estimated that in the century or so following the real beginning of the commercialisation of coal in the 1860s,
more than six billion tons of what they called "buried sunlight" were torn from the seams beneath our hills, the waste shaping other hills of slag and slurry looming over the valleys, one rising above Aberfan. Now the wounds
have healed over, there is little to tell you as you walk in places like Clydach Vale or Cilfynydd or, yes, Senghenydd that you are walking across old battlefields.
Well, pit disasters of the past wrecked communities.
The closing of the South Wales coalfields wrecked an entire region. Now let us return to Senghenydd and its aftermath . > > After the explosion of 1901 which killed 81 - yes, there was a dreadful prelude to 1913 - safety measures were recommended. They were not followed. A government inquiry found the manager and mine owners guilty of violating the 1911 Coal Mines Act. They were fined a total of... £24.
As our headline said: "Miners' Lives at 1s 11d each".
Then, showing that attitudes towards the "serfs" hadn't changed, when the pit closed on Friday, March 30, 1928, the
2,500 "workers and officials" were given one day's notice. But as we relive the grief that shrouded Senghenydd a century ago, remember, its apocalypse was just one among many, its deaths a fraction of the whole.
So let it serve as a symbol for every pit that perished, for every man and boy who has died since that Unknown Soldier of 1668.
"My New Year's Resolution, is to try and emulate Marek's level of chilled out, thoughtfulness and humour towards other forumites and not lose my decorum"
