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At 8.00am on the morning of 14 October 1913 the mining village of Senghenydd (Seng-HEN-uth, hard s as in sip, soft th as in clothes), about four miles north-west of Caerphilly, was going about its business as usual. At the Universal Colliery the men of the early shift were underground and had been for two hours or more. The night shift men, who had come up at 5.00am, would have been in bed or maybe having breakfast with their families. The day shift men, who went down at 2.00pm, would also have been having breakfast. Mothers would have been busying themselves with breakfast and getting their children ready for school.

Soon after eight they all heard a heavy, prolonged rumble beneath their feet, and the ground shook. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at each other, wide-eyed with fear. They all knew what the sound meant. Twelve years earlier, in May 1901, only five years after the mine had opened, there had been an explosion in the Universal Colliery that had killed 80 of the 81 men who had been underground at the time. Right now there were 950 men down there. How bad would it be this time?

In the early years of the twentieth century coal was the world’s premier fuel, and the output of the South Welsh coalfield was widely considered to be the best coal in the world. The Royal Navy burnt thousands of tons of it every year. The French PLM Railway (Chemins de fer Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée) held it in such high regard that it owned a small fleet of collier ships to bring the stuff to France. It was one of Britain’s most important exports, and the burgeoning trade made fortunes for the mine owners and expanded the port of Cardiff into the largest city in Wales. In 1913 it was at its all-time peak, with nearly two million tons of coal passing through Cardiff docks that year. But this high-grade coal came with a price attached.

All coal seams exude a greater or lesser quantity of the gas known to miners as firedamp. A mixture of methane and hydrogen, it is highly explosive, which is why the miners’ safety lamp was invented and why miners were searched before going underground to make sure no one was carrying any matches. And that’s not all. Coal dust, when mixed with air, is also explosive. The blast of a firedamp explosion will stir up any coal-dust lying about and propel it along the workings, exploding as it goes to stir up more dust and propagate a murderous chain reaction. The dangers don’t end even then. A firedamp explosion leaves behind it another gas called afterdamp, a mixture of csrbon dioxide, nitrogen and the insidiously deadly carbon monoxide. If not rescued promptly, survivors of a mine explosion are in danger of dying from anoxia.

That prized South Welsh coal was particularly prone to producing firedamp. The statistics speak for themselves: between 1880 and 1900, the mines of South Wales employed 18% of the miners in the UK, but suffered 48% of the fatalities. Between 1856 and 1905 there were no less than ten mining disasters in South Wales with death tolls of over one hundred, an average of one every five or six years. That profitable business was a wretchedly dangerous occupation for those who went underground to do the actual work of producing the coal. No wonder the miners developed strong bonds of comradeship like those of soldiers in wartime, engendering the close community spirit for which the Valleys were famous.

The Universal Colliery was known to be a ‘gassy’ one. It was also very dusty, but its owners and management displayed a complacency to the dangers which seems quite breathtaking today, although the figures quoted above suggest that it was not particularly exceptional at the time. Senghenydd had been sitting on top of a disaster waiting to happen, and on that October morning the day of reckoning arrived.

When Robert Shaw, the mine manager, heard and felt the explosion he hurried to the pithead, where the two vertical shafts known as the York and the Lancaster plunged 1,950 feet (590m) into the ground. Shaw found that the two-ton cage (the big lift used for bringing coal to the surface and for transporting the men to and from the workings) had been propelled by the blast right to the top of the Lancaster shaft, where it had wrecked the winding gear. Flying debris had killed the man in charge of it (the ‘banksman’) and seriously injured his deputy. As soon as he had given orders for the area to be made safe Shaw descended the York shaft to assess the situation, taking with him Overman D R Thomas (an overman was a foreman, responsible for maintaining the underground infrastructure).

From the shaft bottoms the workings extended in two directions. Shaw found that the east side workings were unaffected and the 450 or so men there unharmed, so he gave orders for them to be evacuated. But the west side was another matter. According to Thomas it ‘was exactly like looking into a furnace.’

Shaw remained below ground until 9.30, busy finding injured survivors and arranging for them to be taken up, and helping to fight the fires near the pit bottom – with hand extinguishers, for the water pipes had been damaged by the explosion. His courage and commitment earned him the lasting respect of the local community and a commendation in the report on the disaster, but his actions resulted in a delay of nearly an hour and a half in summoning assistance, which almost certainly cost lives that might otherwise have been saved. It was 11.00 before the specialist mine rescue teams began arriving.

Crowds gathered around the pithead and in the streets, silently waiting for news. Nearly two thousand feet below, conditions for the rescuers were atrocious. In constant danger of roof falls due to weakening of the roof supports by the fires, contending with heat, smoke, fumes and afterdamp, they could only work in twenty-minute shifts. It didn’t help that the Universal Colliery possessed no respirators, and they had to be brought in from elsewhere. Even after they arrived many men were overcome by fumes and carbon monoxide poisoning. But the rescuers carried on with great courage and persistence, all the rest of the day and into the night and the next day, searching for survivors and battling the fires.

A group of eighteen men brought up around 1.00am the morning after the explosion were the last survivors found. It was several days before the fire was contained, and over a month before the last bodies were recovered. The final toll was appalling: 439 miners died, of whom sixty were under twenty and eight only fourteen, and one rescuer was killed by a roof fall. To say that the community was devastated would be putting it mildly. 205 women were widowed, and 542 children left fatherless. One woman lost her husband, her brother, two sons and her lodger. Senghenydd was, and remains, the worst colliery disaster in British history.

A photographer from Glasgow who specialised in recording disasters, W Benton, visited the area and produced a series of twenty-five postcards of scenes at the pithead and in the village. Morbid as the idea seems today, we should bear in mind that there was no television news then to show such images. The pictures are now regarded as a valuable historical record. The best-known of them shows a girl with a young child on her arm standing on a hillside alone, looking down at the pithead. Benton captioned it ‘A little mother waiting for news,’ but in fact the girl was only thirteen and the child was her sister.

In his report Richard Redmayne, Chief Inspector of Mines, was unable to identify the exact cause of the explosion, but thought it most likely that it had been a spark from the electric signalling gear. Communication within the mine was by electric bells, which were battery powered and connected, incredibly, by naked wires. Every time the wires were bridged by a knife or a file to make the bells ring sparks were produced. The bells were covered, but the covers were not airtight, and when they rang their contacts also produced sparks. This arrangement was by no means unique to Senghenydd, and the owners contended that the low voltage concerned would not produce sparks intense enough to ignite the firedamp, but Redmayne could ‘only regret that the safer plan of excluding sparks altogether was not adopted.’

‘It is all the more astonishing,’ he continued, ‘that the management should have faced the risk that sparks might have ignited gas in view of the Bedwas Colliery explosion which occurred on March 27th 1912, and was proved beyond all reasonable doubt to have been caused by the sparks from an electric bell. The attention of owners of mines throughout South Wales was called to this explosion in a circular letter… dated 28th August 1912.’

That was only one item in the sorry tale revealed by the enquiry of negligence and breaches of the laws pertaining to coal mining. The watering of the workings to lay the coal dust was inadequate. Only the floors were watered, no attempts being made to deal with the dust on the walls and roofs. This already been drawn to the management’s attention after the 1901 explosion, but little or no notice had been taken. It was also a clear breach of the law.

The layout and organisation of the mine was such that the firemen (not fire fighters: their job was to check the levels of firedamp in the workings before every shift) had to spend so much of the time allowed for their inspections in walking to their assigned areas that they didn’t have enough time to check them properly. And the records of those inspections were not kept in a manner that met the requirements of the law.

The Coal Mines Act of 1911 had stipulated, among other safety measures, that a mine’s ventilation system must be capable of reversing the airflow in an emergency, and mine owners had been given until 1 January 1913 to comply. The owners of the Universal Colliery had not done so by the deadline, and applied for an extension. They were granted one until September 1913, but by 14 October the necessary alterations had still not been implemented. There was some doubt as to whether reversal would have been of any use in this emergency, but the inarguable fact remained that the owners’ failure to comply was another breach of the law.

The lack of respirators had undoubtedly cost lives by delaying the rescue work, and the water supply, even when it was working, was inadequate for fire fighting. ‘I should have thought,’ Redmayne wrote, ‘in view of the fact that the colliery was such a gassy one, and as it had already been devastated by an explosion, that the management would have made arrangements for a supply of water adequate to meet an emergency of the kind that had actually occurred.’

His conclusion was damning. ‘Several of these breaches may appear trivial, but taken in the aggregate they point to a disquieting laxity in the management of the mine.’

Robert Shaw was charged with seventeen offences against the 1911 Act, and the company with four. Shaw was convicted of two offences; the company was convicted of failing to provide a reversible airflow. Shaw was fined £24, and the company £10 with costs. One newspaper, the Merthyr Pioneer, pointed out that according to this the life of each miner killed was valued at one shilling and a penny-farthing – £14 in today’s values. Shaw stayed on as manager until the mine closed in 1928.

Today there is a school on the site of the colliery. In 2013, on the centenary of the disaster, a national memorial to all the victims of Welsh mining disasters was unveiled at Senghenedd. It depicts a miner helping an injured workmate to safety.