Struggle and strife

It was the harshest of all industries, with Welsh miners only expected to live until the age of 40 at one time. In an extract from a new book on our coal industry, Ronald Rees charts the dangerous circumstances under which our men, children and often women worked

THE authors of the 1842 report on the employment of children in mines listed the 10 most common ways in which miners could be injured or killed:

1) Falling down the shaft.

2) Being struck on the head, by something falling, when descending or ascending the shaft.

3) Breaking of the rope or chain that raised or lowered the basket, bucket or cage.

4) Being drawn over the winding pulley and dashed to the ground or precipitated down the shaft through the neglect of the engine man.

5) Something falling from the mine’s roof.

6) Being crushed by a fall of coal at the face.

7) Suffocation by carbonic acid gas (chokedamp).

8) Suffocation or burning by firedamp.

9) Drowning from sudden break-ins of water from old workings.

10) Injuries from horse or carriage.

Only winter sailing in cold Atlantic waters presented as many dangers.

J U Nef, the great American historian of British coalmining, considered that subjecting men, women and children to labour in mines was equivalent to sending raw, unarmed troops into battle against a trained and well-equipped enemy. He could well have been echoing a sentiment expressed by one of the 1842 commissioners, who remarked that, to judge from the conversation in certain mining communities, “We might consider the whole of the population as engaged in a campaign.”

The military metaphor was also adopted by Lionel Brough, Government Inspector of Coalmines for the Western District, in his report for 1864. “This account of death, contusions, fractures, amputations and surgical operations, altogether sounds like the description of military movements in the field rather than the report of industrious and peaceful pursuits.”

By the time of World War II, mining was a far less dangerous occupation than it had been a century earlier, but miners still suffered from tensions, similar, according to B L Coombes, to those that affected soldiers.

For the pitman, the hazards began at the shaft: “A collier,” as one respondent to the 1842 Children’s Employment Commission remarked, “is never safe after he is swung off to be let down the pit.” In the category of day-to-day accidents, deaths from shaft accidents were second only to falls of rock from the roof or, in places where the seams were thick, of coal and rock from the coal face. If, as in early days, the descent was by ladder, men, and the boys clinging or tied to their backs, sometimes fell to their deaths through a loss of footing or, as happened from time to time, through an accumulation of chokedamp in the shaft.

At Llanelli, where ladders are said to have been in common use in 1842, they were placed perpendicularly down the side of the shaft and divided by stages or platforms every 20 or 30 yards. Falls could only have been fatal.

After the introduction of the windlass and the horse-driven whim gin, colliers descended and ascended either by standing in a basket or tub, or simply by hooking a foot or leg through a loop of the rope or a link in the chain.

If hooked in series they looked, as one observer remarked, like a string of onions or, where each man was holding a lighted candle, like a chandelier. In shallow pits, the raising and lowering was by hand windlass, and in deep ones, by horse gin.

The colliers held on with one hand, leaving the other free to guide their bodies away from the sides of the shaft. Boys, who often sat astride the knees of the men, could be dislodged by bars or timbers projecting from the side of the shaft.

Ascending or descending in baskets or tubs was less hazardous than hanging onto a rope, but whether filled with coal or colliers, the tubs, without guides to restrain them, could swing from side to side in the shaft. Nor, too, was there any protection from projectiles from above. In December 1815, a basket being lowered down a shaft at Llansamlet was struck, when about 120 feet from the bottom, by a falling stone. One of the two men in the basket fell to the base of the shaft, while the other, suspended by a leg, was saved only because two boys who were also in the basket managed to hang onto him.

Ropes and chains were of uncertain quality and strength and, in the days of hand-winding, the only brake, before catches were fitted to prevent the windlass from winding back, was the physical strength of the winder or winders. From time to time, a rope or chain would break, or the operators of a windlass or horse-driven gin, through a miscalculation of the weight, would lose control.

The breaking of a windlass handle in 1753 resulted in one of the first recorded deaths of a woman in a mine in Wales. The victim, Prudence Hopkin, was a winder at the Brynhir Colliery, Llanrhidian, when the handle of her windlass “broke in her hand and she fell into the pit eight or nine fathoms deep.”

In the aggregate, falls of ground, haulage and shaft accidents, the day-to-day penalties for coalmining, were the greatest threats to life and limb, but they were so frequent as to be almost beneath notice. Chokedamp and firedamp, on the other hand, which were more likely to ambush companies of colliers than pick them off singly, commanded attention. Although not always fatal, chokedamp could kill, or render senseless, quickly and silently. “Neither visible nor noisome,” wrote Robert Plot, these damps “are suddenly mortal,” overcoming so quickly that the collier was “without access to cry but once, ‘God’s mercy’.” Matthias Dunn, a colliery manager and the author, in 1844, of a book on the coal trade, averred that “a single breath of it when pure is almost certain death.” Even those who escaped ‘absolute suffocation’ might, according to Mr Jessop of Yorkshire in 1675, suffer violent convulsions and “some lightness of brain thereafter.”

Heavier than air, chokedamp lingered in pockets and old workings not reached by the ventilation system, and which miners entered at some risk.

At the Primrose Colliery, near Pontardawe, in October 1858, 11 men, a 12-year-old boy and seven horses were killed by an invasion of chokedamp into the ‘Old Machine Level’.

Disturbed by the frequency of explosions as mines deepened, in 1815 the Sunderland Society for Preventing Accidents in Coalmines asked Sir Humphry Davy, Britain’s most eminent chemist, if he could make a safe miner’s lamp.

All previous efforts at safe illumination, such as reflected light from mirrors and phosphorescence from the scales of rotting fish, had proved inadequate.

Davy visited a gassy northern pit, examined an experimental safety lamp, and very quickly made one of his own from glass tubes and heat equalising metal gauze. The gauze was of such fine mesh that the flame could not pass through it and, by quickly dissipating the heat from the flame, it kept temperatures on the surface of the gauze below the ignition point. As well as providing a safe source of light, the lamp also detected both firedamp and chokedamp.

Herbert Francis Mackworth, the first government inspector of mines in South Wales, urged the adoption of locked safety lamps, but locking mechanisms were not always effective and Welsh miners, who seem to have been particularly lawless, were adept at opening them. Lock-picking ‘contrivances’, according to mine officials, were sometimes found in the pockets of dead miners.

In the steam coal districts east of the Nedd Valley, where there was greater risk from firedamp explosions, discipline appears to have been reasonably tight, but in the hard coal districts of the west, where even elementary precautions were considered unpitmanlike, discipline was a chimera.

Among the first victims in South Wales from the failure to use the Davy lamp were three colliers at the Old Church Pit, Llansamlet. To the report of their deaths, in 1827, the Cambrian appended a cool rider: “We are credibly informed that the proprietor has furnished the colliery with the Davy lamp, but the men, with fatal obstinacy to their own safety, refuse to use them.” The same reluctance accounted for the deaths of six men, at a colliery on the other side of the Tawe, in 1831. “We understand,” ran a local report, “that the workmen in this, as well as several other collieries... decline to use the Davy Lamp and to their obstinacy in this respect, no doubt, is to be attributed this fatal accident.”

At the Mynydd Newydd colliery near Swansea ventilation was thought to be so effective that only firemen or deputies, who tested for gas before the men started their shifts, needed safety lamps.

In 1844, a firedamp explosion killed five men and severely burned and injured several more. It is also possible that safety lamps were not issued in the otherwise near-perfect Hendreforgan colliery.

In the mining record, examples of careless practices are legion.

In 1845, at the Charles pit in Llansamlet, nine-year-old Joseph Harris was asked to go into an empty, unworked stall to fetch an iron bar. The owners of the pit had recently installed a new ‘blowing machine’ or mechanical fan, but empty, unworked stalls were seldom reached by ventilation systems and were notorious harbours for gas. The boy went in with a lighted candle and, within seconds, there was an explosion. His clothes were nearly burned off his body and his hands and face were ‘dreadfully lacerated’. He died that evening, his body swathed in oil. Joseph Harris’s death, however, prompted no lasting changes at the pit. Twenty-five years later, in July 1870, the pit’s reputation for gaslessness restored, an explosion caused the ‘almost instantaneous death’ of 19 men and boys.

Farther up the valley, in the anthracite collieries, practices were even more lax. Most of the collieries were fairly shallow drifts and in them, because of anthracite’s low volatility and slowness to oxidise, there was less danger from both firedamp and chokedamp. In general, gas was regarded as a problem only in mines where ventilation was inadequate, and there were, of course, many of these.

Inevitably, the men were even less inclined to work with safety lamps, occasionally with fatal consequences. In August 1858, at the Cyfing Colliery, Ystalyfera, six men were killed and four seriously injured by a firedamp explosion. At the inquest, James Rogers, a surgeon from Ystalyfera, testified that David Jones, cutter, and the senior of the four men, had suffered a crushed skull (“the skull was smashed in and the brain torn out”), breaks in both legs, and severe burns and lacerations to his body. He could not say if the body had ‘burst’, because it was covered with coal dust and debris. Cyfing was a pit with a single brick-divided shaft that served as both the downcast and upcast for its ventilation system.

Above the upcast side of the shaft was a furnace to encourage the flow of air. The men worked with naked candles and were in the habit of having a chat and a smoke in the pit bottom before going to their stalls.

The spell, mwcyn gweld, also allowed their eyes to adjust to the darkness. There were no regular inspections for gas, even though a man had been burned.

Four months earlier, and on at least one occasion, the men had to come up because the air underground was ‘dull’. At the inquest, it emerged that there was virtually no movement of air in the western section of the pit, except for a stirring effect caused by the movement of men and horses. The explosion occurred on a hot day, when there would have been little natural convection, and there was some doubt whether the furnace above the upcast had been lit the previous night. Lionel Brough, a government inspector of mines, and a witness at the inquest, recommended regular inspections for gas before the start of work and the building of a second shaft with a furnace at the bottom to encourage circulation.

In coalfields throughout the world, the most mystifying of all the gaseous phenomena were ‘blowers’, spontaneous outbursts of coal dust and methane gas under enormous pressure that could within minutes obliterate a coalface or fill a roadway.

Outbursts also plagued the giant new mine at Cynheidre. The mine, which worked coal at levels of 1680, 1980 and 2280 feet, began production in 1961 and from the outset was beset by accidents. Six men lost their lives by falling in the shafts and others were killed through roof falls and accidents with haulage trams and explosives at the coal face. Outbursts began in 1962/63, when more than 30 incidents forced the abandonment of an entire working area.

There were a further 16 outbursts in 1965, one of which filled a heading for a distance of seventy yards with eight hundred tons of fine coal. By 1971, the year of the most serious outburst, when the mine had been open for 10 years, there had been no fewer than 66 outbursts. In April 1971, six men were killed and 69 others affected by varying degrees of asphyxia from an outburst that gave little warning.

On the night shift before the day of the outburst, shot firing had produced more dust and loose coal than usual and sprays had to be employed to keep the dust down. The deputy in charge also noticed that small coal was ‘spalling’ off the coal face and the sides of the heading, and there were signs that the roof immediately in front of the face was beginning to rise slightly. Tests for firedamp revealed no change and there was no pouncing. The colliers filled the loose coal into bags and packed them behind the arched steel pillars.

The only warning of something amiss was a fizzing sound as if something was passing through the duct of a ventilation fan, at some distance from the face, and a cloud of dust that appeared to come from the fan.

Of all the ways of dying in a mine, none seems as horrifying as drowning. Falls of stone and rock might be removed but in a water-filled pit there were few escape hatches.

One of the worst disasters in south Wales occurred in the Garden Pit at Landshipping, Pembrokeshire, on a February afternoon in 1844.

According to one account, on the day of the disaster a runner was sent to the surface to report that water had seeped into the mine and, as a precaution, the mine was cleared. An hour later, however, the 58 colliers were sent back to work. At the surface, the first intimation of the disaster was the sudden formation of eddies and whirlpools in the river as water poured into the mine. At the same time, workers near the mouth of the shaft felt the blast of a current of rising air so strong “as to bear up a hand when held unresistingly over it.”

Underground, the air rushed through the roadways with so much force and noise that colliers at first thought it was a firedamp explosion. The membrane of rock had been breached relatively close to the shore so that the 33 colliers working in distant stalls beneath the bed of the Cleddau were irretrievably trapped and drowned. The remainder ran towards the shaft, shouting for assistance.

One survivor reported that a rushing wind, stronger than any he had ever experienced, carried him and his companion off their legs. The ensuing torrent dashed them against the sides of the roadway but they managed to reach the shaft. Alerted by the noise, the man at the whim gin put three horses into a gallop and was able to rescue four men and 14 boys.

Water in the shaft rose 40 feet within a minute. The last man to be saved missed the bucket but managed to stay afloat in the rising waters until a bucket could be lowered to him.

The sequel to the flooding was a violent explosion the following morning as air, compressed in the recesses of the pit, exploded into the river, throwing large pieces of timber to heights, according to witnesses, of thirty to forty feet. No bodies were ever ejected or recovered, and so there was no inquest and no public inquiry.

Local newspaper editors admonished the mine agent. The pit was abandoned; mining continued in the area, but at some distance from the river.

Even if a collier managed to escape crippling or fatal injury, he seldom – at least until well into the 19th century – died of old age. James Brown, a surgeon at Narberth, who was interviewed by R H Franks of the Children’s Employment Commission, 1842, estimated that the average lifespan of a collier was around 40 years.

Among the entire population of Begelly and East Williamston, in 1863, only six miners had reached the age of 60.

David Morgan, manager of the Broadmoor Colliery, declared in 1841 that most men were unable to work by the age of 50 or 55.

These observations were endorsed by the 1842 commissioners, who noted that “the seeds of painful and mortal diseases” were very often sown in childhood and youth. They assumed a “formidable character between the ages of 30 and 40” and soon after the age of 50 “each generation of this class of the population is commonly extinct.”

There were no old miners. Hannah Brown, a 16-year-old windlass girl from Begelly, reported to the commissioners that her father, who was ‘not very old’ (he was probably about 40) had been off for two years with ‘bad breath’ and was reduced to grazing a cow on the roadside.

The cow and Hannah’s wages were their sole sustenance.

Aside from the well-known respiratory diseases, ‘bad breath’, there were a number of minor ailments that were so much part and parcel of pit life that they went unrecorded and unclassified. If few miners, as John Benson remarked, died from rupture and rheumatism, many died with them.

To aching joints, from working in water, many could add inflamed and infected limbs. ‘Beat hand’, ‘beat knee’ and ‘beat elbow’ were common to all mining regions. The constant chafing of knees, elbows, and hands when working in narrow seams and frequently foul, unsanitary conditions invited infection, blood poisoning and the inflammation and festering of the joints and limbs. Gas and fetid air, with barely enough oxygen to support the flame of a candle, and inhaled at temperatures of up to 90F, could produce throbbing headaches.

Most debilitating of all, however, were the various respiratory diseases that came from working in damp, wet or dusty conditions. It had long been known that the lungs of men working in rock containing quartz or silica could fill with immovable, hard siliceous dust.

In the lungs, stone dust hardened into a cement-like mass, inhibiting, and eventually preventing, breathing. Some sufferers, however, died from tuberculosis, not from the dust itself.

Dust-coated lungs were particularly susceptible to the tubercle bacillus. Silicosis was the worst of the lung diseases and, with the victim having to fight for every breath, it could, as one doctor remarked, inflict “a terrible death and one never to be forgotten.”

By early middle age virtually all miners suffered from ‘miner’s asthma’, a train of breathing and pulmonary ailments attributed to the inhalation of coal dust. In 1863 the Miner and Workman’s Advocate reported that few young men above the age of 25 were quite free from some form of lung complaint and that above the age of 35 more than 90% suffered from asthma and chronic bronchitis.

X-rays showed that the lungs and bronchial passages of miners who drilled and cut coal were just as dust-coated as those who cut headings and airways through stone. The condition was named pneumoconiosis and because its identification happened to coincide with the introduction of machine cutting, more and more men were certified with the disease.

At first, compensation was confined to miners who could demonstrate that they had worked in silica rock, but in 1934 it was extended to all men who worked in coal.

The most seriously affected were colliers working in the hard, dry coals of the anthracite districts.

A cough and persistent breathlessness were the unmistakable badges of an ageing collier but another, just as infallible, if less common, was a conciliation of the eyes that made it difficult for him to focus and fix on an object.

On coming up from the pit into daylight, many miners automatically tilted their caps over their eyes and stretched their necks.

In some cases this might have been a reaction to release from the darkness and confinement of the mine, but in others it was an unconscious effort to find the angle at which their eyes converged and their vision focused. Accompanying physical symptoms were the oscillation of the eyeballs and an involuntary twitching of the eyelids. Other tell-tale signs included headaches, giddiness, night blindness and photophobia, a dread of light.

At the end of the 19th century, a 50-year-old collier delivered the following lament with the customary matter-of-factness of workers for whom the insupportable, by the standards of today, had become the norm: “Up to the last two years before I failed I had no trouble with my eyes and earned good money. During the last two years my eyes got weak, but I struggled on, hoping things would mend. I lost days and days, and on times a week. At the time it was not safe for me to go to the face without the help of another man. I could not recognise anybody, and I had to walk with my lamp held behind my back.

“I could always tell by the sound if it was safe. My wages fell to a pound a week, and the manager stopped me at last and told me that it was not safe to work any longer. If I could only have known before, I might have saved my eyes.”

Joshua Richardson, the Neath engineer, ended his monograph on the prevention of accidents in mines with an appeal.

He characterised miners as an uncomplaining, long-suffering race exposed, in performing work indispensable to the nation’s well-being, to more danger and misery than any other group of Victorian workers.

Removed from the world’s gaze, however, they had received far less than their fair measure of attention from government. Yet if any worker had a claim to every possible protection from the legislature, then none, he concluded forcefully, was more eminently entitled to it than the British miner.

Reading Richardson’s monograph a century after its publication, B L Coombes remarked that had it not been for the faded covers he might have imagined, from its style and tone, and to some extent its content, that it had been written in his own time, perhaps 25 years earlier. Richardson wrote simply and directly. In the century since the book’s publication there had been great improvements in mine safety but, as Coombes noted, schemes of ventilation appeared much the same and much of the work was still being done by hand. Implicit in his remarks is the affirmation that mines could never be safe places and that no book written on mine safety and the prevention of accidents and ailments could ever seem completely out of date.

Taken from Black Mystery: Coal Mining in South-West Wales by Ronald Rees (Y Lolfa)

Have your say on the Expats forum...

When Gabby met Shaun Edwards
Fishing industry in Wales
Sir Anthony Hopkins is targeted for a Welsh choir
Barrage across the River Severn
Past life of the Welsh miners
Laugharne is still a property hotspot