Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

Prologue

The Hastings is a roadside pub in the village of Seaton Delaval, a few miles north-east of Newcastle. The pub (and village) are named after local landowners, who had been granted land by William the Conqueror and become abundantly rich, mainly on the proceeds of coal-mining. They had that instinct for survival which marks so many wealthy families with large estates. When they fell on hard times, they restored their fortunes through adroit marriage, after which they commissioned a fashionable architect to build them a massive stately home. Admiral George Delaval picked Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, to build a magnificent English baroque pile in the early eighteenth century. These families intended to impress, and in that the Delavals were successful – Vanbrugh’s designs were his last for a country house, and are thought by many to be his finest work. Seaton Delaval Hall is vast, with an enormous central courtyard of almost 2,500 square metres between two symmetrical wings. It is one of the grandest houses in Northumberland.

If they get that far, some of the 80,000 annual visitors to the Hall are entertained by the mausoleum in the grounds dedicated to a nineteen-year-old son and heir who died after being kicked in ‘a vital organ’ while attempting to seduce a laundrymaid in 1775. If they but knew it, there is a much more dramatic story to be found in the village outside the gates of the majestic Hall. The families of the miners who worked in the new mine, which opened in the year of Queen Victoria’s accession, lived in 360 gimcrack cottages, supplied with water which had to be carried indoors from standpipes. There was, of course, no internal sanitation either. The village had three shops – a tailor, a butcher and a grocer/draper. A few of the residents – the local doctor, minister, stationmaster and some senior colliery officials – had bigger houses, but the best of the miners’ homes contained two rooms downstairs, with a ladder leading to an attic. Most of the mine-workers lived five people to a house, and for those with large families, conditions must have been appallingly cramped. (The 1891 census shows Edward Ranshaw, a fifty-one-year-old miner, living in two rooms and an attic with a wife, six children, and two lodgers.1)

Across the road from the Hastings pub is a branch of the local Co-op, successor to the shop founded by the residents in 1863 as the first miners’ co-op in Britain. It nestles behind a petrol station selling pork scratchings on the counter. In front of the pub, beneath a plastic sign offering ‘Geordie Tappaz’, and live sport on the bar’s numerous televisions, a middle-aged white man walks his two greyhounds on a leash. The pub doesn’t look as if it is on a Campaign for Real Ale pilgrimage route.

But one Sunday in 1862 the place was besieged by huge numbers of customers. They had arrived by train, horse, carriage and on foot. The pub was, said a witness, ‘literally swarming with visitors … passages and staircases alike being impassable; and, with a callousness that is positively shocking, all are drinking, joking and enjoying themselves’.2 The local police struggled to exert some sort of control outside the pub, by erecting temporary barriers. But it was the weekend, the Hastings was the only licensed premises in the area, and the sheer number of customers was simply unmanageable. Nothing draws a crowd like the chance to learn details of a tragedy. The visitors had come to try to discover what was happening literally beneath their feet.

Three days earlier, between ten and eleven on the morning of 16 January 1862, the second shift of the day had assembled for work at the colliery in the next-door village of New Hartley. The newly arrived miners were due to take over from what was called the foreshift, which had begun work in the middle of the night. Like most changeovers it was to take place underground, to save time and money for the mine operators, who did not want to pay men for the time they spent being dropped in cages down the mineshaft and then walking or crawling along underground passages to the face they were expected to chip away at. The pit had been sunk over fifteen years beforehand and had been an unlucky place from the start. Its predecessor had been closed in the 1840s, because it kept flooding. But, the mine produced good steam coal and its newly rich owner, Charles Carr – all sideburns and waistcoat and with what was said to be the tallest top hat in the county – believed that with a big enough steam pump to drain water from the pit, the coal could be extracted and sold. The machine made for him was one of the most powerful in the entire north-east coalfield, and built by one of the heavy engineering firms which had developed on the banks of the Tyne in the wake of the coal trade. The main cylinder of the beam engine was over seven feet across, pushing up and down an enormous horizontal girder over thirty-four feet long, made of cast-iron and weighing forty-two tons.

Shortly before eleven that morning, with a tremendous shattering noise, it broke in two. Part of the beam – perhaps weighing over twenty tons – fell down the shaft, which was the only way into – and out of – the mine. The accident had occurred at the worst possible time, when the maximum number of men were underground for the shift change. It would have been easier to manage a rescue had there been – as existed at other pits – two mineshafts. But the owners had followed local practice and sunk only one shaft into the earth, about twelve feet across. The shaft was divided in two all the way down by a timber partition – or ‘brattice’ – to allow the usual mining ventilation system, in which clean air could reach the men underground through a ‘down’ draught while a fire was kept burning low down on the ‘up-cast’ side, to draw in the foul air of the mine and release it to the surface. If the single shaft became blocked for any reason – as now happened – tragedy would surely follow.

That morning a cage was being raised to the surface. Inside were eight men who had just finished their shift, doubtless pleased to be the first to have completed their time underground. When they were about halfway to the surface they heard a terrifying crack, followed by a roar, as the broken beam careered down the hole. Debris dislodged from the walls of the shaft, and bits of lift machinery struck the cage, snapping two of its four supporting cables. Four of the men inside the ungated cage were thrown out and plunged into the darkness below, as rock, metal and timber rained down upon them. The remaining miners knew their friends would not survive the fall. The massive beam continued its descent down the shaft, dislodging rock, rubble and heavy timbers as it fell. The rocks, rubble and rubbish then jammed across the shaft, blocking access to two of the three seams of coal; 204 men and boys were now trapped underground.

The fatal accident at Hartley Colliery sounds extraordinary to the modern ear. The Hartley disaster was bigger than most, but Britain had by this time a barely satiable appetite for coal, and it was fed at a terrible price in human suffering. For over 400 years, the fuel of a nation and empire was dogged with accident. ‘Close the coal-house door, lad,’ sang the Tyneside radical Alex Glasgow a hundred years later, ‘there’s blood inside.’ Perhaps there were years when no one died trying to get coal out of the ground. But they were exceptional.

After the initial paralysis caused by the shock, men on the surface at Hartley began quickly to organise rescue efforts. By midnight, rescuers had clambered down and reached the cage, where George Sharp, though badly injured, was saying that he wanted to climb down to help his son, Young George, whom he could hear lying injured and moaning on the rockfall below. One of the rescuers put a sling around the old man, but as he was being lowered, he struck an overhanging piece of timber, was knocked from the sling, and plunged to his death. He hit the ground a few feet away from where his son had fallen. Two other men from the cage were retrieved successfully, but the most heroic act that day came from Thomas Watson, a recent convert to Primitive Methodism, who had himself lowered into the darkness and stayed with the wounded men on a pile of debris part way down the shaft, leading them in prayers, and hymn-singing, until they died. Watson was the last man to be brought to the surface alive. He had been underground for eleven hours. Other miners rushed to the stricken colliery to offer what help they could. Under the leadership of William Coulson – who, with over forty years’ experience was considered the finest sinker of mineshafts in the north-east – they worked on feverishly. But the obstacles were enormous. Great quantities of debris blocked their way and often they had to line the walls of the shaft with heavy timber to prevent another fall.

By now, word had spread across the north-east that a life-or-death rescue drama was taking place. Over the weekend, the trippers began to arrive and the Hastings found itself with a roaring trade. Among those despatched to the scene was Thomas Wemyss Reid, a nineteen-year-old reporter on the Newcastle Journal and Courant, who began to keep an hourly account of what he rapidly recognised as ‘the most terrible calamity that was ever visited upon any coal mine in the country’.3 His writing is purple in places, but for the most part remains an object lesson in how to write about ongoing drama: urgent, frank, emotional, exploitative, of course, yet dignified. On the Saturday he noted how

Around the pit buildings a crowd of men are gathered, talking to each other in undertones, speculating upon the fate of their comrades. Whenever the gin [winch] needs to be turned they volunteer for the service, for the horses are thoroughly worn out with the labour through which they have gone. At other times they stand idly and silently, apparently quite unconscious of the bitter blast which is sweeping in from the sea with chilling force. Occasionally one or two women, with tearless faces … come from the village to know if anything has transpired regarding the fate of their loved ones, and then, with fixed stony countenances, the sight of which is far more moving than any violent outbursts of passion would be, slowly return to their desolate homes. The appearance of the village itself indicates the presence of some overpowering calamity.

‘Few villages are more noisy or cheerful than those connected with collieries,’ he wrote with some journalistic licence, ‘but here a deep and solemn silence prevails. No children are at play, every door is shut, and the one or two little shops at which the inhabitants supply themselves are partially closed. Through the windows can be seen the clean bed, which is always remarkable in the cottage of the north-country pitman, while upon the table in front of the window, in almost every case, the breakfast things prepared for the prisoners on Thursday morning are still standing awaiting them.’

Hour by hour the reporter recorded the frenzied efforts and the false hopes. Someone had seen smoke rising – the trapped men must have made a fire and could feed themselves on the dead pit ponies. ‘Hope at last, thank God!’ Wemyss Reid wrote in his journal at midday. ‘Jowling’ had been heard, which was taken for a sign of life (it turned out later to be sounds of rock and water moving). ‘Helpful’ suggestions were coming in from across the country. A Mr Hill of Bristol had suggested boring a small hole through the debris in the shaft and pouring soup down it to the men. ‘Mr Hill and the others who propose this plan may rest assured that, had it been feasible, it would long ago have been attempted.’ At nine on Monday morning he reported that digging was going better than expected, and ‘another hour, or at the most two, must decide the dreadful fate of the 204 prisoners’. In Newcastle, some idiot in his newspaper’s circulation department had placards painted with the words ‘Glorious News At Last’.

The truth was that those who had survived the accident to the cage had been poisoned by ‘stythe’ or chokedamp – one of a variety of gases produced when hitherto buried coal was exposed to the atmosphere. Deep in their hearts, the wives and families of the missing miners, most of whom sat up all night in their cottages, began to realise that their menfolk were never to return alive. At the pithead, Wemyss Reid heard suspicions sweeping the crowd that the survivors of the accident had been gassed. At ten o’clock he wrote that ‘the very heart sickens and the hand palsies as we write these lines, and anticipate a dreadful conclusion to our long and painful watch’. At four on Tuesday morning – almost five whole days after the accident – ‘an incident of a truly appalling nature’ happened. A man had run to the platform at the pithead and shouted ‘All the men are alive. They’ve got the shaft clear. They’re all safe.’ No sooner had he screamed this than five of the rescuers were brought to the surface, having been gassed: it was now clear that any miner who had not been crushed had probably been asphyxiated. But the see-sawing of emotions continued. At seven in the morning, officials were said to be confident that the trapped miners could be rescued. At 11.30 on Wednesday, Wemyss Reid reported that one of the rescuers had found two axes, a saw and a back-protector belonging to the missing men. But on Wednesday afternoon a particularly bold group of rescuers forced their way into a hitherto unexplored area, a coal seam called The Yard. Here they found two bodies, and then, pushing on through the foul air, about fifty other bodies ‘strewn in all directions’. Many were badly swollen, indicating they had been dead for days. The next party of rescuers found more bodies ‘lying promiscuously side by side; but the boys of each family appeared to be clustered around their relatives’. Since they had food in their pockets, they could not have starved to death. It was small comfort. Now the business of the rescuers was to retrieve bodies, and leather slings were lowered into the pit. An official then decided that it was not worth risking more lives to recover the corpses. The decision confirmed what many had by now sadly accepted.

The shock was given on Thursday morning, when the dreadful news flew like lightning through the desolate village. Gradually, bit by bit, the noble fires of hope have sunk lower and lower in every heart; and it is only the last uncertain flickering flame that has now been quenched. With a dead silence the people heard the words which told them they were widows, orphans or childless. Job, in all his calamities, could not have been more resigned than they; and the audible ‘God help them all,’ muttered upon the platform, was the only comment the address called forth.

Later that day two brothers braved the gas, and returned to the surface, reporting they had found over 150 bodies. ‘There was a very bad smell, indeed, from the bodies. They had no appearance of having been starved; but all appeared just to have lain down and slept themselves to death. Only one or two seemed to have died hard; but it was quite discernible, from the appearance of all, that they had been dead some time.’

The entire country was now transfixed. Coal was the nation’s special gift from God: however much imperial painters and writers preferred to claim otherwise. Thomas Jones Barker began work on a painting about the country’s mission in the year of the disaster. It showed Queen Victoria handing a Bible to a fawning, kneeling African potentate, as her frock-coated prime minister and Foreign Secretary looked on. Those who really knew how things worked understood this was a fable: the true secret of England’s greatness was the power unleashed by coal.

This filthy rock had performed an act of magic upon a set of islands of undistinguished size in the North Atlantic. It had liberated the country’s scientific and technological potential. It had enabled the people living there to make objects the rest of the world wanted. That very year, the world’s biggest warship, HMS Warrior, was deployed at sea. As well as her three masts, she was powered by ten coal-fired boilers and clad in coal-smelted wrought iron. Coal had produced the gas which provided the illumination for the Great Exhibition and there was hardly a town in the land without gas lighting. Coal would soon drive the generators to make electricity. It was the source of England’s power.

At about two that January afternoon in 1862, a telegram had reached the rescuers in Northumberland. It had been sent from Queen Victoria in her ostentatious retreat at Osborne, on the Isle of Wight. ‘The Queen is most anxious to hear that there are hopes of saving the poor people in the colliery, for whom her heart bleeds,’ it read. In truth, there was now no hope. But the rescuers sent a message back that there was a faint chance that perhaps some of the men might be rescued. That evening they faced reality and sent a further telegram, with the news that over a hundred men had been found dead and there was no hope of discovering anyone alive. Miners continued to try to burrow down the blocked shaft, but, Wemyss Reid thought, with less enthusiasm, now that they knew they were only in the business of recovering bodies. The anxious crowds of wives and children at the pithead started to melt away.

The gas in the mine affected the rescuers in a variety of ways. Many passed out. One came up seeming to be raging drunk, offering to fight anyone. By Thursday, though, there was another problem. The stench of decomposition was so bad that men coming to the surface after their two-hour shift underground were violently sick. All the colliery carpenters in the area were assigned to the task of building coffins. It was decided to put the bodies into the coffins before they were brought to the surface.

That night, Wemyss Reid noted that ‘dreadful scenes are occurring. Fathers coming to the shaft, almost frantic, to seek their children, wives wailing for their husbands, and sons for their parents. It is a most painful scene.’4 Soon the women had disappeared and that night some of the men on the surface became ‘wickedly unreasonable’. One man, who had four sons lying dead in the pit, clambered onto the platform. ‘Grief had completely unhinged his intellect,’ the reporter noted, and ‘had he not been restrained, he would undoubtedly have thrown himself headlong down the shaft’.5

There was now a sharp disagreement between those organising the retrieval of corpses and some relatives of the dead. Many of the bodies – especially those of boys who had died – were unrecognisable except by their clothes, yet many of the families wanted to see the dead with their own eyes. It was agreed, eventually, that the coffins would be brought to the surface with their lids only lightly secured, so that those who wanted to look inside could prise them open and do so.

Conditions in the shaft were now appalling. Every time there was another fall of debris, a terrible stench of decomposition was blown into the faces of those making their way down. Everyone knew that, with no pump working, the water level inside the mine was rising all the time and that soon recovery work would have to stop.

By now, visitors from further afield had flocked to the scene of the tragedy, each train disgorging more crowds of sightseers, though miners prevented them jostling too close to the shaft and getting in the way. Men selling hot pies plied their trade among the crowds. The Bishop of Durham and the mayor of Newcastle arrived, the bishop going from door to door offering what spiritual succour he could to the bereaved. He was later followed by ‘men of different creeds and classes, for once bound together by the common bond of charity’. At eight on the Thursday evening the rescue committee calculated that the accident had created 103 widows and left 257 children and 47 dependent adults with no means of support. The local vicar decided there was not enough room in the church graveyard to bury the dead and asked the Duke of Northumberland for more land. It was decided to set up a relief fund, with a public meeting in Newcastle at the weekend.

The crowd at the pithead had thinned out, though people still came who had travelled great distances. Mining was an industry which attracted immigrants from across the country, prepared to descend into the depths of the earth for the sake of decent wages, so the effects of the tragedy were unconfined. ‘An old man named Yule came here from Glasgow and found that he was childless,’ wrote Wemyss Reid. ‘Today we have seen wives and mothers, daughters and sisters wend their weary way here, from all parts and receive sentence of bereavement.’6 On Friday the men from The Times, the Morning Chronicle and the Mining Journal arrived, along with a couple of artists from the Illustrated London News. They were in time to see horse-drawn carts deliver the first of the 200 black coffins that had been ordered. Along with barrels of chloride of lime, a hundred pairs of long-armed gloves were stockpiled at the head of the shaft for the men who would have to bring up the remaining corpses. On Saturday, the final effort to recover the bodies began in earnest. A chartered train arrived, carrying nothing but coffins. Bodies were brought up by the same improvised winch which had been lowering the rescuers. The men who were expected to ride to the surface with the human remains were given tots of whisky to help them cope with their grisly task.

As the end of the rope drew near the surface, one of the men was seen riding upon the little sling on which the sinkers have so fearlessly ascended and descended. Just below him, carefully attached to an iron chain, was a strange and hideous object which at first we could not recognise. In a moment however, we saw that it was the stiffened form of one of the victims of the carbonic-oxide that was dangling in mid-air before us. In a moment he was landed upon the platform. It was dreadful to look upon his skinny, attenuated form, which seemed so small beside the gigantic men around, his fleshless hands curiously marked in white and blue, and his fixed, immobile features, the closed eyes of which denoted that he had slept even while treading the valley of the shadow of Death. He was thrown down upon an open shroud, spread upon the ground, and while he was being rapidly rolled up in it, someone called out his name, which was methodically entered in a book by one man, whilst another chalked it on the lid of the coffin into which he was forthwith lifted. Thus laden, the coffin was placed upon a small trolley, and pushed along the wooden bridge separating one portion of the pit-heap from another. At the further end, the name inscribed upon the coffin was called out; someone stepped forward from amongst the dense crowd of waiters, and claiming the body as that of a relative, it was placed in a cart and conveyed to the home it left in health and strength some ten days ago … Men and boys of all sizes and ages were brought up to the surface. Some had died with a smile upon their faces, others frowning in terror or anger. There were strong men of gigantic mould, still apparently engaged in a deadly struggle with the last adversary; and there were children – weak and helpless, early doomed to toil in everlasting darkness – clasped in the arms of loving fathers, who, even in their own extremity, remembered those whom they had begotten. One after another they were dragged forth from the huge charnel-house below; and as hour by hour in unending succession they were brought forth, it seemed as if some unholy, premature resurrection were going on.7

This miserable work continued throughout the night, with the area around the top of the shaft lit by flickering torches, and the gruesome task of identification largely carried out by Mark Bell, a boy of about fourteen, whose role at the pit had been to collect the identity ‘tallies’ handed in by the men as they went down to begin work. Once the victim’s name had been scrawled on the lid of the coffin, Robert Turnbull, the miners’ leader – a man with dark ringlets and enormous shaggy beard – shouted it out, so that the body might be claimed by the family and carried away on a horse-drawn cart to the miner’s cottage. Those bodies which could not be identified were stacked in their coffins in a makeshift morgue inside the Methodist chapel of the dreary village.

At four on Sunday morning, the last of the dead were brought to the surface. Now, the crowds of disaster tourists grew again. Throughout the morning they arrived by train, trap and cab, gawping at the wreckage, and then peering through any open cottage doors at the grieving families inside. At midday on the sloping side of one of the spoil heaps, half a dozen clergymen conducted a service for the crowd. Before the prayers a letter from Sir Charles Phipps, one of the queen’s equerries, was read out. Her Majesty hoped that as much as possible would be done for the families of the dead, and would like to make a contribution herself. At one-thirty, the funeral of the dead miners began. Wemyss Reid believed that no one had ever before witnessed such a spectacle. He was probably right – there had not been a loss of life on this scale in Britain since the Battle of Culloden in 1745. The side of the slag heap nearest the station was so covered in people that it looked vaguely like a fairground or racecourse, with stalls selling tea and food. Outside the miners’ cottages ‘a cart seemed standing at almost every door, and was surrounded by a few men decently attired in mourning’. Wemyss Reid noted that a large number of the mourners were fellow miners, many of them ‘attired in the showy garments which this class so much affects, velvet waistcoats and white feathers being very common articles of apparel’.8 Most of the carts carried a single coffin, though the reporter saw seven coffins brought out of a single cottage. At a very slow pace, the horses and carts, white sheets thrown over the coffins, plodded their way to the village of Earsdon, four miles away. The first coffins had arrived at St Alban’s Church before the last had left the pit village. It took until after dark to bury them all.

That afternoon, the men who had supervised the retrieval of the bodies opened the area around the top of the mineshaft to visitors. For a sixpenny donation to the relief fund, sightseers would be allowed up close and could even stare down the hole in the ground through which the bodies had been recovered.

The disaster had been on a larger scale than most mining accidents, but it was different only in magnitude. Think of a violent death – crushed, blown up, poisoned, gassed, incinerated, cut to pieces, even murdered – and it almost certainly happened in a mine somewhere beneath our feet. It was inevitable that the digging of coal would be political, for there were few other occupations in which the arbitrariness of fate could have such harsh consequences. The rich owned the rolling acres and the poor dug in the dark underneath them. Grubbing out the stuff that made their country function, the miners were out of sight and out of mind. But they were also beyond close control – they organised themselves and they educated each other, in anything from horticulture to power politics. The two greatest industrial confrontations of the twentieth century – the 1926 General Strike, and the miners’ strike of 1984–5 – were both about coal.

In the Hartley disaster of 1862, the grandest local toff, the Duke of Northumberland, honoured his word and gave land for the local churchyard to be extended to accommodate the miners’ graves. (The duke could afford it – the family estate had grown to 19,200 acres, largely on the proceeds of coal royalties.) A small number of the dead were laid in single graves, others adjacent to family members under stones recording their deaths in the ‘fatal calamity’. Thirty-three of the victims, many unidentified, were buried in a communal grave. Today, the graveyard extension is as overgrown with ivy and nettles as the rest of the cemetery. In one corner of the graveyard is an obelisk stained green by the lichen growing in the shade of the slatternly sycamores which have invaded the place. On the memorial’s sides you can make out the names of the dead, ranging in age from ten to seventy-one, among them eight members of the Liddle family, including seven children and teenagers. Beneath the green mould on the memorial, you can just make out the words from St Matthew’s Gospel chiselled into the stone, ‘THEREFORE BE YE ALSO READY: FOR IN SUCH AN HOUR AS YE THINK NOT, THE SON OF MAN COMETH’, along with St Paul’s stern warning that ‘GOD IS NOT MOCKED; FOR WHATSOEVER THOU SOWETH, THAT ALSO SHALL YE REAP’. Victorian religious practice seems as unforgiving as the backbreaking daily labour of the time. The stonemasons might as well have opened the King James Bible and carved ‘to those who hath, to him shall be given: and from he that hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath’. The men who died in the Hartley disaster had been the poor of the earth, who fed themselves by burrowing underground for other men.

By the end of April 1862, the public relief fund to support the bereaved had gathered £75,000 (equivalent to perhaps £10 million at current values). But the greatest consequence of the disaster was a change in the law. Had there been more than one shaft, the airway might not have been completely blocked and the men – or some of them – might have escaped. The safety benefits of having more than one shaft had been pointed out over twenty years beforehand, but the suggestion had not been acted upon, since it doubled the cost of getting down to the coal. Now, at the inquest into the men’s deaths, the jury added a rider to their verdict that ‘all working collieries have at least a second shaft or outlet’. Even mine-owners now supported the idea, and a law was passed making it compulsory for all pits to have at least two entrances: it is noticeable how many safety precautions in mining only came about when legislation compelled the mine-owners to introduce them. Wemyss Reid went on to something of a stellar career in journalism and publishing: by twenty-eight he had become editor of the Leeds Mercury, and after moving to London established a reputation for scoops about the inner workings of the Liberal Party, of which he was an active member. In due course, a grateful Lord Rosebery recommended him for one of the first journalistic knighthoods, and he duly developed into a pompous bore, dying of pleurisy in 1905. The Hartley mine itself was abandoned and later rented to another company, which in 1900 pumped the water out of the main seam and discovered the mining gear and coal tubs exactly as they had been left thirty-eight years earlier.

We have become unaccustomed to hearing of long-gone mining disasters. But coal was bought with human life wherever it was mined. There had been numerous other fatal accidents in the coalfields before the Hartley tragedy, and within five years of it happening, 361 men and boys were killed in explosions at The Oaks Colliery near Barnsley, the biggest single loss of life in an English mine. There was a melancholy pattern of behaviour at these disasters. The initial shock spread through the little communities like an electric charge, with anxious wives and families rushing to the pithead, or as close as they were allowed, everyone wondering whether their husband, son or neighbour, was alive or dead, or perhaps gasping, bleeding, or drowning somewhere beneath their feet, then the arrival of other miners, grim-faced and resolute, who had volunteered as rescuers, then the food which appeared from nowhere to feed the rescuers, the silence which fell upon everyone as bodies were recovered, ‘Abide With Me’ sung at the subsequent church services and the many appeals launched by men in dark suits and mayoral chains.

In modern times, the most horrifying of British mining tragedies occurred not underground but in a school, when a South Wales spoil tip slid downhill and engulfed Pantglas junior school in Aberfan in October 1966; 116 children, most aged between seven and ten, along with twenty-eight adults, were killed that morning. It surely could not get any worse. By then, coal-mining in Britain was in what turned out to be terminal decline and there is something horribly apposite in the fact that the most recent victims of a great disaster were killed not by coal but by what is left after coal has been mined. Only a fool would say that there will never be another mining-related catastrophe in Britain. But since it became unfashionable to deep-mine for coal, the country has outsourced its production, and the attendant pain usually occurs somewhere else, too. It may be in Colombia, Australia, India or somewhere else out of earshot. But for sure, someone is crying somewhere.

Go to Aberfan today and the site of the school is a Garden of Remembrance. The children’s graves are well kept in the village cemetery. The old coal-yard is a site for commuter homes: today’s valley-dwellers do not have to walk to work. The name Aberfan perhaps rings an unhappy echo in the memory of old people, but soon the dead children will be as forgotten as William and George Fairbairn, young and old George Sharp and the three Wanless brothers, aged from fourteen to twenty who died in the Hartley disaster in 1862. In 1976, over a century after that catastrophe, a small memorial garden was opened around the capped top of the old shaft from which the bodies of the dead men had been retrieved, by the then president of the miners’ union, Joe Gormley. It takes an extraordinary effort of will to make a connection between the verdant grass, geraniums and benches and the 204 men and boys who died. Perhaps it was easier to make the imaginative leap thirty or forty years ago.

Such is the story of coal: go to an old mining village and the chances are that you won’t even see the spoil heaps, let alone the winding gear. Time moves on and the things we understand change. It sometimes seems that all that really remains of an occupation which employed well over a million men are thoughtless clichés – people ‘dig down’ to ‘mine’ information, yielding a ‘seam’ of meaning. To get there may involve ‘labouring at the coalface’. It is dead language, but we understand it. There are vaguely remembered tales of great-uncles who sat in tin baths scrubbing themselves clean in a cottage kitchen, and pit ponies which lived all their working lives underground.* But it had only been in 1842, when legislation made it illegal to employ women and children underground, that ponies became widely popular as beasts of burden. A bizarre device – a small oxygen cylinder mounted on a cage and intended to revive canaries which had succumbed to gas when taken down a mine – is occasionally shown to mesmerised children at a science museum in Manchester to show them how miners assessed the quality of the air underground. But the coal merchant, his flatbed truck piled with dirty jute sacks of coal, belongs only in period dramas. Most city-dwellers are unable to identify the acrid smell of coal smoke.

* The precise number of ponies working in the mines is unknown. When the mines were nationalised, in 1947, the Coal Board inherited 21,000 pit ponies. Most ponies chosen for pit work were under eleven hands tall, and some colliery proprietors became rather proud of their breeding programmes: Lord Londonderry maintained his own stud in the Shetlands. While it is true that once lowered into the mine many ponies rarely emerged into the air, stabled underground, they were generally well fed: a familiar complaint from the miners was that the owners cared more for their ponies than for their humans. A 1911 law required them to be at least four years old, and generally worked with the same handler. The last pit pony, Tony, died in 2011 at the age of forty. The story that they all went blind is untrue.

Introduction

The importance of this black rock cannot be exaggerated. Anything that might be alloyed, armoured, baked, boiled, bolted, brewed, built, canned, caulked, coked, cooked, corrugated, dried, dyed, electrified, fired, forged, fried, frozen, galvanised, gilded, hammered, hasped, illuminated, melted, printed, processed, pulverised, riveted, roasted, salted, scorched, serrated, sharpened, smelted, sugared, tanned, tempered, threshed, tinned, toasted, varnished or welded – to say nothing of countless other processes – depended upon coal. It was midwife to practical genius and without it, we should have nothing much for which to praise the Victorians. Britain dug out its coal more efficiently than anywhere else in Europe, and in time the country has paid the price for its ingenuity and ruthlessness. No one cares about coal any more: the cry now is ‘down with fossil fuels’ – and nothing is more packed with fossils than a sedimentary rock like coal. Even if you are lucky enough to find the fossils of ferns,