440 Men Died in This Pit. The Fine Was 5 Pence a Life.

Fourteenth of October, 1913. Beneath the village of Senghenydd in the South Wales valleys, the Universal Colliery drove two deep shafts into some of the most gaseous coal in Britain. The ventilation meant to sweep the firedamp clear had already been condemned, and the reversing gear that could have drawn the afterdamp back out of the workings was due to be fitted weeks before — and never was. That morning a spark met a cloud of coal dust, and the fire ran through the pit faster than any man could outrun it. The blast threw a two-ton cage up the Lancaster shaft like a cork. Four hundred and thirty-nine men and boys died below ground, and a rescuer above them, four hundred and forty in all. In a village of a few thousand, roughly one man in every eight was gone before the shift was out. It remains the worst mining disaster in British history, and the sixth worst the world has ever recorded. When the inquiry sat, it could not name the spark — but it named everything else that had been left wrong. The manager, Edward Shaw, was fined twenty-four pounds. The company that owned the pit was fined ten. Thirty-four pounds, set against four hundred and forty dead. A valley newspaper did the sum everyone else was already doing in their heads, and priced each life at roughly five and a half pence. This is the story of the shafts and the fan and the fire — the machinery built to bring those men home, the law that arrived too late to matter, and the fine that told a mining valley exactly what it had been worth. Watch next — The Deadliest Machine of the Mines: the winding engine that dropped a cage full of men down the shaft at Markham in 1973, and forced Britain to rebuild every winding engine in the country. Senghenydd got a £34 fine instead. #Senghenydd #MiningDisaster #WelshHistory #IndustrialHistory #BritishHistory