Thirteen children among 68 killed in pit disaster
(Page 2)
A SKETCH of the Moorfield Pit shortly after the explosion
The explosion occurred on the morning of Wednesday 7th November at the Moorfield pit, between Accrington and Clayton-le-Moors. The disaster caused the deaths of sixty eight men and boys and seriously injured thirty nine. It was one of two pits owned and worked by the Mr. Alderman Barlow for the Altham Colliery Company.
The second pit, the Whinney Hill, had been in operation for twelve years but the Moorfield colliery had been in operation only two and a half years and was sunk to 293 yards to a coal seam which was from 24 to 26 inches thick. The pit had been sunk on the most up to date principles; there was one shaft that had two main drifts, one to the east on an incline and one to the north on a decline. The main chainway was in the east section and extended about 180 yards and coal was wound by double cages which brought eight tubs to the surface at once.
The pits were worked with safety lamps and there were variable quantities of gas produced in the mines. There were three firemen employed in Moorfield pit and they went to work as usual on the morning of the explosion at 5 a.m. They found nothing unusual; between six and seven about 111 men and boys descended the pit and proceeded to their work in the workings. The manager of the colliery, Mr. Thomas Macintosh, was in the habit of going down the pit at 6.30 a.m. with the last of the miners to go down on the day shift, but on the morning of the explosion he was a little late and he only got down about seven a.m. and from the evidence of the hooker-on given at the inquest, he and the fireman went straight to the No.1 level. On his return to the pit bottom, he heard the alarm in the No.2 level but there was no reason to suppose that he saw any gas.
The explosion took place at 8.50 a.m. and fortunately the workers at the surface were a short distance away at the time, emptying wagons into boats on the Leeds Liverpool canal which ran besides the colliery. The report was described as a loud report and a sustained rumbling was felt that blew out all the lamps and rolled along the floor. At the time of the explosion the cage was sixty yards from the top and the other a similar distance from the bottom. The top cage was not damaged but the bottom one was stopped and blown back. One part of it left the conductors, tore up the framework and became firmly embedded in the shaft.
News of the explosion was carried to the Whinney Hill pit and since the Moorfield shaft was blocked this was the only way that the miners had to escape. The hookers on at the bottom of the shaft soon ascended and parties were made up to explore the mine. The recovery of the dead and the living was started.
Among the dead where the manager Mr. Thomas Macintosh. The explosion was a very violent one and many of the bodies were unrecognisable but most of the causes of death were from burning and suffocation.
The exploring party continued work until one o’clock on Thursday morning by which time 21 bodies had been recovered from the Moorfield pit and eighteen from Whinney Hill. The cause was thought to be a large blower of gas that was ignited by passing through the gauze of a Davy safety lamp. There were no naked lights allowed in the mine and there was a lamp station at the bottom of the downcast shaft.
The fireman went down the pit at 5 a.m. to test for gas and to inspect the workings. They found nothing wrong and allowed the men to go down between 6 and 6.30 a.m. About 8 a.m. the firemen were on their way up the pit for breakfast and to enter their reports in the report book and an assistant fireman was left down the pit.
The manager was in the habit of going down the pit at 6.30 a.m. with the last of the miners to go down on the day shift, but on the morning of the explosion he was a little late he only got down about 7 a.m. and from the evidence of the hooker-on, he and the fireman went straight to the No.1 level. On his return to the pit bottom, he heard the alarm in the No.2 level but there was no reason to suppose that he saw any gas. The boy, William Smales who brought the news of the gas to the shaft, escaped with his life but was burnt in the disaster. He had been working in the No.2 level and had been as far as the slants three times that morning but there was no gas but then he had seen a drawer coming through the slant with gas flaming in his lamp and it blazed in his own lamp.
Tim Yates, a collier working in the No.2 level, said his place was filling with gas and he was running about telling the men to get out. John Mann came and saw the gas which filled his lamp and he could not put it out. Many of the men took his advice and ten or twelve persons were soon at the bottom of the slant, some went to the shaft and some went to warn others in the workings. Stephen Clough came down in the dark and gave the boy Smales a ride out on a sledge. Having gone about one hundred yards on the level they met the assistant fireman Mr. T. Macintosh, who told them to hold on a minute while he tested for gas. At first there was a little and then it jumped in his lamp.
Mackintosh returned to warn others and was lost in the explosion. Smales went to the shaft and gave the alarm there. As they were waiting to get into the cage at the bottom of the shaft, a boy came along the No.2 level to tell John Rushton, one of the firemen, that he was wanted as there was gas in his part of the workings. Ruction’s first thought was that someone had left a door open and at once went down tee jig-brow. The manager, Thomas Macintosh, heard the word ‘gas’ and went to the No.2 district, by the travelling road. Neither of these two men returned alive. Peter Broadley, another of the firemen, also went into the workings to see if his district was affected. Meanwhile, the men and boys, who had seen the gas in their lamps, came hurrying to the shaft bottom, some of them without their clothes and demanded that the hooker-on should take them up the pit at once. The hooker-on had five tubs in the cage and there were three more to complete the load and would not consent to the men going up but told them that they would have to wait for the empty cage to come down. There was some delay in getting the cage away from the bottom of the pit because of the alarm and a quarter of an hour elapsed before the cage was signalled off.
By that time it was 8.15 a.m. and thirty three persons were at the bottom of the shaft. At least one of whom had asked to ride with the tubs but was refused. Some had taken up good positions so that they could get into the cage as soon as it descended. The cage had not run far from the bottom of the shaft when the blast of the explosion came from the jig-brow, sweeping partly into the No.1 level and partly towards the shaft. It tore into the people who were waiting there to ascend the pit and swept on up the shaft. The cages were blocked in the shaft and the landing platform at the surface was forced up, the plates at the top stopping ingress and egress.
The workings at the Moorfield pit were connected by air-ways and an engine-brow one thousand two hundred yards long with the Whinney Hill pit which was the downcast pit. The blast of the explosion was felt at Whinney Hill and the head fireman, William Hope, knew that something was wrong. The assistant manager of Whinney Hill, Mr James Macintosh, happened to be in the pit at the time and went to the aid of the men in the Moorfield pit. He checked the state of the return air coming from Moorfield to see that the ventilation furnace was in full operation. He then went down the engine-plane, which he could do in fresh air, as the upper part was ventilated from Whinney Hill and only the lower part was ventilated by air from Moorfield.
After they had gone some distance, they met firedamp and had to return. The ventilation was adjusted so that Whinney Hill was supplying more air and they tried again. This improved the air and they were able to go forward. About one hundred yards from Moorfield they were met by some of the injured men coming out of the Moorfield pit in the dark. These men were attended to by a following party and taken out of the pit. Macintosh arrived safely at the bottom of the Moorfield shaft with William Hope following him. They found that the explosion had blown out all the lights and that every person at the shaft bottom was burned, being either dead or injured. Most had been injured partly by the afterdamp and partly by dense smoke from a roll of smouldering brattice that had caught fire. Fresh air was now coming down the shaft and they were given lights and the survivors that were able to travel were sent to Whinney Hill with the assistance of others. Macintosh resumed the search for more survivors. He found one of the double doors at the bottom of the engine-plane was blown towards Whinney Hill but the other door, which opened by sliding into a recess where it happened to be at the time of the explosion, was undamaged. This door was partly closed by the rescuers to send air into the inner workings in the hope that some might still be alive and to clear the air-way as a means of escape. They heard cries for help on the No.1 level and on investigating they found ten dead and some injured. Two men alive at the far end of the workings had felt a puff and waited until the afterdamp came, knowing that they were trapped. They went on up the jig-brow but found only bodies.
All the stoppings were blown out and the air was taking the nearest course to the upcast shaft. They put up tarpaulins and screens which took the fresh air along, so that they could go forward and found more of the dead including the body of the manager who had been leading a team that was investigating the reports of the gas before it fired. By 4 p.m. the Moorfield shaft had been repaired enough for the cages to be operated.
Mr. Morton Her Majesty’s Inspector of Mines, arrived and joined the explorers. Mr. Joseph Dickenson was at the Home Office when he got the telegram that informed him of the explosion and arrived at the colliery the morning after to find the first shift that had gone down, coming to the surface at 10 a.m. They had come with the sad news that one of the engineers Mr. J.F. Seddon had been thrown out of a conveyance and killed. The landing and the platforms at the pit head were still in disorder but this work was left to Mr. Macalpine who was attending to the problems at the surface. Mr. Joseph Dickenson joined the third shift with Mr. Morton and they were accompanied by Mr. P.W. Pickup who had been on the second shift and had just come out of the pit. They found that broken tubs had been cast to the side of the road by the rescue teams and a tramroad with trolleys had been constructed to transport men and materials to the workings.
Brick setters were rebuilding the stoppings and new air doors were being constructed. The return air from the workings contained a lot of firedamp and had to pass through the ventilating furnace. This was obviously a source of anxiety to the men down the pit who feared a second explosion.
The further the explorers went into the mine the more difficult it was to combat the gas and the firedamp stood like a wall until stoppings were built in the No.2 level. When this was done, the gas did not go down the return air-way but it came back and fired at their lamps and the exploring party had to withdraw. After two hours, the ventilation cleared the gas and a careful watch was kept on the furnace. The extinguishing of the furnace was considered but then there would be no ventilation so they decided to keep it going.
By Friday, two days after the explosion the main source of the firedamp was discovered. The roof had fallen in two places near a small fault and from the inner fall there was a noise like steam rushing through water. Gas was also coming from the fall at the other side of the fault. There was so much gas that the air could not dilute it and the exploring party had to leave.
On Saturday morning, the third day following the explosion, the Inspector and William Hope visited the far end of the No.2 level with Mr. John Higson, a mining engineer, who had been called in by the owner as a consultant. They tried to clear the gas from the main blower but it was too strong for the air. He approached in the dark, without a lamp, holding his breath ‘against suffocation’. The air was fouling the return air-way and that part of the workings where the rest of the bodies lay.
Work went on to restore the ventilation of the mine, shift after shift and by Sunday, the fourth morning of the rescue efforts, the last of the bodies were reached and brought out of the mine.
It was reported in the local papers that the local Relief Fund is making good progress and stood at over £5,000.
The Inquest
The inquest into the disaster was held by Mr. Henry Robinson, the Coroner for Lancashire. There were several sittings and much interest was shown in the proceedings. The jury returned the verdict to the effect that out of the sixty eight dead, forty three were burned and gassed, six burned, eighteen suffocated and one drowned in the sump and that the explosion was caused by a sudden blower of gas but they could not fix where or how the gas was ignited.
Joseph Dickenson, the Inspector, agreed with the verdict. He had seen the blower and it was still there weeks after the explosion before any decrease could be observed. In five weeks the noise slackened and in two months the noise ceased. Four months later on the 10th March when he visited the colliery the gas was humming off and had lodged in the gutter cavity which extended four yards above the coal.
The place where the blower occurred was on the inner cutting and that on the floor was a shovel which was charred but still had the fireman’s chalk marks on it showing, that he had visited the place on the morning of the explosion.
There was no one working at that place on the morning of the explosion but on the previous evening, a collier David Bradley, had driven across a small fault and before he left work he noticed that the place was making gas but there was no noise. He set timber to support the roof at the fault. The fact that he was not at work on the morning of the explosion had nothing to do with the gas. At the outside of his place the workings were thickly covered with dust but the inner workings were clean.
So many of those who could give useful information were dead and the fall at the place could have occurred before the explosion and interfered with the ventilation. Under the circumstances the hooker-on made a mistake in delaying the ascent of the cage but in justification, it was said that it was unusual for men to leave the pit early and he did not think there was any danger and what danger that might exist, he shared. He was one who was severely inured and he had seen the boy Smales, who brought the message go back into the pit with Rushton. They went to the top of the jig-brow to fetch his clothes. This took him about five minutes after which he took up a position where he could get into the cage.
With bore holes made into the seams and gas had been found in the Upper Mountain series and a large blower was encountered in this seam when Whinney Hill was mining it and when the shaft was sunk at the Hampton Valley colliery there was an extraordinary outburst of gas into the Whinney pit one thousand yards on the rise and gas was encountered some years afterwards at the sinking of the Moorfield shaft one and a half miles from the Whinney Hill colliery.
In December before the explosion at the Duckworth Hall pumping shaft a candle was lowered down the shaft to test for blackdamp. This had been done for some time and there had been no firedamp at the colliery for seven years, yet there was an explosion in the shaft.
It was known that firedamp will be forced through a Davy lamp and the Inspector recommended that the use of this type of lamp should be discontinued and replaced by the Marsault type lamp which gave off more light and had been found safe in explosive currents. The length of bratticing should be reduced by making more cut-throughs and the furnace was replaced by a ventilating fan.
The Inspector thought that the conduct of all concerned with this explosion although only such as occurs of these occasions is yet desiring mention:- “The great discipline shown by the crowd of men and boys who rushed from the gas without their clothes obeying the orders of the hooker-on at the bottom of the shaft the assistant fireman, when he saw the gas coming, staying to send his men out, the fireman at the shaft, on being told of the gas, going to assist the other fireman who went from the shaft to see if his workings were safe, the manager and the fireman at Whinney Hill in going to the rescue and the speed at which the wreck and gas were dealt with and the bodies cleared by the fourth morning.”
The Coroner summed up and the jury returned the following verdict:-
“That the deceased Thomas Mackintosh and others received certain injuries at Moorfield Pit Altham by an explosion of gas on the 7th November of which they died either in the pit or in their homes that the explosion was, in the opinion of the Jury, caused by a sudden outburst of gas but how it exploded there was not sufficient evidence to show.” |
