BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series edited by Alan Horne. It is focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alun, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire, Denbighshire and Cheshire. You can read about the background to Between Rivers in the Introduction.
In this edition we look at Gresford: The Anatomy of a Disaster by Stanley Williamson, published in 1999 by Liverpool University Press.
Stanley Williamson (1921-2010) was a BBC journalist who worked in the north-west of England during the period following the Second World War, mainly as a producer of radio programmes. He covered the Munich plane crash, in which a number of Manchester United footballers died, and wrote a book, The Munich Air Disaster: Captain Thrain’s Ordeal, in defence of the pilot. In retirement he wrote two historical studies. One was The Vaccination Controversy (2007), about the brief post-war vogue for compulsory vaccination. The other was Gresford. This is a remarkable work of near-contemporary historiography,
At about two o’clock in the morning on Saturday 22nd September 1934 a massive explosion destroyed the Dennis Section of Gresford colliery, near the village of that name, which lies on the outskirts of Wrexham in Denbighshire, close to the border with Cheshire and England. 256 men and boys who had been working underground were killed. More died during a poorly organised rescue attempt, and after an explosion on the surface.
Despite the high death toll, the Gresford explosion was only the 6th most lethal mining disaster in Britain between 1850 and 1950: the worst, at Senghenydd in South Wales in 1913, killed 439 people. Yet the disaster, and the acrimonious inquiry that followed it, marked a significant turning point in the safety of coal mining. In later years, only the disaster at the William Pit in Cumberland, where 104 men lost their lives in 1947, was of a comparable magnitude.
One of Williamson’s successes is his evocation of the working mine. He provides a two-dimensional map of the pit (below), with its obscure nomenclature, the coal faces known by numbers which appear to follow no system, so that one might travel via 20s District and 61s District to get to 109s. The map also shows the downcast shaft, down which air was drawn – a vital issue, as we shall see – and the upcast shaft, through which it returned. But Williamson makes it clear that this does no justice to the intricate three dimensional underground maze of the real pit, with the coal faces continually moving, following the seams of coal, the exhausted workings being abandoned or filled in, other passageways opened or adapted for ventilation or drainage, and mysterious little-visited parts of the mine of which a few colliers might have a vague memory. This world was roughly half a mile below the surface and extended for about two miles.
Plan of underground workings: the Main seam of the Dennis Section at Gresford Colliery, 21 September 1934.
In what is perhaps a high-risk strategy, Williamson puts the explosion itself right at the start of his book, and we get a vivid picture of the situation some of the colliers found themselves in just outside the Dennis Section:
The blast and the gust of air had been felt at the pit bottom. Edward Williams, the attendant of the haulage engine for the Dennis Section, who had just left his cabin to try to discover why the haulage had stopped for longer than usual, heard a distant rumbling: “It came nearer until it was like thunder, and a big bang, and then the place was all black – you couldn’t see anything”.
Some way along the haulage road Isaac Williams, a young lad, was ‘minding slaughters’ – watching for derailed tubs. As the deafening bang from the depths of the pit reached the refuge hole where he was sitting a whirlwind lifted dense clouds of dust that obscured both of his lamps. A few minutes later it began to subside and he reached for his scarf, poured water over it and wrapped it round his face to prevent himself from suffocating.
Henry Tomlinson, a rope-splicer, had been signing reports in a cabin. Rushing out at the sound of the explosion he found several men apparently amused by the state of their faces and clothing and did his best, with some success, to wipe their smiles away. Telephoning the Dennis Section and getting no reply he crossed over by way of some ventilating doors to collect stretchers from the return airway. It was filled with thick fumes and dust.
The night overman thought at first that the noise had been caused by one of the cages dropping out of control. As soon as the dust had subsided he telephoned the surface with an urgent message to the manager and under manager: “Something’s happened down the Dennis – I think it’s fired”…
Miners inside the Dennis Section who had not been immediately affected by the blast discussed what to do. The risk of carbon monoxide poisoning meant that they had to get out quickly. A collier recalled a little-used route with ventilation doors which might be viable. Six men set off on this route and called to the others to follow closely, but when they looked back, they could see no-one. They pressed on:
Between the men and their objective there was a series of faults forming steps to a height of 20 feet, which had to be negotiated by a set of ladders. The party had three lamps which had not been extinguished but the road was long, and narrow in places, and they had not travelled it before. The journey was later described by John Samuel:
We put the deputy, David Jones, down on his hands and knees and Fisher took the lead. We kept wafting these bits of rag and our caps and things around our faces. It was very hot, and a lot of gas there. We carried on until we came to a slight bend in the road, and David Jones said something about being done, but I said ‘stick it’, and we kept carrying on until we came to the bottom of the ladders. The going had been heavy and it was hot, and David Jones again said he was done. Fisher and Challoner had started up the ladder by this time, and I said to my brother “take your time, don’t be in a hurry. We won’t leave Dai here”. We got him to the foot of the ladder, and he got his hands on the rungs, and I got my shoulder underneath him and pushed him up. As we were going up the ladder he seemed to revive and the air was clearer.
On reaching the top of the ladder they were able to make better progress although one or two of the weaker men fell behind from time to time and Samuel had to stop and help them. At last, as they were approaching a junction there came “a big gust of wind”.
I said, “thank God, they’ve reversed the wind. We’re all right now”. We continued out against the wind along this junction road, and we came to a man who was dead, and then we carried on a bit further and I heard my brother shout, “we’re by the Clutch”. So I was alright then, I knew where I was.
These six were the only men to come out of the Dennis Section alive.
Rescue teams assembled. Miscommunication resulted in one team going into an area full of carbon monoxide – what the miners called ‘afterdamp’ – produced by the explosion:
There was a high concentration of gas which killed a canary at once but they pressed on, Williams, the captain, first and the others following at 20 yard intervals. After about 120 yards they found that the roof of the airway, which was supposed to be a route for men to travel, had sagged and the walls had caved in, leaving a space which the captain estimated at 3 feet high by three feet wide. Soon afterwards, crawling on hands and knees, he saw that further progress was out of the question; it was equally impossible to turn round in the confined space with his apparatus on so he worked his way backwards to the wider section. Gathering his men together and risking a dose of lethal gas he pulled aside the mouthpiece of his breathing apparatus and told them what the conditions were like and that they must retire.
But the breathing apparatus turned out to be faulty, and only one of these men survived the return journey.
Later, firefighting teams entered the pit:
When the Llay Main team [from a neighbouring colliery] reported for duty again at 5:00 AM on Sunday they found the main fire fighting force nearing the entrance to 29s junction which was blocked by one huge fall, with the fire still smouldering under it. After an hour’s work the entrance was revealed.
What a sight! The whole of the level is just one mass of flame, the coal sides of the roadway burning in one white mass, and the more stones we moved to one side, the more air we put on the flames, and the fire roaring away.
Soon, firefighters and rescue teams were withdrawn due to a fear of further explosion. This was well advised.
The immediate need was to cut off the supply of air from above that was feeding the flames. On Sunday evening, before the rescue parties were finally withdrawn, discussion took place on the advisability of trying to seal off the main roadways underground, but apart from the risk to the men who would have to do the work, analyses of the atmosphere in the main airway revealed as much as six-and-a-half per cent of gas and it was thought doubtful that seals of sufficient strength could be built underground to withstand further explosions. A decision was therefore taken to seal the shafts at the pit top and this work was completed during the early hours of Monday. On Tuesday the worst fears expressed about conditions in the pit were realised when, at about 1.30 p.m., violent explosions blew the seal off the Dennis shaft, sending out volumes of dense smoke and scattering debris which killed a surface worker some distance away. After yet another explosion at midnight more effective seals were built.
It became clear that no further survivors would emerge from the pit, and that even attempts to retrieve the dead might be long delayed.
Having described the terrible events of that night, Williamson goes back to survey the state of the pit and the industry at that time. How might the explosion have come about? There is less drama here, but it is an absorbing story. By the 1930s the British coal industry faced declining demand, notably after most shipping moved onto oil-fired engines. The usual response was to push for increased production, flooding an already declining market. In the drive for production, safety could easily be neglected. Officials known as firemen had for many years been responsible for safety, but now they were also put in charge of output, a clear conflict. Mechanization meant that the coal, previously cut by hand, was brought down by firing ‘shots’ – explosive charges – and precautions against igniting flammable gases when shot-firing were often ignored. In addition, the coalfield in North Wales still retained the butty or chartermaster system, whereby a subcontractor – the chartermaster – would agree to get the coal out for a set sum, and would hire miners to do the work: chartermasters had a reputation as bullies, with scant regard for safety.
This coalfield was also especially prone to explosions. Williamson explains the issue:
Coal gives off gas, known to miners as ‘firedamp’. Firedamp consists chiefly of carburetted hydrogen, also commonly known as methane, or marsh gas. When mixed with pure air in the proportion of not less than 5 per cent and not more than about 14 per cent it is explosive, the most dangerous level being about 10 per cent. Some coal seams produced more firedamp than others, and generally speaking the deeper the mine the greater will be the quantity of firedamp, which may be given off at great pressure. R.L. Galloway, the analyst of the coal industry, tells of a newly-sunk pit in North Wales which he does not identify in which ‘the noise made by the gas issuing from… the coal was so loud as to prevent men hearing each other speak’.
The mines of North-East Wales were especially prone to firedamp. (‘Damp’ in this context does not connote moisture but relates to the German word for vapour: Dampf.) Good ventilation was essential, and the later inquiry dwelt on a poorly-ventilated area of the mine known as 14s, the most likely seat of the explosion. But there was something else:
Once an explosive mixture had been ignited at any point, …the flame would spread in all directions through the explosive gas, gathering strength as it went, and raising a cloud of dust because of the strong wind it made. Coal dust in a pile is difficult to ignite because there is not enough air in it, ‘but if it is blown into a cloud so that it mixes with air, then it can be made to explode like a gas’. The explosion, begun in the gas by some cause or other, now has another explosive substance to feed on, becoming infinitely more violent, reaching more parts of the mine, setting fire to anything that will burn, and releasing great quantities of carbon monoxide, or afterdamp, which kills almost instantly anything left alive by the explosion.
Here was the explanation of the calamities which had struck so many mines with such grievous loss of life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Not all mines produce equal quantities of firedamp – in some coal fields it does not occur at all – but even a moderately ‘fiery’ mine, in the official phrase, could be turned into a raging furnace by coal dust, which would be manufactured in larger and larger amounts as machines took over from hands the job of prizing loose and transporting the coal.
Spreading inert stone dust came to be the standard method of combatting this risk, and the inquiry also questioned whether this had been correctly done at Gresford.
Williamson devotes the later chapters of the book to the inquiry carried out by the Inspectorate of Mines and chaired by the Chief Inspector, Sir Henry Walker. It opened just over a month after the disaster, and the final reports were discussed in Parliament in 1937, a very long time it was thought then, although to us it might seem rather speedy. The inquiry was extremely acrimonious, partly because the miners blamed the Inspectorate itself for failing to enforce safety standards. The North Wales Miners’ Association engaged their own counsel, separate from the national Miners’ Federation, and this was Sir Stafford Cripps, the barrister and Labour M.P. Cripps was well on his way to being expelled by the party because of his advocacy of a ‘Popular Front’ with the Communists; despite this he later held senior posts during Churchill’s wartime government, including ambassador to the U.S.S.R., and following readmission to the Labour Party he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Atlee’s postwar administration. Cripps was a brilliant and extremely combative advocate. Throughout the inquiry he constantly returned to the theme that private ownership of the mines forced the owners to pursue profit at the expense of safety, and Williamson sees him as establishing at Gresford a key part of the argument which led to the coal industry being taken into public ownership in 1947.
The manager of the colliery, William Bonsall, appears as a pathetic, even tragic figure in the inquiry, the fall guy in a system where the owners could appoint a manager and leave to him the responsibility for any mishap:
The early stages of his examination were pure frustration for everyone. He seemed incapable of grasping what was said to him or giving a coherent answer to a question or even reading a plan of his own pit which was put in front of him so that he could identify significant features.
It is likely that real control of the mine lay elsewhere:
It was commonly said in Wrexham that Gresford was controlled not by the manager but by the owners, especially Henry Dyke Dennis, described by one who had dealings with him as ‘a very powerful man’. It was alleged that when a deputation from Hafod Colliery, by no means a timorous band of men, needed to see him they would take a minister of religion with them.
At the time of the inquiry, Dyke Dennis presented himself to the Press as ‘an old man, leaning on a walking stick’. He largely escaped scrutiny.
There was little agreement about the conclusions of the inquiry. The Chief Inspector of Mines was supposed to have two ‘assessors’, one representing the owners and one the miners. When the Chief Inspector published his report, both assessors produced rival reports, reflecting the interests they represented. Assorted charges were levelled and dropped. In the end, the manager and the company were fined a total of £140, with £350 costs, for failing to keep correct records. This was the only legal action taken to hold anyone responsible for the disaster.
For the local community, the issue at first was not only the loss of life but also the penury into which many were suddenly thrust: there were said to be 200 women widowed and 800 children who lost their father. Extremely generous and spontaneous donations were collected nationwide – this outpouring of concern and perhaps collective guilt was a repeated occurrence after mining disasters – but this led to much ill-feeling: money often given with express instruction that it go straight to the families of the dead was doled out with a pernickety insistence that no-one should be financially better off as a result of their bereavement. The mine was also closed for a long period, throwing out of work the colliers who had not been on shift that night. Williamson lists the communities from which the dead came. They were spread over a surprising distance along the local railway network, as far as Ruabon and Acrefair, about ten miles away.
But as the inquiry progressed, attention in the local community moved from the immediate personal and economic crises to the question of recovering the dead:
‘In its way… formal burial was as important to the inhabitants of a colliery village as to the Greeks of the Iliad.’ Bereavement caused by the Gresford disaster spread far beyond the confines of a single colliery village, but the response to it was no less strong and with the passage of time and the decline of hope, was intensified rather than diminished… Petitions bearing thousands of signatures expressed the general sense of outrage and resentment. ‘We, the undersigned Widows and Relatives of the entombed at the above Colliery,’ a typical one read, ‘Feel very strongly that every Possible effort should be made to recover the Bodies, Before Proceeding to Produce Coal at the Above Colliery.’
There was a public appeal for volunteers to enter the pit, and teams were assembled:
Proceeding by carefully worked out stages the rescue teams constructed an airlock of the top of the Martin shaft, then, wearing breathing apparatus, opened the seal which had been placed over the shaft shortly after the explosion, and finally ventured to the bottom… What they found there was later described to the miners’ annual conference at Rhyl by Joe Hall… The effects of the first explosion had stopped short some distance from the shaft bottom. The second explosion, following the withdrawal of the rescue workers, had produced, in Hall’s words, ‘for three hundred yards from the pit bottom… a state of things… no man could ever have seen. It was indescribable. Iron girders weighing many hundredweights were blown many yards, even heavy cutting machines were removed.’ The water, estimated at 20 to 25 million gallons, which had been pouring unchecked into the workings, was reckoned by the management to have submerged the whole area affected by the first explosion, although this was disputed by the miners.
Gradually, the affected communities began to realise that the bodies of the dead were probably beyond recovery. Certainly, they would not be recovered.
The unaffected part of Gresford colliery, the Slant Section, resumed production and continued until the 1970s. By then it was proving increasingly uneconomical, particularly because of geological faults that made it difficult to reach the remaining coal. Williamson provides a suitable epitaph:
Coal winding at Gresford ceased on 23 October 1973 and the colliery closed on 10 November. Some months were spent in bringing out of the pit everything worth salvaging. One set of pit head winding gear was left standing as a memorial to the mine and the disaster. Then, far below the farmland of Cheshire and Clwyd and the streets of Wrexham, the relentless pressures of the earth were left to destroy the Slant District, as they must long ago have crushed the deep recesses of the Dennis Section, the roads and conveyors, the scourings and headings, of 20s and 61s, 109s and 95s, 14s and 29s; leaving the men who died there on 22nd September 1934 to lie in the most impregnable of tombs.
To this there is a small coda, perhaps an emblem of fragile memory:
To accommodate the reconstruction of the main road from Wrexham to Chester, now carried on a flyover, the pit-head gear, which stood in the way, was dismantled, and a smaller memorial, consisting of a single wheel resting on plinth, was erected to one side on an unobtrusive site screened by trees.
This memorial is still in place and can be visited, beside a large road junction, close to Gresford Slag Heap or Wilderness Tip, the colliery spoil heap, now landscaped, a local viewpoint popular with trail bikers.
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By David Selzer