The Oaks Mine Christmas Disaster

by David A. Jacinto

December 12th, 1866,  began not unlike most winter days in the village of Hoyle Mill. Two weeks before Christmas, a foggy mist drifted through the valley and gripped the bitterly cold and wet morning. Enthusiasm for Christmas  was running high.  Most men and boys in the village had been putting in overtime at the Oaks Coal Mine south of Barnsley to make a little extra Christmas money. 

That morning, well before dawn,  the coal miners shared a final word over tea and crumpets, bangers and mash, or blood sausage, kissed their wives and mothers goodbye, gave each of the little ones a warm hug, and began the short walk from Hoyle Mill to the Oaks Colliery.

 On the darkened path, they were joined by the other collies, chatting, laughing, and sharing jokes in casual conversation. Passing through the gates and into the Oaks yard, they headed toward the cage to go down the shaft into the mine, just as they did every morning.

One by one, each cage lowered down the telescoping shaft, stopping periodically to deposit miners at various levels. Each disembarking level led into a vast web of interconnecting tunnels, smaller shafts and mining chambers. The last of the miners reached the bottom at a thousand feet below ground, where the cage door was pulled open for the final time. They stepped onto the rough-hewn floor of the landing in the faint light. This brotherhood of miners shared their final morning pleasantries, smiling, laughing, and even singing Christmas songs as they each lit their oil lamps and headed off into the various corners of the mine to dig their own graves where they would spend eternity.        

***

The first trembling upheaval arrived late that clear blue morning. The cruel whip of nature bringing a sudden crack of doom to the quiet tenor of innocence as the blast  fought its way to the surface. 

In his office, Thomas Diamond, the mine superintendent, jerked to attention with the thunderous roar of the explosion. He ran to the window to see a monstrous skyrocket of flames and smoke shoot up in every direction from the main entrance to the mine. Bricks disintegrated into powder. Great ascending clouds of chalk, coal, rock, earth, and debris spouted up into the sky and began to fall back in a “black bloody snow”. The hundred-year-old cage support beams went up like matchsticks in the blaze. It seemed the entire surface of the earth had been torn off, burying four hundred miners in the pit.

The massive tree in the yard had been uprooted, fat tendrils of roots rose up from the ground looking like an upside down tree. The fires pooled and strutted, flowing from structure to tree as smoke chased ash into the sky. The appetite for oxygen was such that leaves and branches were sucked into the flames and flashed their disappearance in an instant.

Mr. Diamond rushed out of his office into the wings of the hot breeze cutting through the cold morning. There was the sound of pandemonium. The smell of smoke and burning flesh. The taste of coal dust. Men yelling. The crackle of burning timbers. Moans of pain and screams of agony. Adrenaline pumping, Diamond leaped into the chaos, ignoring the smoke and flames, seemingly contemptuous of the danger. The main entrance to the mine that was supposed to lay before him was no more. The entire yard was unrecognizable. He had been through mining explosions before, but nothing like this. It looked like a war zone after a daylong cannon raid. 

Driven to a rush of heightened awareness, Diamond seemed to have a clear vision of just what needed to be done. He knew it was important not to lose his head—to take immediate but thoughtful, deliberate action, carefully planning the dangerous rescue of the men still down in the pit. 

With his right hand cupped over his eyes to see through the heavy smoke and debris drifting back to earth, he held a kerchief to his nose. He searched through the smoky haze to commandeer rescuers from the miners who were scurrying in all directions in terror. He called out and the men jumped at his orders, seemingly thankful to have someone take charge and tell them where to go and what to do.

Miners boiled up from the bowels of the mine and toward him, away from the blazing fires of burning colliery timbers. They reeled in shock and confusion, some calling out in agony, some held up by other men, some saying nothing at all. Wherever Diamond looked, torn and broken bodies and injured animals were shaking in the grip of death, while the uninjured tried in vain to comfort the dying. One miner walked toward Diamond, staring dull-eyed at him without a word. It took a moment to register, the man was near naked, his skin burnt grey.

     Over two days the rescue would continue in an attempt to save as many as possible from the firedamp explosions, and following afterdamp asphyxiation. Almost every man and boy from the surrounding villages over the age of ten had been down in that mine. There was not a single family in Hoyle Mill who had not lost someone. Three-hundred and eighty-four men and boys would die, including twenty-six rescuers in a blast on the second day of the rescue attempt. That blast would close down the mine forever, leaving most of the dead buried for eternity. For these miners' families, there would be no more caresses from a husband, kisses from a father, no more “I love you, Mam” from a son, no more childhood memories of a brother.  

The Oak's irresponsible operators and massively wealthy landowners who had not provided proper ventilation or other safety measures recommended by inspectors would not be held liable in any way. They would not even provide enough money to bury the dead, let alone provide for food, rent, or even survival of these destitute families. Thousands of  family members would  be left with no way to even keep warm during their cold winter nights of despair after the disaster.

The 1866 Oaks Mine Christmas disaster that killed 384 men and boys was not the first on this seam of coal. In the previous twenty years there had been over five-hundred other minors who had lost their lives. In 1845, six men and boys lost their lives from a firedamp explosion and afterdamp asphyxiation at the Oaks; in 1847, seventy-three men and boys were killed, again firedamp and afterdamp at the Oaks; in 1849 seventy-five at Darley Main on the same seam; in 1851, twelve more were killed at the Oaks, again for the same reason; in 1851, fifty-two were killed at Warnervale. In 1852, twelve more were killed at the Elsecar colliery, firedamp and afterdamp. In 1857, firedamp and afterdamp killed 189 men and boys on the adjacent Lundhill Colliery, and fifty-nine at Edmonds in 1862. 

These avoidable disasters all along this same seam of coal occurred mostly because of poor ventilation and deplorable safety deficiencies. And yet the operators and fabulously wealthy Landlord were not held liable in any way for these deaths, inciting the miners' families to demand an inquest into the Oaks Christmas disaster. That inquest was held in 1867 and would stir interest all across the United Kingdom, rousing Queen Victoria to push for change in  laws governing coal mining and other industrial revolution operations. The Oaks Christmas Disaster and the fascinating historical events that followed are all covered in a well documented, historical fiction recently released by Simon & Schuster. “Out of the Darkness”, is based on the true story of a nineteenth century child coal miner rising out of the ashes of poverty and tragedy to change the world. It’s a story of poverty, sacrifice, greed, love, faith and the courage to push aside fear and jump into the refiner’s fire where the finest qualities of character are forged. It’s a story of the great sweep of human desire for freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of justice.

 

David A. Jacinto

Author of: Out of The Darkness

Little mothers and Proto-proletarians: Growing up in Mining

By Lesley Hulonce

Elizabeth was using the last of the daylight to finish mending her brother’s trousers. The job often kept her until the early hours of the morning because of the long hours the miners worked. She hated the thick moleskin that prevented him being injured in the mine as it was almost impossible to get her needle through, and her fingers were hurting. The needle and thread had to be waxed for nearly every stitch before she could get it into the moleskin. He felt differently, these were men's trousers, miners’ trousers which showed that he was now a man, a wage earner and had at last joined the masculine ranks at the pit. Alan Burge identifies boys’ first pair of moleskin trousers as a ‘totem of manhood’. Getting their first pair represented their entry into the ethos of adult ‘manhood’ within the pit.

    (Welsh miners' children)

The South Wales coalfield was one of the few locations in Britain which adhered to a separate spheres agenda.  Unlike most of the country where working-class women went out to work as a matter of course, in the coalfield boys were trained to be miners and girls to be mothers and housewives. They were ‘little mothers’ as soon as they could look after their siblings, they could be taken out of school in times of crisis and were primed to marry a miner, probably from the same village and restart the cycle with their own (numerous) children. While American feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott felt able to claim with confidence that the ‘call for a history of women’ had been comprehensively answered by 1983, Welsh women's historian Deirdre Beddoe argued in 1984 that Welsh women were written out of Welsh history and, ‘if a creature from outer space landed in Wales and worked through Welsh history, she would be perplexed as to how the Welsh procreated. They were all men!’ Within the historiography of Wales, a complete work dedicated to Welsh women’s history was not published until 1991.

The study of childhood in Wales is an under-investigated area of scholarship. The gender roles and expectations of adult life were grafted onto children via the stratification of play, household chores and education. Building on Alun Burge’s study of miners’ learning in the first half of the twentieth century, a gendered analysis of both boys’ and girls’ positioning within coalfield society enhances our understanding of the gender roles ingrained during their formative years. Boys were widely seen as proto-proletarian heroes, union stalwarts and hungry for learning. But not by their mothers who imagined a different future for their children, one which did not include working a mile underground or struggling on after 13 stillborn births. As Dot Jones argues ‘the unremitting toil of childbirth’ killed and debilitated untold numbers of women in the South Wales Coalfield. Burge argues that boys were socialised and trained into the colliery ‘around the fireplace’.  Dai Dan Evans recalled that ‘all the young lads…in the village were steeped in mining, the only conversation you could get in the community was about mining…Therefore we were what you might term, trained for the pit, and nothing else’. Girls, it appears were trained for domesticity and very little else.

 (pithead bathing)

Although elementary education of working-class girls was intended to produce good wives and domestic servants, there is insufficient exploration of the offensive that exacerbated this widely held construction of femininity. Reports such as the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical 

Deterioration in 1906 set the tone for girls’ education as it thought that the ‘annual sacrifice of infants’ was not due to poverty but to the ignorance of mothers about hygiene and nutrition and it recommended the teaching of cookery, childcare and cleanliness in schools. ‘Schools for Mothers’ were also established which leant heavily on lectures on personal hygiene and the necessity to eliminate dirt from the home. Girls were trained to refute this charge of slovenliness in the home by becoming respectable and ‘tidy’ women.   

Amongst girls who attended and completed a grammar school education, entry into the teaching profession was regarded as an appropriate progression. Sian Rhiannon Williams highlights the limited occupational options of educated working-class women and men in an article that shows that teaching may have not been the girls’ first choice, but as teaching was held in high regard and considered an appropriate feminine profession, many young women were encouraged down this avenue by their parents. Williams has shown that this ‘feminisation’ of teaching from the late nineteenth century did not necessarily lead to a fall in the social standing of teachers.

 (waiting for news)

However, a more complex gendered exploration of why the profession was considered so suitable for women, could deepen our understanding of a coalfield society in which teaching was perceived as the primary ‘escape’ from the pit or domesticity.

Elizabeth Andrews didn't grow up to darn her own sons’ moleskin trousers as she and her husband did not have children themselves. She became the Labour Party’s Woman Organiser for Wales for 29 years and following her retirement in 1948 she equated her work to that of a missionary ‘preaching this new Gospel of Social Justice and a new way of life’. Her long career of political activism had also included campaigning for women’s suffrage and the establishment of several branches of the Women’s Co-operative Guild in the Rhondda. She was a leading figure in the campaigns for pithead baths and better housing for miners; pit head baths were considered vital if women were to be able to stop carrying heavy coppers of hot water to bathe their coal-stained husbands at home. The evidence she gave before the Sankey Coalmining Commission in 1919 raised awareness of a coalfield society in which the health and life expectancy of miners’ wives and daughters was as damaged and diminished by the demands of mining as the miners themselves.

  (Elizabeth Andrews)

These were ‘tidy women’ women whose career was homemaking and mothering; ‘an army of women trained to wash and scrub and polish as men trooped in and out’. Mrs Hughes reminisces about cleaning:

‘I used to wash the path – and our toilet was down the bottom of the garden – and I used to ‘wash the path – we had flagstones – used to wash the path from the back door right down to the toilet…And then the front, flagstones was in front then, and I used to wash the pavement from the front door, right past the window, right down to the drain. The pavement, I used to wash all that. Beautiful, lovely. 

‘Coal House’ was a reality TV series, in which three 2007 families lived and worked in the south Wales coalfield of 1927. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/7086725.stm while the programme tried to follow the way life was in 1927, it was of course impossible to recreate the fear, worry and hardship that Welsh children and their families experienced on a daily basis. I was drawn to the way the women failed to keep the range up to a temperature for cooking and water for baths. Women in 1927 would never have let the range temperature drop – if they had done, their miner husbands would have come home dirty and hungry and been unable to bathe or eat; it was unthinkable.

(coal house)

A 1916 Local Government Report showed that some counties in Wales had more than double the average maternal death rate of England and Wales. Stillbirths in Wales were also over a 1/3 higher than England, and in Glamorgan and Monmouth maternal mortality had increased from 14.2% in 1929 to 42% in 1933. A damning report on Maternal Mortality in Wales in 1937 showed that maternal mortality had risen steadily and was over a 1/3 higher than England. Similarly In ‘Counting the Cost of Coal’, Dot Jones shows that in 25-44 age groups in Pontypridd, the female mortality rate was significantly higher than men.

Little girls were growing up to die in childbirth, and little boys were sent into mines where safety standards were low priorities. Mining companies in South Wales of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took the children for the pits and lost them early to the killing fields of coal.
~~~~~~~~~~~

Select references:

For an insight into the pride taken by these ‘tidy women’ listen to http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/welsh_womans_history/9_weekly_routine/

Deirdre Beddoe, ‘Towards a Welsh Women’s History’ in Llafur, 3:2 (1981).

Alun Burge, ‘Swimming against the tide: gender, learning and advancement in South Wales, 1900-1939’, Llafur, 8, 3 (2002), 13-31

Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Women in History: The Modern Period’, Past and Present, 101 (1983), 141; 

Angela V. John, ed., Our Mother’s Land, Chapters in Welsh Women’s History, 1830-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991).

Rosemary Crook, ‘Tidy women: women in the Rhondda between the wars’, Oral History Journal, 10 (1982), 40-6.

Neil Evans and Dot Jones, ‘“A blessing for the miner’s wife”: the campaign for pithead baths in the south Wales coalfield, 1908-1950’, Llafur, 6:3 (1994), 5-28.

Elizabeth Andrews (ed., Ursula Masson), A Woman’s Work is Never Done and Political Articles (Dinas Powys, Honno, 2006 edition).

Diana Gittins, Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure, 1900-39 (London, Hutchinson, 1982).

Francis and Dai Smith, The Fed: A History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century (London, L&W, 1980; UWP, 1998).

Carol White and Sian Rhiannon Williams (eds), Struggle or Starve: Women’s Lives in the South Wales Valleys Between the Two World Wars (Dinas Powys, Honno, 1998).

Graham Goode and Sara Delamont, ‘Opportunity denied: the voices of the lost grammar school girls of the inter-war years’, in Sandra Betts (ed.), Our Daughters’ Land: Past and Present (UWP, 1996), 103-24.

Dr Lesley Hulonce is a historian and lecturer in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Swansea University. She researches children, women, disabilities and prostitution and can be contacted at mailto:l.hulonce@swansea.ac.uk

She tweets at @LesleyHulonce and @histhealthcult and blogs at Workhouse Tales https://lesleyhulonce.wordpress.com

Her first monograph is available to preorder at Amazon for £2 (a pound of which goes to the Careleavers trust) Pre-order

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