Senghenydd - Britain's Worst Mining Disaster

100 years ago, here at Senghenydd,

439 miners were killed in a massive underground explosion.

It was the biggest loss of life ever in a British coal mine.

My great-grandfather died in the explosion.

My grandmother's husband died in the explosion.

Now, descendants of those who lost their lives

are marking the centenary of the disaster

by uncovering just how their ancestors lived and how they died.

Do you know what? That has shocked me. Honestly.

Well, well, well.

The Senghenydd explosion came to symbolise

how the mighty coal owners grew rich...

Murderers, simple as that, murderers. They knew what was happening.

..whilst the colliers risked all.

They paid the ultimate price. They really did.

South Wales 100 years ago was like the Klondike.

People flocked here from all over Britain.

They left poorly paid jobs on farms and in domestic service

for jobs in a booming energy industry - coal mining.

The quality of the coal mined here was unrivalled.

But the risks to those digging it out

were far greater than in other parts of Britain

because of the high levels of explosive methane gas

found within the coal seams.

There were a quarter of a million men working in the pits.

A quarter of a million men.

Every year, at least 1,000 would die

and sometimes closer to 2,000 would die.

Now, you get an explosion in a mine like Senghenydd

where the ventilation isn't very good,

where the air is full of coal dust,

where there are known pockets of methane.

That's a recipe for disaster.

This is the only film of the Senghenydd disaster in existence.

The smoke billowing from the colliery

came from underground fires caused by the explosion

that burned for weeks afterwards.

It all began at eight o'clock on the morning of 14th October 1913.

The 935 men on the day shift at the Universal Colliery

were making their way to the coalface.

Normal day, people down the pit. Everything going fine.

The men working on the coal faces, a lot of the coalface

would be manned by a father and son, perhaps,

a father and brother, and everything is going normal.

It is a normal...like every day in the office. Yes.

And then there's a bang happens.

EXPLOSION

HOOTER

It's thought that a build-up of methane gas was ignited

either by an electrical spark or by a miner's lamp,

causing a blast that ripped through the mine.

There's certain people who have been blown to bits immediately.

Other people in the pit further away know something's happened.

The air has changed.

Because once you explode,

the air pressure is going to alter immediately.

So they know something has gone on here somewhere.

They think, "OK, let's go back to the pit

"and find out what's happening."

They walk back and then, of course, the carbon monoxide hits them

because the oxygen has been burnt out of the air and they collapse.

Walking down the roadways

and they've basically gone on the deck and died.

More than half the workforce of men and boys,

some as young as 14, were killed,

leaving 205 women widowed and 542 children without fathers.

It was a coal mining tragedy on an unprecedented scale.

Today, little remains of Universal Colliery in Senghenydd.

It closed in 1928.

But all was not lost.

The Aber Valley Heritage Group pulled together a unique archive

of documents and memorabilia which includes a model of the village

as it was a century ago, dominated by the colliery.

Now, as the centenary of the Senghenydd explosion approaches,

the museum has become an important focal point for local people

who want to rediscover their family history

so that those who died are never forgotten.

The father and son worked on the west side.

The younger generation are learning from local historian Jill Jones

about life in Senghenydd 100 years ago.

There was more fuss if a horse was killed underground

than if a man was killed.

Men came cheap because they had to buy the horses.

But it is not just the youngsters

who are interested in their family history.

Hilary Barbrook grew up in Senghenydd

and now she runs a flower shop in nearby Caerphilly.

She too has been inspired by the centenary

to find out more about her family links to the explosion of 1913.

My connection is that I had lost two grandfathers in that.

My mother's father, which was Evan Hopkin James.

He's buried in the Pen-yr-heol cemetery,

where a lot of people were buried.

But my father's father, Charles Brown, was never found.

And as far as I know, he is still down the pit.

They never found his body at all.

Hilary has been digging through the records of the appeal fund,

set up in the aftermath of the disaster,

for more information on Charles.

On there, it says there, look...

Charles Brown, aged 31, then you've got funeral expenses.

They didn't have no funeral expenses because they never found his body.

Few liked to talk about the explosion

when Hilary was growing up.

It was a taboo subject.

It is intriguing me.

I would like to find out more about them

and how my grandmother survived.

She lost the breadwinner, then, if you like.

Evan, by all accounts, was an upstanding member of the community.

But family tradition describes Charles as a rough character

who came to the Welsh coalfields in search of work.

The families in Senghenydd were ordered by the colliery

to take these itinerant workers in.

Charles Brown became a lodger in my great-grandmother's house

and my grandmother was there as a young girl.

And before very long, they had a baby by Charles Brown.

And my great grandparents were horrified

at the fact that she had an illegitimate child.

And they were...they threw Charles Brown out immediately.

He went and lodged elsewhere and the records show

he fathered another illegitimate child in Senghenydd.

To shed more light on the dangers

both Charles and Evan faced underground,

Hilary is heading to the Big Pit Mining Museum.

I would like to know how they died and where they died actually,

what part of the mine.

It is going to be a big black dark hole with a lot of dust about.

I'm very claustrophobic.

Ceri Thompson is an ex-miner himself

and is now the curator here.

He has looked into the museum's archives for Hilary

to see if there's anything that will help her understand

what happened to her grandfathers.

Go on then, there you go.

Hilary descends into the pit

just as her grandfathers did on that fateful morning in 1913.

How deep down are we going now? 300 foot.

The same as Senghenydd? No, Senghenydd is about 600m.

The Senghenydd pit spread for over a mile underground.

It was designed so that the coal could be removed quickly

through the main tunnels

in coal trucks, or drams, pulled by pit ponies.

In those times, the men cut the coal by hand.

Conditions would have been cramped and roof falls were a daily threat.

Ceri takes Hilary to an area of the mine that is similar

to the conditions her grandfathers worked in

at the Universal Colliery at the time of the explosion.

My father's father, Charles Brown, was a haulier in the pit.

What type of work was that then?

The haulier accompanied the horses in,

bringing empty drams into the stalls.

And when they were full,

the haulier would come in and then take the full dram out

to the main roadways.

But I don't know much about my other grandfather,

which was Evan Hopkin James.

I don't know what he'd have done in the pit, actually. OK.

We've got a death certificate here

and this is for a Mr Evan Hopkin James. He was 42 years old

and the job, according to this, is a colliery rider.

Now, a rider is somebody who travels out with the drams.

So they were both employed to get the coal back to the pit.

So basically then, my grandfather, Charles Brown,

would be working somewhere along here on these roads

bringing it to the main road there,

where my other grandfather, Evan Hopkin,

would be bringing the coal out of the mine itself?

Yes. It may have been that they often met underground.

Yes, that's quite possible. Yes. You know.

But unfortunately, my grandfather... His body was never found.

He's one of the people who are still down the pit.

The problem was, of course,

there were fires which raged for almost a month, apparently.

And these are the roof supports

they would have used on the main roadways.

They would have been about 12 to 14-foot high. Yes.

And once these started to burn, of course, they would collapse

and anybody then who died in the roadway, would be buried

because there's thousands of tonnes of stone, coal,

bits of old timber, burnt.

Upturned drams, dead horses, everything.

Ceri has his own theory as to what killed most of the men.

I think the majority of men died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Yes.

Because once there's a fire underground, of course,

the oxygen's burnt out of the air so they cannot breathe.

So they collapse and die.

He has unearthed compelling evidence of this.

This is actually a copy of the inspector's notebook who came round

straight after the disaster, before the bodies were recovered.

And you can see here where men have heard the blast,

started to walk out and then been overcome.

These are matchstick drawings of people lying in the roadway.

And you can see the inspector actually drew them as he found them.

Yes. So these have actually just collapsed, basically,

in a line as they're walking. Because there's no air.

It was that quick. It was that quick.

One of the drawings records the death of a lone haulier

and his pony.

So there's the dram and there's the horse.

That could have been like my grandfather.

It could have been your grandfather.

Yes, moving that with the horse. It is quite sad.

You can see the way he'd done his body there.

He's collapsed on himself, rather than just falling down. Yes.

So it's very poignant.

They paid the ultimate price, they really did.

And, and then the struggle afterwards,

the realisation afterwards, was all the breadwinners had gone.

It is sad.

Many of the bereaved families were kept waiting for months

before the bodies of their loved ones were recovered from the pit.

And as well as the bodies still underground,

there were those that could not be identified.

So some families faced the reality

of never knowing where their menfolk lay.

There would have been a sense of numbness initially,

of astonishment that such a thing had happened

and a sense of wondering why it had happened.

They knew that this explosion was exceptionally powerful.

It even caused havoc above ground.

It blasted a two tonne pit cage up and out of one of the mineshafts,

wrecking the winding gear.

But what began underground with an explosion of methane gas

became something far more lethal

because of another contributing factor.

An explosion of that sort can then cause coal dust

to be pushed up into the air.

And if coal dust is in suspension in the air in cloud form,

then it itself becomes explosive.

EXPLOSION

The particles of coal dust catch fire, they explode...

EXPLOSION

..and you get a chain reaction.

EXPLOSION

The shock wave ahead of the initial explosion raised coal dust

so there wasn't just one,

but a devastating series of self fuelling coal dust explosions...

EXPLOSION

..which spread through the mine.

In its wake, came the deadly carbon monoxide.

The biggest cause of death amongst the 439 men who lost their lives.

The centenary of the Senghenydd disaster

has become a focus for many to find out more about their ancestors.

Fourth-generation coalminer Peter Broome

is discovering more about his.

I have a genuine link into the Senghenydd disaster.

Something I had ignored and forgotten about really

and possibly didn't think I had.

This painting, which has been handed down through his family,

shows his grandmother, Sarah, and her children

in the aftermath of the explosion.

Peter's father left it to him.

He explained to me that the painting was of my grandmother

and she was crying in the painting with two children in the background

and through the door,

you could see a man being carried on the shoulders of two rescue men

and the Senghenydd pithead on fire.

And he explained to me that that was my nan crying

because it was her husband who had just been killed

and been brought out of the mining disaster.

The future for Sarah was bleak.

Like many of the grieving widows,

the house was rented from the mine owners

and with her husband dead,

Sarah faced the prospect of losing her home.

A few months after the explosion, there was a knock on the door

and the bailiffs from the company

wanted to evict her from the company cottage

that was owned by the mining company

because she couldn't afford to pay the rent

because her husband had been killed in the disaster.

But Sarah was saved from eviction by marriage to a miner,

John Broome, Peter's grandfather.

And it was he who painted the haunting image of Sarah.

But for Peter, there's an important piece of the story

that has been lost.

The identity of Sarah's first husband,

the man who died and is known to Peter only as "Mr Price".

Now, he wants to find out more about him.

Although the Mr Price isn't a blood relation,

he obviously has a big effect on the story of my grandmother's life.

So it's really dreadful to think he's anonymous to me.

Sarah lost her husband, Mr Price, in 1913.

But this wasn't the first tragedy she and other families faced.

So the same colliery, 12 years before the big disaster,

she lost her father in that explosion.

This earlier explosion in 1901 took the lives of 81 miners.

Astonishingly, it is now thought the two disasters had similarities.

Both were methane gas explosions,

which triggered further coal dust fuelled explosions

that spread through the mine.

The inquiry into the 1901 explosion found that not enough

was being done to control the coal dust underground.

Despite this warning of the dangers, by 1913,

little had been done to remedy the problem.

The mine owner, William Thomas Lewis,

was pushing at the boundaries of mining engineering -

sinking pits even deeper to get at the coal and to maximise profits.

They were very often engineers, they were often people

who knew very well how mines worked and what the dangers were.

But they were also people who wanted to make money,

a lot of money.

They were people who were prepared to take risks.

They weren't prepared to put the investment in the pits

which, as engineers, they knew they should have put into those pits.

In the years after the 1901 explosion,

William Lewis rose to become one of the most powerful men in coal

and his achievements were celebrated.

The great and the good erected this statue of him in Aberdare

when he was honoured with a peerage

and the title of Lord Merthyr of Senghenydd.

But those who suffered as a result of the explosions

in his Universal Colliery are not so well commemorated.

Peter's grandmother, Sarah, was buried with other family members

here in Treharris.

I couldn't believe that nothing was put on the grave to remind them

so, I, I don't have a great deal of money,

but I purchased a cross and put the plaque on.

Peter's quest to learn more about Sarah's first husband,

who was killed in the 1913 explosion and who he only knows as Mr Price,

has taken him to local historian Jill Jones.

What we've actually done, we double checked all through

the list of the miners that were killed in 1913 explosion

and there are three Prices. Right, three Prices.

Harold Price was 22. William Terrace, Senghenydd.

Idris Price was 18. But they were both single.

They only had the compensation for single men. OK.

However, George Price was 28

and lived at 137 High Street in Abertridwr,

was married to Sarah Jane. That was the one then.

That's it. So it's George. Yes, so it was George Price, aged 28.

He was a collier. Yes. Right. Same as me.

137 High Street, Abertridwr.

His widow was Sarah Jane and they had two children.

James, aged two, and George Abraham, eight months. There we are.

But George Price's body was not recovered or identified.

He was not recovered. No, no. Oh, my God.

Very sad, isn't it? Oh, God, yes.

Now, Peter's family history, built around the painting

of his grieving grandmother, Sarah, has been transformed.

He always thought the body being carried was Sarah's husband, George,

but there was no funeral for him.

The headstone for George Price was the pit headgear.

That was his grave and she looked out of that house every day

and saw that,

it reminded her of the disaster.

It must have been horrific for her to have that.

There was nothing for her to just go and put flowers on.

Dreadful to have to think that.

In the weeks that followed the explosion,

the traumatised families of Senghenydd and nearby Abertridwr

took yet another body blow.

Shockingly, 800 men were laid off.

Not only were their wages stopped, but also their free coal concessions.

It was November and winter was upon them.

Lord Merthyr's only offer of help

was for 200 of the survivors to uproot

and move to work in one of his pits in the Rhondda.

But none took him up on the offer.

They didn't want to leave

whilst many of their comrades' bodies were still entombed.

Eventually, after seven weeks,

the men face the daunting prospect of going back into the mine.

The horror of it all is that they are not just being respectful

getting the pit clear,

they're actually making it ready for work again.

So that must be a terrible mind shift.

You've been through all of this

and you're actually getting it ready so you can hack coal,

bring your drams out

and basically forget what's happened, in a way.

You know! And just change over completely, you need the production.

Hilary Barbrook believes her grandfather, Charles,

was one of those whose body was never recovered from the pit.

At the community archive in Senghenydd,

Jill is helping her find evidence that supports this.

She's uncovered some important research

done by local schoolteacher Basil Phillips in the 1960s.

He pulled together the first accurate list of victims,

half a century after the explosion happened.

From Basil's detailed notes, Jill has pieced together

some surprising new information about Charles.

Right, well I've got news for you, Hilary.

"Charles Brown, 31, a haulier, from 23 Caerphilly Road, Senghenydd.

"Marital status: single."

His body was unaccounted for by 31 March, 1914.

However, it was recovered over a year later.

Never. Yes. Yes. Yes.

We are not sure where the burial place is.

But, how...how in those days would they know after a year,

after that long, that it was Charles Brown?

Because they had no DNA or anything like that?

There must have been some sort of... A watch. A watch or something.

Oh, good gracious. I have never found out that. Yes.

And what we wondered was how was it so long before they found him?

We have talked about it and we believe that, gradually,

they cleared the west side and it must have taken a long time.

The falls...the falls had to be cleared to get back to the coalface.

And they must have discovered Charles Brown's body there.

Well, that is...all these years, Jill, all these years, growing up,

and so my own father never knew that they actually found his body.

As I've known to this very minute,

that my grandfather was still down the pit. Yes.

Do you know what, that has shocked me. You're all right, Hilary.

That has shocked me, honestly. Yes.

So there it is. Well, well, well.

It's very, very emotional. Very emotional in fact.

And I can't say any more than that

because it really choked me, actually.

The government at the time paid the bereaved families

up to ?300 compensation.

But the public inquiry to determine why the explosion happened

was a disappointment to many

as no-one was found to be culpable for the men's deaths.

The colliery manager was fined ?24

for breaching mine safety regulations.

Whilst the owners were fined a mere ?10.

In today's money, that would amount to just ?1,600.

It was another bitter blow for the families

of the men and boys who were killed.

Peter Broome's investigations have shed new light on the painting,

which has been handed down through his family.

Now, he knows the body of Sarah's first husband, George,

was amongst the 18 miners never recovered from the pit.

It just makes it even more sad that that is the case.

There's nowhere to grieve for Georgie Price.

Now, on the centenary of the explosion,

the image painted by his grandfather, a miner himself,

has become ever more poignant.

To think this goes back to those days,

when those men were treated so badly.

In 1901, 81 miners died.

12 years later, at the same coal mine, 439.

And to see that painting, the way it was painted,

again, you can just feel the sadness.

Hilary is still trying to piece together

more information about her grandfather, Charles.

He fathered a second illegitimate child

but Hilary has no idea if there any descendants.

She has come to the Caerphilly County Registry Office

where Della Leigh Mahoney has scoured the records

of those born a generation after the explosion.

She has discovered Charles's daughter, Gwendolyn,

who herself had two children.

The two daughters I found were actually born in 1938 and 1941.

Gosh, if they lived in Senghenydd, I am bound to have known them.

Well, almost certainly they were in the Senghenydd area.

I mean, to think that's family really. Isn't it?

It seems so, doesn't it?

They would only be in their 70s now, wouldn't they? Yes.

They would have been my age. They would be my age. Of course.

We could have even been in school together

and we were relatives.

They might have died at a young age and never have got married.

I haven't got anything further at this point for you.

It...it...it...

It's heartbreaking, I can't.

The explosion that destroyed so many lives

is now responsible for a fracture in Hilary's family.

To think all these years that he's gone...

..knowing we had family, we had family living in and around us

in Senghenydd, that could have been part of our family

and it's sad to think my father didn't know

and neither did any of us.

Despite further searches, Hilary was unable to find

any living descendants from the lost side of her family.

It's thought they moved away from Wales more than 70 years ago.

The true sacrifice of those who lived, worked and died here,

is being recognised.

Where the Universal Colliery once stood,

a national memorial is being put in place.

Centre stage is this sculpture depicting a miner

coming to the aid of his injured buddy.

But this is not just in memory

of those killed in Senghenydd's two disasters,

but of the 8,000 miners who lost their lives

mining coal all across Wales.

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