PAUL ROUTLEDGE
They called it “black snow” – the burning debris blasted skyward by a massive explosion deep underground at Oaks Colliery. Blazing, charred fragments rained down on Hoyle Mill pit village, where an entire community was widowed or orphaned when the mine blew up “like a volcano”.
The sky turned deathly grey and dropped soot “like a touch of hell to make thee tremble” over a huge area, even on farmers in fields five miles away.
It was Christmas time 1866 in the middle of a bitter winter and the colliers were working flat out to buy toys and food for the festival. They never saw it.
It was the worst disaster of Victorian England, claiming the lives of 361 men and boys – a double catastrophe that killed not only miners on shift but those who fought to rescue them.
Their ages ranged from 10 to 67. They left behind 167 widows and 366 orphans under 12.
Even by the grotesque standards of exploitation by 19th-century bosses, the carnage at the pit near Barnsley that December 12 was unparalleled in scale.
Yet, except for a modest cenotaph in a rural churchyard, this sacrifice has largely been forgotten – just another footnote in the history of an industry that claimed 100,000 lives.
This glaring omission is put right in a moving documentary titled Black Snow, by writer/director
Stephen Linstead.
It won the Best Research Film of the
Year at the 2018 Arts and Humanities Research in Film
Awards at BAFTA in Central London earlier this month.
The film came from a collaboration of ex-miners, trade unionists and historians who also raised funds for a statue of a distraught mother and child running towards the siren-sounding pithead.
It’s by well-known Barnsley artist Graham Ibbeson, a miner’s son who discovered a forebear died in the tragedy.
In a dramatic reconstruction of real eye-witness accounts, the film opens with pitman’s wife Kitty recalling: “It were a black day that Wednesday.
“Bitter cold. Snow dusting t’ground. It’s been bitter for days and though we didn’t want a hard winter it meant plenty of work for t’men.
“Men who went down that cursed ’oyle to keep country warm and they all wanted all t’work they could get for t’bairns, for Christmas.”
They knew the danger.
Oaks was a gassy pit, prone to explosion. Nineteen years earlier another large blast killed more than 70. Men had often refused to go down.
Miner Andy Munro picks up the story: “T’owners were never forward about safety.
Coal were good, demand were great. People were sacrificed.
“Seventy-three souls at Oaks in 1847; Darley Main 75 in 1849; 52 at Warren Vale in 1851; six at Lundhill in 1854, VICTORIA MUNRO AN EYE-WITNESS TO DISASTER followed by a further 189 in 1857; 59 at Edmunds Main 1862. “Five-hundred-and-33 lives in 25 years. Barnsley were t’mining disaster capital of England and too few people were ashamed of that. “The Queen’s Inspector himself said owners armed themselves wi’ clever lawyers and tampered with witnesses.” Mining families always lived in the shadow of this corruption. Victoria Munro, Kitty’s friend in the film, accuses: “I was born in 1838, same year that 26 bairns drowned when t’Huskar pit up Silkstone flooded. Should have been playing in t’sunshine not being underground, Statue of mother and child
Wives and mothers, bairns ... we all ran to the flames and smoke