MEET THE AUTHOR

JANE AINSWORTH’s Victims of the Oaks Colliery Disaster 1847 tells the story of a mining disaster in her hometown of Barnsley

How did you come to write the book?

About four years ago Paul Stebbing, who’s Barnsley’s archivist, told me about acquiring a ledger that contained the minutes of the Colliers’ Relief Fund Committee for the Oaks disaster. I was very interested in the ledger. I’ve got mining ancestors, as well as taking a broad interest in Barnsley’s heritage. So I offered to transcribe it for him. As I worked my way through it I got more and more fascinated by the women and children who were left behind and felt that I wanted to know their stories, the stories of the victims and the family survivors who had to manage without their working men and boys.

Did you manage to trace all of the victims?

I’ve traced everybody who was killed, although as you’re probably aware yourself from doing family history research, some people don’t leave much of a trace behind them. In other cases I was able to find out a lot, and even trace them forward to relatives who served in the First World War.

How difficult was the research to carry out? Because it was 1847, the records available were very limited – for example, there was only one census. So it was quite challenging to put the information together. I was reliant on if I could find parish registers for the victims and then find out from those the names of parents, to then try and build forward and find out second marriage records for the names of the widows that were left behind and that sort of thing. I feel pleased with what I was able to do. Any research you do like that could be neverending – you could go on and on and on trying to find the records. However, I felt like I was able to bring the lives back of a fair number of them in quite a bit of detail.

Most of the stories I uncovered were very sad. It’s surprising how many of the families lost other members in different colliery disasters. People working in collieries and factories in those days were expendable. In a sense it’s almost like a form of slavery. They weren’t directly violently mistreated, but their lives were of limited quality because of the hours of work and little pay and the quality of housing. And when they died there wasn’t the same structure in place that we have today, where employers are responsible and have to pay compensation.

Was there anyone you found particularly interesting to research?

Yes – one of the survivors, Bernard Wogan. He was injured in the disaster and then he killed himself. When I do my research, I weep buckets in places, because you do get very involved with the characters you’re researching.

JANE AINSWORTH'S VICTIMS OF THE OAKS COLLIERY DISASTER 1847 Is Published By Pen & Sword (280 Pages, £16.99; tinyurl.com/pen- and-sword-oaks-colliery)