Black Diamonds (21 page)

It was true. Underground there was carnage. Forty-four men who had courageously volunteered to go down the pit to bring up the bodies from the first blast had been killed. Sergeant Winch was one of the few members of the rescue party to survive:

We had been working
down the pit for a couple of hours recovering the bodies of those killed in the first explosion – loading them into a train to carry them to pit-bottom. I think we had recovered about twenty-four bodies. It struck me that our electric torches had been in use for rather a long time, and that it would be well to recharge them. That thought saved my life. Two other men came with me. We had not gone more than a hundred yards when there was a roar. I found myself groping on the ground in thick darkness and swirling dust. How many yards I had been thrown by the explosion I can’t say. Dust. I have seen some terrible dust storms in India, but they were a trifle to the dust that swept over us. It was like a great black torrent. I groped my way about and suddenly I saw a tiny twinkle of light. It was from my electric lamp which was lying on the ground half-buried. There were hoarse shout s from behind us, and I got my lamp and we groped our way back to see if we could save anyone. We came across one or two who had been even nearer to the explosion than ourselves. They were badly cut about and we assisted them along the road. But there was no sign of the main body of rescuers. A huge fall had taken place close to where they were standing, shutting them in completely. It stopped up the way just like a cork pushed into a bottle. I believe that fall saved our lives, for while it crushed many of the rescue party, I believe that it dammed the flow of the after-damp which otherwise would have reached us and choked us before we got a hundred yards.

Frederick Smith and his team, volunteers from a neighbouring colliery, were also lucky to escape: ‘For the most part,’ he said, ‘we were strangers to the pit, and half a dozen other men and myself took a turning which we thought would lead us to the victims of the first explosion. As a matter of fact, we lost our way, and that saved our lives. We went down a turning, and suddenly found we were cut off from the remainder of the rescue party. We were just about to turn round to get back to the main body, if possible, when the place was filled with a red glare. There was a dull rumbling noise and smoke and dust filled the air. Then came the gas. It made us turn sick and faint, but we held up, and in a few minutes the air had grown comparatively clear, and seizing our lamps, we retraced our steps along the road to discover what had become of our friends. We had not gone far before we came upon them. Bodies absolutely littered the ground. We had a pulmotor apparatus with us, and we did our best to revive one or two of them. Some of them were still alive and gasped feebly. One man suddenly exclaimed, “Lord help me, I am done,” and collapsed. When we bent over him he was quite dead.’

Sergeant Winch and the two miners who had gone with him to get the chargers for the lamps, and Fred Smith and his men were among the few left alive on the shaft side of the fall. One hundred tons of rock had crashed from the roof in the explosion, entombing the rescue party: without proper digging equipment, it was impossible to reach the dead and dying on the other side. For the second time that day, as Albert Wildman had done some hours earlier, the men ran the mile to the pit bottom to raise the alarm.

News of the first explosion had reached the King at breakfast. Immediately, his Private Secretary wired a telegram to the colliery:

The King and Queen are shocked to hear of the terrible accident at your colliery, and perhaps the fact that Their Majesties were near to the scene in the midst of so much rejoicing, when they visited Conisbrough yesterday, brings home to them still more the sorrow and sadness which now prevail amongst you. I am desired to express Their Majesties’ sympathy with the families of those who have perished, and with the sufferers in this grievous calamity.

There was no question of cancelling the morning’s programme: after breakfast, it was decided that the royal show must go on. The King had left Wentworth at ten o’clock. In the space of three hours he saw nine pit villages – all in the vicinity of Cadeby. Throughout the morning, the royal party was kept informed of developments. Though overshadowed by the tragedy unfolding close by, the first morning of the tour was judged to be a great success. On the scheduled stops – at Clifton Park outside Rotherham and at Silverwood colliery – crowds of upwards of 50,000 turned out to greet
the King and Queen
. Similar numbers lined the roads along which they progressed. Everywhere they went, the brass bands from the collieries played the national anthem, the crowds spontaneously joining in. At Silverwood colliery, the royal party stopped for an hour to inspect the surface workings. They watched two windings of coal coming up from the pit, and saw it weighed and ‘checked’ before it passed on to the tippers. The colliery had arranged an eccentric form of transport for the Queen. ‘
For a greater part
of the distance,’ the local newspaper reported,

a railway platelayer’s trolley was provided for Her Majesty, who, seated in a revolving chair, and with Lady Eva Dugdale and Lady Aberconway standing on either side, appeared to enjoy greatly the novel mode of locomotion. Excepting that a piece of cocoa-nut matting served as a carpet, the trolley was in proper working ‘condition’ and it was propelled along the lines by half-a-dozen men.

The highlight of the morning, as the
Yorkshire Post
floridly reported, was an unscheduled stop at a cottage in Woodlands, the model village that had been built for the workforce at Brodsworth Main colliery.

It was William Brown’s, bearing the prosaic number 33, and the aristocratic address of The Park. Yet it was only a miner’s cottage, with a trim little garden in front of roses and more common-place flowers carefully cultivated by the tenant. In the little garden there stood the collier’s wife, Mrs Brown, and Mrs Aston, the next door neighbour, both with babies in arms, wistfully watching the Royal procession and the great people who made it up. Suddenly the Royal car stopped outside the garden gate and out stepped the King and Queen smiling. Both advanced towards the cottage door. The poor women, embarrassed, seemingly almost frightened, turned on their heels and rushed to the threshold of the house. Greatly amused their Majesties followed, piloted by Mr Greensmith, the local colliery manager, and in a second the party had disappeared into the house. News of the visit, which was obviously unexpected, quickly spread, and in less than a minute the cottage of the Browns was in a state of violent siege. In the middle of the crushing and squeezing could be seen the Archbishop of York, laughingly enjoying his own novel position as much as he appeared to do the unusualness of a Royal visit to a humble cottage, while members of noble houses who had accompanied the party looked on with great good humour. The crowd surged over the rose trees and flower beds of the trim garden in their anxiety to get a closer view of the Royal visitors, and Mr Brown’s little plot was soon a wreck. For five full minutes the colliers and their wives clamoured round the house, cheering madly, and when the King and Queen emerged the crowd would hardly let them pass to their motor car, so demonstrative were these Woodlands villagers. The Royal pair were obviously touched and obviously pleased. The King’s face was wreathed in smiles, and his Consort showed equal pleasure in her experiences, as she made her way back along the garden footpath to the car. A minute later the Royal party left for lunch at Hickleton Hall.

The lunch for the twenty members of the King’s suite at Hickleton Hall, Lord Halifax’s house, had been well planned. On 29 June, Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, had written to Lord Halifax:

I fear I must
ask you to consider the luncheon which you kindly give to Their Majesties on the 9th as a hurried meal to satisfy in the shortest time the cravings of more or less empty stomachs!! The tendency is to undertake too much in these ‘tours’ and it is most difficult to keep up to time and consequently the luncheon is a hurry … Their Majesties will be glad to meet anyone you wish to invite but if we are pressed for time it would be difficult for Their Majesties to talk to them but of course you would present them.
No tall hats and black coats
. We shall all be in ordinary county clothes!

Lord Halifax evidently satisfied the ‘cravings of more or less empty stomachs’: the printed menu for the lunch for his forty guests was as follows:

Chaud

Consommé à l’Impéeriale
Filet de Soles Frites
Côtelettes d’Agneau à la Macédoine
Poulardes en Casserole
Léggumes
Pouding à la farola
Fraises à la Cowlper
Gelées Variées
Macédoine aux Fruits
Pâtissiers

Froid

Salade d’Homards
Poulets à la Langue de Boeuf
Jambon de York Sauce Cumberland
Galantines aux Truffes
Pressé de Boeuf en Aspic

Lunch, intended as a pleasant interlude in a gruelling schedule, became a crisis meeting. When the royal party arrived at Hickleton Hall, some three miles from Cadeby colliery, the latest news of the disaster awaited them. The death toll had leapt from an estimated thirty-five after the first explosion, to over eighty following the second. It was the worst colliery disaster in South Yorkshire since 1893 when 139 miners had been killed at Combs Pit in Thornhill. The tragedy at Cadeby dominated the conversation over lunch. In his diary, the Archbishop of York reveals that a number of the King’s officials were uncertain whether, in view of what had happened, it would be wise for the King to keep to his plan to descend Billy Fitzwilliam’s mine at Elsecar later that afternoon. The previous week, a miner had been killed at the pit by a fall of stone; that incident – and the dangers evident in the explosions at Cadeby – prompted the officials to urge the King to reconsider his schedule. But, as the Archbishop records, George V was adamant that the descent at Elsecar should go ahead as planned. ‘Whatever happens,’ he told them, ‘I have got to show I want to do all I can at this time to see for myself, as far as I can, the risks to which my miners are exposed.’

By mid-afternoon, at Cadeby, 80,000 people were gathered on the hillside overlooking the pit. As word of the tragedy had spread, they had come from the nearby villages. A local reporter described the scene:

…
the ill-fated colliery
stood out from the hillside of Cadeby black and stern and sinister and foreboding. The flags that had floated from the headgears the previous day to welcome a King and his Consort were gone and no touch of colour relieved the gaunt tombstone. All that long black terrible day the bodies took their solemn journey down that awful gantry. Men who went to their work hearty and strong at night came back stiff and cold at noon; men who gallantly rushed to the rescue were gently shunted, twisted and lifeless on the slabs at night-fall. The crowd that had flocked into the place in the heat of the afternoon grew and swelled … Motor cars and ambulance wagons streamed in continual procession up the hill to the hospital. Now the burden was a rescuer who had been ‘gassed’ lying back in the arms of a half-naked miner, with a nurse plying a paper fan with tremendous energy for the revival of the lungs; now it was a man desperately wounded, who writhed under the brown covering of the stretcher, and uttered moans or screams. An old, wrinkled woman with red-rimmed staring eyes shambled up and down the grass-bordered pathway, praying at the top of her voice. An ambulance wagon galloped up the hill, and as it pulled up the man inside began to shriek. The old woman thought she recognized the voice of her son. ‘Oh God help him,’ she cried and she ran forward. The man moaned again, his arms had been unstrapped and he beat the air with them. The old woman peered into his face. It was the face of a stranger. ‘Thank God,’ she said and tottered back against the wall. ‘The Lord he knows everything. The Lord he knows everything.’ One woman who had volunteered to help with the ambulance work came face to face with the dead body of her own husband. Another woman whose husband was killed in the disaster had no less than fourteen children, the youngest an infant in arms.

There were still tens of thousands of people on the hillside and along the roads leading into the village when the King’s Daimler, driven at walking pace and with no accompanying motorcade, approached the colliery. The car edged its way through the crowds lining the road, the men and women standing in stunned silence in rows four deep. As the King and Queen drove past, the men removed their hats and bowed their heads, the women dropping to the ground in deep curtseys. The King’s visit to Denaby had not been scheduled. In his diary for that day, George V wrote:

At 6.45
May and I with Fitzwilliam and Legge motored off to Conisbrough about 10 miles to the Offices of the Cadeby colliery, as there was a terrible accident this morning, two explosions in which I fear 78 men lost their lives, including Mr Pickering (Govt. Inspector), splendid man. We went to inquire and to express our sympathy with those that have lost their dear ones. There was a large crowd of miners outside the Offices and they appreciated our coming to inquire.

At the entrance to the pit, the royal party was met by a group of officials and twenty miners who had been recovering bodies all afternoon. They wore their working clothes, their faces still black with coal dust. The local paper marvelled at the fact that the King and Queen shook their ‘grimy hands’. In the pit office they were shown plans of the mine and told of the force of the explosions. They had been caused by ‘gobfires’ – the spontaneous combustion of the layers of dust and muck that lay between the seams of coal. Both explosions had occurred after gobfires had ignited pockets of methane gas that had built up in that section of the pit. Billy Fitzwilliam, who, in his early twenties, had worked underground at his own pits before qualifying as a mining engineer and for whom safety was paramount, had anticipated the explosions. Though he owned a stretch of land under which the coal at Cadeby was mined, he had been unable to convince the colliery manager to install better safety measures: ‘
They hadn’t got
enough ventilation,’ his daughter Elfrida recalled. ‘My father had warned them: “You must have more ventilation, you haven’t got enough. You’ve got too much dust. Too much coal dust. That is the biggest danger of the lot.” He always said, “Watch Cadeby. There will be a terrible blow-up one day.” And he was right.’