The Huskar Pit Disaster: 26 Children Drowned Underground in 1838

The Huskar Pit Disaster: 26 Children Drowned Underground in 1838

On the 4th of July 1838, a violent thunderstorm hit Silkstone in Yorkshire. At the local colliery, people were already underground working when the rain began causing problems.

Among those below were a large number of children.

The steam machinery used to bring workers back up the Moorend shaft stopped working properly, leaving them waiting underground. After a while, around 40 children decided to try another way out through the Huskar Day-Hole.

This was a route they knew. It came out at the surface further away and involved climbing through the workings rather than being brought up the shaft.

The children put out their lights before setting off. Accounts differ slightly over exactly why, although fear of danger underground appears to have played a part.

They were making their way towards the surface in darkness while the storm continued above.

The rain had caused a nearby stream to overflow. Water began finding its way into the mine and eventually came rushing down the passage the children were using.

They were caught on a steep section of the workings.

The water rushed down the drift, swept the children backwards and trapped many of them at a ventilation door lower down.

Fourteen children survived. Some had managed to get farther along the day-hole, while surviving accounts also describe children escaping into a narrow slit or passage away from the main rush of water.

Twenty-six children died.

Fifteen were boys and eleven were girls. Their ages ranged from seven to seventeen.

James Burkinshaw was seven. His brother George was ten. Both were killed.

There are several very young children among the names recorded after Huskar, and that is probably the part of the story I find hardest to get past. Not because child labour itself is surprising -most of us know children worked in Victorian factories and mines- but because seven is so young.

Children could be given jobs such as opening and closing ventilation doors as tubs moved through the mine. Others helped move coal or worked alongside older members of their family. In mining communities, several people from one household could be earning wages from the same colliery.

Huskar attracted attention outside the local area, particularly because of the number and ages of the children who had died.

Concern about conditions in mines was already growing, and in 1840 a Royal Commission was set up to investigate the employment of children underground.

The investigation went well beyond simply asking mine owners what conditions were like. Investigators visited mining districts, went into pits and spoke to the people doing the work.

J. C. Symons, who investigated Yorkshire, visited around 200 pits and went underground in about 70 of them.

The report published in 1842 included evidence from children themselves. It described long working days, very young workers and jobs carried out in difficult conditions far below ground.

Later that year, Parliament passed the Mines and Collieries Act.

Women and girls were no longer allowed to work underground. Boys under ten were also banned.

That age is worth keeping in mind. The law stopped a nine-year-old working underground, but a ten-year-old could still legally be sent down a mine.

Huskar had happened four years earlier.

By the time the Act was passed, there was already a memorial to the children in the churchyard at All Saints’ in Silkstone. It had been erected in 1841.

Their names are still recorded there today.

I had heard about children working in mines many times before, but Huskar is one of those stories where the individual ages make it much harder to think of child labour as just another feature of Victorian Britain.

Had you heard of the Huskar Pit Disaster before?

 

Image info:

Child trapper in a British coal mine, 1842. From the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Children’s Employment. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

During WW2, Even Your Farm Wasn’t Entirely Your Own

During WW2, Even Your Farm Wasn’t Entirely Your Own

When Britain went to war in 1939, increasing the amount of food being produced at home became very important. Britain had relied heavily on food coming from abroad, and the danger to shipping meant that more use had to be made of farmland at home. This brought the government much further into the everyday running of farms than I had appreciated before looking at the records.

County War Agricultural Executive Committees were established across England and Wales and usually became known simply as the County War Ags. Many of the people serving on them had farming experience themselves, and their work covered everything from finding tractors and machinery to dealing with shortages of labour. They were also involved in deciding which land ought to be cultivated. A farmer who had kept a field as pasture, for example, might be required to plough it and use it for crops.

These committees were not limited to offering advice. They had wartime powers to issue directions where land was considered to be badly cultivated. Farms could be inspected and changes required, and the powers available eventually extended to taking possession of land or ending the tenancy of a tenant farmer.

One case reached the House of Commons in June 1944. It concerned Wyndham Hartnell, an owner-occupier who farmed about 200 acres in East Sussex. The MP who brought up his case argued that Hartnell had already been through difficult years before the war and had lost cattle following sewage pollution on his land. He maintained that improvements had been made to the farm, but Hartnell had eventually been dispossessed.

The government gave a rather different account of how these cases were dealt with. The parliamentary secretary explained that representatives of the county committee would normally visit a farm first. Advice might be given, followed by directions concerning such things as machinery or fertilisers, and further approval was required before possession was taken. Hartnell’s case was disputed, but the debate shows that these powers were actually being used while the war was still being fought.

The National Farm Survey of 1941–43 collected an extraordinary amount of information about individual holdings, including land, buildings, machinery, labour and water supplies. An inspector also visited the farm and completed a Primary Farm Survey, recording the condition of the holding and giving an assessment of its management.

The grades were A for well managed, B for fairly well managed and C for badly managed.

I was particularly interested in the section dealing with the reasons behind a poorer assessment. Where a B or C grade could not be explained by old age or lack of capital, the inspector was required to give details of the farmer’s “personal failings.” It seems remarkably personal when you imagine that judgement being written down as part of an official wartime survey.

Around 14,500 holdings of five acres or more, covering about 1.21 million acres, were classified C. This did not mean that all of those farmers were removed. Advice, assistance, directions and closer supervision were among the measures available before possession was considered.

Between 1940 and 1944, possession was taken in 5,350 cases covering 344,413 acres. During the same years, 2,695 agricultural tenancies were terminated, covering 225,939 acres.

It is quite a long way from the wartime farming story I first knew, which was mostly Land Girls, tractors and Dig for Victory. Farmers were also dealing with inspections, official assessments and instructions about the way their land was being used. In a relatively small number of cases, those decisions ended with somebody else taking control of the farm.

Had you heard of the County War Ags before?

Image info:

Barley harvesting at Hills Farm, Kingston Blount, Oxfordshire, 1941. Ministry of Information Photo Division / Imperial War Museums. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Elizabeth Signed Mary’s Death Warrant. Then Her Secretary Was Sent to the Tower

Elizabeth Signed Mary’s Death Warrant. Then Her Secretary Was Sent to the Tower.

On the 1st of February 1587, Elizabeth I signed the warrant that would send Mary, Queen of Scots to the scaffold. Within weeks, William Davison, the secretary who handled it, would be imprisoned in the Tower.

Mary had been in England since 1568 and, after the Babington Plot was uncovered in 1586, the case against her had finally come to a head. Coded correspondence intercepted and deciphered by Walsingham’s intelligence network formed an important part of the evidence used against her. She was tried at Fotheringhay Castle in October, found guilty and sentenced to death.

Elizabeth still did not allow the sentence to be carried out immediately.

Mary had been a queen in her own right, she was Elizabeth’s cousin and she still had supporters who regarded her as the rightful Catholic heir to the English throne. There was also the deeply uncomfortable question of one anointed monarch authorising the judicial execution of another.

By February, the warrant had been prepared.

William Davison, one of Elizabeth’s principal secretaries, took it to her and she signed it. The document then passed under the Great Seal.

Davison later left his own account of what happened afterwards.

He wrote that Elizabeth asked whether the warrant had already been sealed. When he told her that it had, she questioned why it had been dealt with so quickly. Davison replied that he had done no more than he believed she had instructed him to do.

His account also shows just how uneasy he had become. Davison later wrote that he feared Elizabeth might try to shift responsibility away from herself, and he did not want to deal with the matter alone. He went to Sir Christopher Hatton and explained what had passed between himself and the Queen.

On the 3rd of February, Lord Burghley brought the warrant before members of the Privy Council. According to Davison, the councillors were told what had happened between him and Elizabeth and agreed that the warrant should be sent to Fotheringhay without going back to the Queen again.

Robert Beale, Clerk of the Privy Council, was chosen to carry it.

Mary knew nothing of this until the evening of the 7th of February, when she was told that she would die the following morning.

On the 8th of February 1587, she was executed in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle.

Davison was soon in serious trouble.

Elizabeth maintained that although she had signed the warrant, she had not given authority for it to be carried out in the way it had been. Davison was arrested and sent to the Tower, and on the 28th of March he appeared before the Star Chamber.

He was fined 10,000 marks and ordered to remain imprisoned at the Queen’s pleasure.

One of the things I find most striking about this episode is that Davison was not acting entirely on his own. Senior councillors had discussed the warrant, read it and agreed that it should be sent. Yet once Mary was dead, it was Davison who faced the most obvious punishment.

We cannot know exactly what Elizabeth intended at every stage, and the surviving accounts do not give us a simple answer. Davison believed he had followed her instructions. Elizabeth later insisted that the warrant had gone further than she intended.

That disagreement sits at the heart of what happened next.

Next in my Tudor series, I’ll be looking at Mary’s final evening and her execution at Fotheringhay on the 8th of February 1587.

Image info:

Mary, Queen of Scots’ death warrant, signed by Elizabeth I, 1587. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

If German troops landed, who would keep villages running, treat the wounded and stop panic on the roads? Britain had thousands of committees ready for exactly that

If German troops landed, who would keep villages running, treat the wounded and stop panic on the roads? Britain had thousands of committees ready for exactly that.

By June 1942, the government said that between 6,000 and 7,000 Invasion Committees had been established across Great Britain.

I came across them while looking at Britain’s invasion preparations. Most of what I had been reading was about roadblocks, stop lines, pillboxes and the Home Guard, so I was interested to find how much planning was also taking place in individual towns and villages.

One of the early schemes began in Norfolk in 1941. Major-General E. M. Steward, Zone Commander of the Mid-Norfolk Home Guard, believed there needed to be direct contact between local Home Guard commanders and the heads of civilian services. After discussions with the ARP Controller, police and local authorities, informal parish Invasion Committees were started. The idea spread through Norfolk and was later encouraged more widely.

The make-up of the committees varied. Police, Civil Defence, local government, food officials, the Women’s Voluntary Services, fire services and military representatives could all be involved.

Hansard, the official written record of debates and proceedings in the UK Parliament, gives a good idea of what they were preparing for. Volunteers might be given jobs digging trenches, clearing or blocking roads, removing debris or helping with first aid. Committees also arranged messengers in case telephones failed, looked for alternative drinking-water supplies, made plans for distributing food and kept records of useful equipment such as tools, stirrup pumps and sandbags.

Civilian movement was another concern. The fighting in France in 1940 had shown what could happen when large numbers of refugees crowded the roads. Britain’s “stand firm” policy was intended to keep people off roads needed for military movements unless they had been ordered to leave.

There are records from Flitton in Bedfordshire that give us a much closer insight into one of these committees.

Flitton’s members included a food organiser, an ARP representative, a police representative and a Home Guard officer. A Fire Service officer and a WVS representative joined in May 1942. They met every two months in the Parish Church Rooms.

The minutes contain some very specific details. Fire equipment was inventoried. Emergency cooking was discussed. Military exercises were organised. Six local women volunteered for emergency cooking in July 1942, and the Home Guard agreed to dig a slit trench so villagers could see how one should be constructed.

Two noticeboards were also requested because the village did not have suitable boards for the committee names and other notices to be displayed. One was to stand beside the telephone kiosk in Flitton and another opposite the garage in Greenfield.

On the 24th of April 1942, the schoolmaster at Flitton and the headmistress at Greenfield were to allow children to copy sketches of slit trenches from a circular sent by the ARP Controller. They would take the drawings home and get their parents interested in constructing them. By the meeting on the 22nd of May, the drawings had been completed and sent home.

Nearby Little Barford worked slightly differently. It was a sub-area of the Tempsford Invasion Committee, but it had its own reception, first-aid and other defence facilities and was expected to use them independently if circumstances required it. Its plans named the people responsible for emergency food, first aid, the fire service, special police, WVS, vehicles, labour and messengers.

Flitton’s committee remained in existence well into 1944. Its June meeting that year was cancelled because it was considered unnecessary. When members met again on the 21st of November 1944, they heard that the County Council no longer considered the Invasion Committee necessary.

For years, people in villages like Flitton had been meeting, organising equipment and making plans for an invasion that, thankfully, never came.

Sources & research: Bedfordshire Archives; UK Parliament, Hansard; Ministry of Information Digital Archive.

Image info:

Members of the Orford Invasion Committee, Suffolk, 1941. Ministry of Information Second World War Official Collection / Imperial War Museums, D4847. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Three Days After Stamford Bridge, William’s Fleet Appeared off the Sussex Coast

Three Days After Stamford Bridge, William’s Fleet Appeared off the Sussex Coast

On the 28th of September 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey in Sussex. Three days earlier Harold Godwinson had been at Stamford Bridge, near York, fighting Harald Hardrada and his own brother Tostig. Both were killed and the Norwegian invasion was broken.

William had been ready to cross for weeks. His fleet gathered near the mouth of the River Dives during August, but sailing depended upon the wind and for about a month it was against him. A storm on the 12th of September drove the ships east towards Saint-Valery at the mouth of the Somme, which meant more waiting.

 

They eventually sailed on the 27th.

William’s own vessel was the Mora, given to him by his wife Matilda. Around it sailed hundreds of other ships carrying the invasion army, its horses and equipment. We cannot put an exact number on the fleet. Medieval writers disagreed and some produced enormous figures; English Heritage puts the likely number somewhere between 700 and 1,000.

They crossed during the night and reached Pevensey before dawn.

Pevensey looked rather different from the place we see now. The Roman fort stood much closer to the sea, with marshland around it, and its great walls had already survived for centuries. William’s men made use of what was already there, creating a temporary fortification within the Roman enclosure, repairing sections of the walls and cutting a ditch across the peninsula.

The Bayeux Tapestry also gives us some of the practical details of the invasion. Men are shown unloading armour and equipment, horses are brought from the ships and food is prepared. William had brought far more across the Channel than soldiers alone.

Pevensey was only the first stop. On the following day the Normans moved towards Hastings and established themselves there. William’s men took supplies from the surrounding countryside and there was burning and pillaging in the area while they waited.

Harold and his family held extensive lands in Sussex, so William had landed in a part of England closely connected with the English king.

The news reached Harold more than 200 miles away after what had already been a punishing campaign. English Heritage records that he had travelled more than 200 miles in the space of a fortnight before Stamford Bridge. Some of those same men had then fought a major battle.

Harold came south again, stopping in London and collecting more troops before travelling on towards Sussex.

There were only nineteen days between Stamford Bridge on the 25th of September and Hastings on the 14th of October.

Harold and many of his men had covered an enormous distance and fought one major battle before they ever faced William’s army.

What do you make of Harold’s decision to head south so soon after Stamford Bridge?

Bayeux Tapestry, Scene 38, showing William’s fleet crossing the Channel and arriving at Pevensey. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why Were Enormous Water Tanks Built in Britain’s Parks During the War?

Why Were Enormous Water Tanks Built in Britain’s Parks During the War?

On the 20th of May 1941, Herbert Morrison told Parliament what had happened during one particularly difficult air raid.

High-explosive bombs had broken the water mains. Firefighters switched to a reserve static supply, but that was hit as well. The pumps were smashed and men were killed or injured.

Hoses were then run from another source some distance away. A large building collapsed across them and the water was cut off again.

Incidents like this were one reason huge Emergency Water Supply reservoirs began appearing around Britain. Historic England records that they were being constructed in towns and cities across the country from late 1941, giving fire brigades a supply that did not depend entirely upon the mains.

They were put on open ground, including parks, lawns and bomb sites.

Weston-super-Mare eventually had fifteen.

Three stood on Alexandra Parade beside the Odeon cinema and another three were placed on Beach Lawn. Others were built on bomb sites and in residential areas. Historic England’s study of wartime aerial photographs found that none of Weston’s fifteen reservoirs appeared before July 1942.

By the 26th of November 1942, MPs were discussing a different issue: children getting into the tanks.

Metal mesh had already been tried, but Morrison said children were dancing on it within an hour and one fell through. He announced that rings of barbed wire would be fitted to make access more difficult.

People were also throwing rubbish into the reservoirs and interfering with pipes and valves. Morrison described the supplies as being of “first-rate importance” to the war effort.

At Weston-super-Mare, the three reservoirs on Alexandra Parade were still standing when an RAF photograph was taken on the 13th of January 1946. By then they no longer contained water. Historic England records that they had been removed by 1948.

Their purpose was straightforward: if bombing had broken the mains, firefighters needed another source of water close enough to use.

It is another often-overlooked reminder of how much had to be planned for war. Everything had to be considered, including what would happen if something as basic as the water supply suddenly failed.

Did your town have one of these Emergency Water Supply tanks during the war?

Ministry of Information Photo Division, Marchant’s Hill School, Hindhead, Surrey, 1944. The large pool shown in the photograph was actually a wartime static emergency water tank, built so that it could also be used as a swimming pool by the children. Imperial War Museums collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

At 3.50pm, Two Explosions Tore Through Albion Colliery- 290 Men and Boys Never Came Home

At 3.50pm, Two Explosions Tore Through Albion Colliery- 290 Men and Boys Never Came Home

At about 3.50pm on the 23rd of June 1894, two loud bangs were heard at Albion Colliery in Cilfynydd, near Pontypridd. Dust and smoke rose from the shafts. In all, 290 men and boys were killed.

The colliery began producing coal in August 1887. By 1893, around 1,500 men and boys worked there. A number had travelled to Cilfynydd from elsewhere in Wales in search of work.

There was no accurate record of exactly how many men had been underground when the explosion occurred, adding to the confusion as relatives searched for missing family members. A few men were brought out alive, and most of those who were rescued later died from their injuries.

Bodies recovered from the mine were taken to a hayloft above the colliery stables, where relatives were asked to identify them. Relatives searched by lantern light during the identification process.

Some of the bodies were so badly injured that identification was difficult. In at least three cases, families took away the wrong body and later had to return it.

Albion employed men from well beyond Cilfynydd. Workers from North and West Wales were living in lodgings near the colliery, and men from the Mountain Ash area had also moved there after Phillip Jones became manager. Not all of them had brought their families with them. Some wives and children remained in other villages and towns while the men worked at the pit.

An inquest opened in Pontypridd the following month, but witnesses disagreed about where the first ignition had occurred. The jury concluded that gas had exploded and that coal dust had helped carry the blast through the workings.

Barrister J. Roskill was later asked to examine the disaster. His report placed the first ignition at blasting timber. He believed this had ignited accumulated gas, with the coal dust then carrying the explosion further through the mine.

Roskill criticised inadequate watering to control coal dust and the practice of blasting timber while men were still working underground.

Albion's 290 deaths were the highest then recorded in a South Wales mining disaster. The figure was not surpassed until the 14th of October 1913, when 439 miners were killed at Senghenydd. 

The scale of the loss is difficult to take in. 290 men and boys were killed in a single afternoon, leaving families without husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. In a place where so many households depended on the colliery, the effects reached far beyond the pit itself. Homes across Cilfynydd were left in mourning, neighbours lost friends and relatives, and the whole community had to live with the aftermath of one of the worst mining disasters South Wales had seen.

Albion Colliery, Cilfynydd, c.1894. Unknown photographer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.