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.
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