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.