Coal was mined on a scale to meet local needs right up to the 1800s, with just small shallow pits employing merely a few hands. The coming of the Industrial Revolution changed all of this, with larger and deeper collieries being sunk to meet the demand for the new mills, foundries, and factories which was to eventually make Britain the greatest manufacturing county in the world. The need for coal though had a high price, and came at a massive cost in human lives. Thousands of men and boys perished in the coal mines of Lancashire and the other coalfields around the country as the Industrial Revolution firmly took its grip. Firstly these accidents in the mines came as singular incidents whereby one or two men died through small explosions. As the pits got larger so did the number of men being killed.
This book chronicles the mining disasters in the Lancashire Coalfield from the 1830s through to the greatest single colliery explosion in English mining history - the Pretoria Colliery Disaster of 1910. It is however not all about mining explosions, although this was by far, the cause of the greatest loss of life - it also includes underground fires, flooding, and cage accidents, for life as a coal miner was fraught with everyday dangers such as these. It might also be said that on a number of occasions it was the miner himself who caused many of the explosions. For instance naked light (candles) were still being used underground at the Clifton Hall Colliery near Manchester in spite of the common and frequent explosions around the Lancashire Coalfields. The Wigan colliers would have thrown their arms up in disbelief at using candles in such as gassy mine it was said later. As a consequence of this, one hundred and seventy eight men and boys perished through an explosion at the Clifton Hall Colliery on the 18th June 1885.
The author worked at East Lancashire's last deep coal mine, the Hapton Valley Colliery near Burnley, and comes from a line of coal miners, his uncles worked there, as did his grandfather. He has other coal mining history books to his credit, such as The Coal Mines of East Lancashire, Coal Mines Around Accrington and Blackburn and the pictorial book Collieries of North East Lancashire. Just two years before he went working underground at Hapton Valley Colliery, an explosion on March 22nd 1962 seared through the Rise Two workings of the pit, taking away nineteen lives, the youngest being just sixteen years of age. This was the last major disaster in the Lancashire Coalfield, let us not forget those who died that day, nor the many hundreds more who perished in past colliery disasters.
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