Trapped underground

Do you recognise any of these names? Fred Armitage, Colin Barnaby, Frank Billingham, Sydney Brown, Charles Cotton, Edward Finnegan, Alan Haigh.

Some of us in Yorkshire do. They are the names of seven coalminers who in March 1973 were killed when the new coalface they were developing 1,000 feet below ground broke through into an abandoned and flooded mineshaft.

The men worked at Lofthouse colliery between Leeds and Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

Lofthouse was an old, deep coalmine, sunk in 1880. I spent a week at the pit working as a reporter at the Yorkshire Evening Post, sending several reports a day on the efforts to rescue the men.

There were hopes that they might be alive, trapped in an air pocket. For six days rescuers struggled vainly to find a way through the flooded and wrecked area to the pitface.

Throughout the rescue operation, families and friends of the missing men gathered at the pithead in a scene which mining communities have witnessed all too often in some two centuries of deep mining in Britain.

The hopes were futile. The breakthrough into the abandoned workings had released more than three million gallons of water.

The force of the flood was so great that it threw huge boulders around like pebbles. So ferocious was the inrush and so extensive the damage that the men's bodies were never recovered.

Today a monument stands about a mile from the pithead, above the spot where the men are believed to be entombed.

The Lofthouse colliery disaster was followed by a public inquiry into how it happened. Representing the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was Arthur Scargill, then in his thirties and making a name as an effective union official.

His cross-examination of the officials of the National Coal Board (NCB) was devastating.

It emerged that the NCB had been aware of the existence of old mine shafts in the area around Lofthouse colliery, and even knew of the existence of the abandoned shaft which was breached, but it had been assumed that the shaft did not descend to the same depth as the new Lofthouse workings, and no check had been carried out.

The public inquiry into the disaster made recommendations which were intended to avoid repetitions of the tragedy, including the introduction of searches for evidence such as old maps and geological field documents prior to the development of new underground roadways, and in the absence of positive information, no development should proceed.

The NCB was ordered to prepare a catalogue listing relevant documents and other evidence to be checked.

NUM secretary Chris Kitchen has raised questions as to whether the recommendations of the Lofthouse colliery disaster inquiry were applied at Gleision colliery in south Wales where an inrush of water is again believed responsible for the deaths of miners.

At the time of the Lofthouse disaster Britain had a quarter of a million miners working at 250 deep coalmines.

Today there are less than 2,000 miners and only a handful of deep coalmines remain.

Kellingley in Yorkshire is one of them, and three miners have died there in recent years in industrial accidents.

The inquiry at Gleision may reveal whether the deaths of four miners there were avoidable.

But it is tragic that in an industry which has been decimated and privatised, its communities and their economies wrecked, still the men die.