Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/270

17, 1860.] with the other), roars up as though in a blast furnace, and setting fire to the neighbouring coal, sends up a column of fire sixty yards high, in itself a glorious sight, and which, the night before, had illuminated the country for miles round.

This conflagration had only been stopped by dosing, as nearly hermetically as possible, both the shaft mouths; and the question now is, what further can be done. Alas! for the men below,—nothing.

The first great object is to extinguish the flame, and to do this we must of necessity extinguish life, too. No one dare say that all must have perished, and so no one dare take upon himself the responsibility of measures for extinguishing the smouldering flames.

And so we stand over one hundred and eighty-six human beings dead, or now perishing beneath us, and discuss the best means of killing those amongst them—if any—who are not dead outright,—for we must extinguish the flame; whilst round us some thousands of holiday-makers walk, and talk, and drink, and fight, each enjoying himself in his favourite way, and making the most of his excursion, while across the corn-field, black with the smoke ashes of the past night’s conflagration, hundreds more sight-seers press on, “to see.” Such is Burnslay life!

We determine at length—we who specially guard the entrance to Death—to try and stifle the flame below by steam (I need not say what beside we may do); but here hesitation and dread of responsibility creep in: and a compromise between a really useful course of proceeding and total inaction is made. Our engineers accordingly turn a jet of steam down the main shaft from the engine boiler, in the manner proposed by Mr. Gurney for the purpose of ventilation; but that ingenious gentleman would have been astonished to see the scale upon which we carry out his ideas; for instead of using as powerful a jet as the boilers can supply, we take one which has an aperture of about one quarter of an inch, and which discharged into the downcast shaft, must become utterly useless at a distance of a few feet from the surface of the ground. And so the flame of the furnace—and perhaps of life—smoulders on.

I return to my dust and work, weary and dispirited. For days the great Bungle explosion is talked of to the exclusion of every other subject, and at length we learn that the fire having steadily refused to go out of itself, it had been determined to extinguish it by stopping the pumping engine, and allowing the water to accumulate, and also by turning a small neighbouring stream into the mine, which is accordingly done, and the extinction of the fire at last is effectually accomplished.

The work of re-draining the colliery is one of time. Some weeks elapse before it is sufficiently free from water to enable the workmen—picked men selected from the neighbouring collieries—to descend in search of the bodies of the lost, and for the purpose of clearing out the mine for reworking. What they see and do when they at length begin their work, it is not pleasant to describe.

One of the best and sharpest men from our works is amongst those selected, and I often examine him on his return from work in the evening, as to the progress made. His story is generally horrible enough: the headless and unrecognisable trunks which he has come across, the limbs shattered and decayed, and the trunkless heads kicked against like blocks of coal, and taken up to be buried, all confused together, in the neighbouring village churchyard, and all his other such anecdotes of what he and his fellows have to do, make no pleasant recital; suffice it to say, that at length the mine is cleared out, the machinery repaired, the engines set to work, and the mine, with a new set of workmen, set again going.

And now, I ask, can such accidents be avoided? I do not ask this for the sake of the men themselves, for they are so accustomed to them—at least in this district—that they care little for them; but for the sake of society at large, and of the State, which is supposed to take some care of even the most insignificant of its subjects.

I say that here the colliers (like the historical eels) are too much accustomed to such accidents to care much about them when they happen. Let me mention two facts illustrative of my assertion. First, in a colliery within a very few miles of the scene of the above explosion—not more than three or four—and after its occurrence, a strike either took place, or was upon the point of taking place, among the colliers, because the proprietors insisted upon certain parts of their mine being worked with safety-lamps, which these men always object to using, preferring more light even with more danger; and, secondly, in one of the collieries on which I was myself engaged, into which I took a visitor with me on one occasion, when he happened to inquire of the overlooker who accompanied us, as we watched a miner hewing away in his hole upon the solid mass of coal before him, whether there was any fire-damp there?

“Has’t any gas in t’hoil, lad?” said the overlooker.

“Ay, there’s a bit,” said Blacky.

And our guide, unscrewing his safety-lamp, and making us stand back behind the brattice where the ventilating current of pure air was passing, applied the naked flame to the roof, and—bang! went the gas there with a loud explosion, whilst several jets from the surface of the coal caught fire, and were extinguished by the miner with his jacket, as our conductor screwed on his safety-gauze again. I never asked any questions about gas again, nor looked for any such experiments when under ground; but these incidents—especially the former—serve to show the recklessness of the colliers of the district.

In the immediate neighbourhood of the Bungle Colliery there have been, as everybody knows, two nearly as fatal explosions—those at the “Beeches” and the “Early Main” collieries; but what then? Why there is more work for those who are left, and higher wages. The widows of the slain are subscribed for by a sympathising public, and consequently very soon (with their dowries) find new