Trimdon Grange Colliery explosion killed 74

Their bodies were badly broken, from where they had been slammed by the explosion into the walls, and horribly charred, by the fireball.

But reports in The Northern Echo, and other papers, noted that many of the victims were unmarked by the brutality of the incident. They had succumbed to the poisonous gas known as choke-damp or fire-damp or after-damp: it contained the carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide that was left once the fire had consumed all of the oxygen in the air, and it suffocated them silently.

“At times, the scenes were of the most sickening description,” said the Echo’s reporter on the Trimdon pithead on February 16, 1882 (see Memories 563). “Now a mangled corpse, literally, in fact, blown to atoms, was brought to terra firma…while shortly afterwards a youth who had not yet seen 17 summers, with placid smile, and who had apparently died without any struggle, quickly succeeded.”

140 YEARS SINCE THE TRIMDON GRANGE COLLIERY DISASTER

The men and boys of Trimdon Grange were not unique in suffering this fate. The Durham Mine Research Group lists nearly 4,000 deaths in 118 significant events in (mostly) Durham pits, running from Fatfield in 1708, when 69 lives were lost, to Easington in 1951, when 83 lives were lost.

There will have been many more deaths in “small accidents” involving one or more deaths that were not fully recorded, especially in the early years.

Seventeen of these major events, including the one at Trimdon Grange, involved more than 50 deaths, and 90 per cent of all the events involved fire or explosion, and often both.

Around the start of the 19th Century, as pits went deeper and spread further from the shaft, there was a series of major explosions that came to the attention of the public, despite the attempts of coal-owners to suppress the news.

The public were horrified at the scale of deaths and the numbers of widows and fatherless children that were being created. This led to moves to find safer ways of lighting the mines.

Traditionally, mines were lit with tallow candles, but the growing rate of accidents led to other means being tried.

One was the steel mill (above), where a flint is applied to a fast rotating wheel of steel, producing a succession of sparks. This had been widely used in the Cumbrian miles and was, wrongly, believed incapable of igniting the fire-damp.

Another was the use of rotting fish-skins, whose phosphorescence gave a feeble light.

Even mirrors were suggested, to direct sunlight down the shaft!

Mining engineers recognised that ventilating the mine would help to prevent a build-up of the explosive methane in the first place. However, the usual method of ventilation was a large furnace at the foot of the upcast shaft, creating a draught. It would burn as much as 20 tons of coal per shift. Inevitably, the furnace could become the ignition point for the fire-damp.

Only from the latter part of the 19th Century were fans, often placed on the surface, used to force ventilation through the mines.

The public concern also led to the development of safety-lamps.

In 1812, there were explosions in pits at Felling and Herrington that killed more than 100 people and led to the creation of the Sunderland Committtee to address safety. One of the committee’s members was Bishopwearmouth physician Dr William Reid Clanny, who developed the first safety lamp: a candle surrounded by glass that was fed by air that was bubbled through water to remove the explosive gases. It was an extremely cumbersome device that produced only a little light – but at least it didn’t blow the mine up.

In 1815, Sir Humphry Davy (above) and George Stephenson (below) separately produced lamps working on the same principal that a flame could not pass through a very small space. The original Davy lamp had a fine wire gauze surrounding the flame of an oil lamp, but that limited the amount of light it emitted.

Stephenson’s Geordie lamp used a glass cylinder, so it gave a better light but, before the days of safety glass, it was fragile and so had a protective metal shield with holes around it.

A Davy lamp and, below, a Geordie lamp

There was a big controversy at the time over who had really make the breakthrough – and who had stolen the other’s idea. It was a classic Goliath versus David battle: Sir Humphry, knighted in 1812, was the country’s leading chemist who understood the science behind the breakthrough versus the self-educated George Stephenson, the Killingworth mechanic who had developed the device through trial and error following explosions at his pit in 1806 and 1809.

Davy had been approached by the Sunderland Committee to find a solution. He visited the North East in late summer 1815, inspected Clanny’s lamp and was sent samples of gas from North East mines to experiment on in his laboratory in London, where he discovered that the naked flame of a lamp could be contained within a wire gauze, which would allow air to enter, but would stop the flame igniting any methane outside.

He described his design in a letter he wrote on October 30 to Dr Gray of Hebburn. Those details were made public at a coal trade meeting in Newcastle on November 3.

Meanwhile, Stephenson had a tinsmith make his lamp on October 21 and it was demonstrated in Newcastle, at the Lit & Phil, on December 5.

Davy was lauded by the coal bosses, who presented him with silver plate worth £2,000. The Royal Society gave him a £1,000 award.

Stephenson’s supporters, including some significant mines-owners, while not denying Davy’s achievement, publicised his independent development of the Geordie Safety-lamp and awarded him £100.

Sadly, Davy tried to take the scientific moral high ground, dismissively describing Stephenson’s lamp as “his gas exploding machine”. He wrote to Stephenson’s supporters, criticizing them for backing an item that lacked his “Scientific fame, honour and varacity”.

Neither Stephenson, nor Clanny whom Davy also insulted, responded publicly to the denigrations which are a stain on Davy’s reputation.

Randolph Pit Yard, Evenwood during a shift change, in the 1910s. The miners appear to be using Glennys, a hand lamp with a naked flame used in some mines until the 1950s

Both the Davy lamp and the Geordie lamp, which were improved during following decades, were a big improvement on tallow candles. However, as late as 1880, it was common to use open “midgie” lamps along the transport ways of a mine, with a “caution board” beyond which the midgie must not be used.

There was no monitoring or regulation of mining before an 1842 Act of Parliament that prevented women and children under 10 working underground, but it did nothing to regulate the running of the mines. Lord Londonderry, a major coalowner in Durham, opposed the Bill in the House of Lords and pushed through amendments that watered it down.

The 1850 Act introduced Inspectors of Mines, but gave them no rights of entry or powers, but raised the age limit to 12. A further Act in 1855 gave powers to inspectors and defined some safety standards.

Despite further Acts, it was only in 1886, four years after the Trimdon Grange disaster, and as a result of a Royal Commission, that the government took powers to formally investigate mining accidents.

With the inspectors collecting significant data on the continuing explosions, scientists came to realise that coal dust played a key role in the blasts – fine dust in the air could either explode on its own or its presence would worsen the impact of a gas explosion.

Chester-le-Street miners with their Geordie lamps and bait bags

With all of these advances, the mines had become safer places by the end of the 19th Century, even as coal production had tripled. However, they could still not be described as “safe”, and the winning of coal came at an extremely high cost to the thousands of Durham miners who lost their lives.

The Davy Lamp pub stood amid a small settlement of early miners' houses that was called Davy Lamp. It is a little strange that the community, which nowadays it is in Kelloe, was not named after George Stephenson, who was the local hero involved in a bitter with Sir Humphry Davy over who invented the lamp first