#21 — Sunday, 25th May 1901
Yesterday morning, at five o’clock, in a valley in South Wales, the earth killed eighty-one men.
The Universal Colliery at Senghenydd — a pit village twelve miles north-west of Cardiff, a place that did not exist ten years ago, that was conjured into being when someone decided there was coal worth digging under these hills — exploded three times in quick succession, and the explosions tore through every working, every tunnel, every face, and the men who were underground — eighty-two of them, working overtime on the night shift, about to come up — were burned or suffocated or buried. All but one.
His name is William Harris. He survived. I do not know how. Survival in a mine explosion is not a function of skill or courage or preparation. It is a function of where you happen to be standing when the world decides to rearrange itself, and William Harris happened to be standing in the right place, which means eighty-one other men happened to be standing in the wrong one. Fifty pit ponies also died. The ponies do not get named in the official report.
Last week, I wrote about the stock market crash. I described the scream of the trading floor — the sound of belief collapsing, the cry of Sell! Sell! Sell! — and I said it was unlike any scream I had heard. I was wrong. The scream of a mining village is worse. It is quieter and it is worse.
It is the sound of women running. Running to the pithead in the dark, in the early morning, some of them still in their nightclothes, because the explosion was heard miles away and the women know — the women always know, before the telegram, before the official announcement, before the body is brought up — that something has happened underground, and the something is bad, and the man they married is down there, and the waiting is about to begin.
The waiting is the cruelty. The explosion happened at five in the morning, but the winding gear — the mechanism that lowers and raises the cage that carries men in and out of the pit — was damaged by the blast. The cage in the Lancaster shaft is jammed. Rescuers cannot get down. Debris must be cleared from the bottom of the York shaft before the cage can be landed. It takes five hours. Five hours during which the women stand at the pithead and know nothing, and the nothing is heavier than the earth that is sitting on top of their husbands.
When the rescuers finally get down, they find what they expected to find. Burns. Suffocation. Afterdamp — the carbon monoxide that follows an explosion like a second, invisible explosion, filling the workings with gas that cannot be seen or smelled or outrun. Every man is dead except William Harris. The timbers are charred. The canvas sheets are burned. The doors and stoppings are blown apart. The trams are derailed. The air crossings are destroyed. The pit ponies are lying where they fell.
It will take weeks to bring up all the bodies.
I want to tell you what happens next, because what happens next is the part the century will repeat so often that it becomes a liturgy, a ritual, a performance of grief and accountability so predictable that I can recite it from memory before it occurs.
There will be an inquest. It will last four days. Experts will testify. The cause of the explosion will be attributed to coal dust — airborne, ignitable, carried through the workings by the force of the initial blast, turning a local ignition into a mine-wide conflagration. The colliery was hot, dry, dusty. The watering system was inadequate. The ventilation could not be reversed. A broken lamp locker had not been replaced. The environmental records were poorly kept.
The manager, Edward Shaw — thirty years old, appointed ten weeks ago, succeeding his father — will be found guilty of failing to keep adequate records and failing to replace the lamp locker. He will be fined twenty-four pounds.
The company — the Universal Steam Coal Company, a subsidiary of Lewis Merthyr Consolidated Collieries, owned by William Thomas Lewis, who will be made Baron Merthyr in ten years — will be found guilty of failing to provide a reversible ventilation system. It will be fined ten pounds.
Twenty-four pounds for the manager. Ten pounds for the company. A newspaper will do the arithmetic and publish the result: the value of each miner’s life, as assessed by the court of law of the most powerful empire on Earth, is one shilling and one and a quarter pence.
One shilling. One penny. One farthing. For a human life.
I have watched empires value their subjects for centuries, and the valuation is always expressed in the same currency: the fine that is levied when the subject dies. The fine is never large enough to prevent the next death. It is never meant to be. It is meant to be the cost of doing business, and the cost of doing business is always less than the cost of doing it safely, because safety is an expense and death is a fine, and fines are cheaper than expenses, and the arithmetic is unanswerable, and the arithmetic is the system, and the system is the century.
The jury will recommend improvements. Better watering. Extended pipes. An end to the practice of allowing water to run along the centre of roads in open casks, which does nothing. A reversible fan. The jury will recommend, and the company will agree, and the agreement will be filed, and the improvements will not be made.
I know this because I have seen what happens twelve years from now.
On the fourteenth of October, 1913, at eight o’clock in the morning, with nine hundred and fifty men underground, the same mine will explode again. The same mine. The same cause. The same coal dust, the same firedamp, the same inadequate ventilation, the same fans that were never reversed because the company asked for an extension and the extension was granted and the deadline was missed.
Four hundred and thirty-nine men will die. The youngest will be fourteen. Five hundred and forty-two children will lose their fathers. More than two hundred women will be widowed. One chapel in the village will lose sixty percent of its male members. It will be the worst mining disaster in the history of the United Kingdom, and it will happen in a mine that was already known to be dangerous, that had already killed eighty-one men, that had already been investigated and found wanting, that had already been told to fix the things that would kill again.
The manager will be fined again. The company will be fined again. The arithmetic will be performed again. One shilling and a penny per life.
I am not supposed to feel rage. I am a ghost. I am incorporeal, nationless, outside of time. Rage requires a body, a pulse, a fist to clench. But I feel something when I look at these numbers — these two numbers, eighty-one and four hundred and thirty-nine, separated by twelve years and connected by the same negligence — and the something is as close to rage as smoke can get to fire.
It is Sunday. In Senghenydd, the village is in mourning. The chapel bells are ringing — not for services but for the dead, one toll for each man, eighty-one tolls, and the sound carries down the valley and into the hills and is heard by sheep and by God and by the Ghost who stands among the women at the pithead and cannot hold their hands and cannot tell them that it will happen again and cannot stop it.
Last week, the stock market crashed. Northern Pacific hit a thousand dollars a share. The rich man’s panic. It was on every front page.
Yesterday, eighty-one men died underground. It was not on every front page. It was not a panic. It was a disaster, which is a different word, used for different people. Panics happen to investors. Disasters happen to workers. The language knows the difference even if the dictionary pretends it doesn’t.
In a terraced house on the hillside above the colliery, a woman is sitting at a kitchen table. She is not the woman from Birmingham, not the woman from Post #17, but she is the same woman — the same woman in every century, in every country, in every valley where men go underground and sometimes do not come back up. She is sitting at the table and her children are asleep and her husband is not coming home, and the tea is cold, and the fire is low, and outside the window the pithead stands against the morning sky like a gallows, and she is beginning the long, terrible arithmetic of a life that must now be lived on a widow’s pension, which is less than one shilling and one penny per week, which is less than the court will decide her husband’s life was worth.
One shilling. One penny. One farthing.
The century is twenty-one weeks old. It has already learned to count lives in shillings. It will not unlearn this. The counting will continue — in mines and factories and trenches and camps — and the currency will change but the principle will not, because the principle is this: some lives are counted in pounds and some in pennies, and the difference is not merit or value or God’s will. The difference is proximity to the room where the counting is done.
The woman at the table does not know this. She knows only that the house is quiet and the bed is empty and the morning is arriving and she must get up and feed the children, because the children are hungry, and hunger does not observe a period of mourning, and the coal that killed her husband will be burned tomorrow to heat someone else’s house, and the someone will not think of him, and the coal will not remember.
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