Throwback Thursday: The Claycross Calamities
I can't really be bothered to hunt out a photo for Throwback Thursday so I instead looked back through my LJ to see what I was doing in June 2007 (the first year of the blog). It turns out I was reading history:
"I read The Claycross Calamities by Terry Judge largely because my interest in genealogy has revealed that a number of my ancestors were miners living in Claycross (or neighbouring Pilsley) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Claycross Calamities documents three of the pit disasters at the Claycross company mines: one inundation and two explosions. The first gets considerably more detail, probably because the progress of the disaster was spread out over a longer period whereas coverage of the explosions really only deals with the aftermath. The book hints darkly at company cover-ups and the growth of miner's representation but can't really make the events support this thesis. It seems clear that the Clay Cross pits were some of the best run (for their time) and the use of candles, as opposed to safety lamps, which were the likely cause of the two explosions was part of a conscious pay-off in the minds of both management and miners of the risks of poor lighting versus explosions in pits where "firedamp" was rarely encountered. The Inundation was probably caused by inaccurate pit mapping (the miners breached a previously closed and flooded pit when they should have been 40 metres away from it) for which nowadays the company would almost certainly be held liable but it wasn't clear to me that their exoneration was because the jury was not composed of miners (the case implied by the book) or simply because Company/Health and Safety legislation was not appropriately in place at the time. The book was well-written however and an interesting and reasonably technical read should you be interested in the history of mining." This entry was originally posted at https://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/707805.html.
"I read The Claycross Calamities by Terry Judge largely because my interest in genealogy has revealed that a number of my ancestors were miners living in Claycross (or neighbouring Pilsley) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Claycross Calamities documents three of the pit disasters at the Claycross company mines: one inundation and two explosions. The first gets considerably more detail, probably because the progress of the disaster was spread out over a longer period whereas coverage of the explosions really only deals with the aftermath. The book hints darkly at company cover-ups and the growth of miner's representation but can't really make the events support this thesis. It seems clear that the Clay Cross pits were some of the best run (for their time) and the use of candles, as opposed to safety lamps, which were the likely cause of the two explosions was part of a conscious pay-off in the minds of both management and miners of the risks of poor lighting versus explosions in pits where "firedamp" was rarely encountered. The Inundation was probably caused by inaccurate pit mapping (the miners breached a previously closed and flooded pit when they should have been 40 metres away from it) for which nowadays the company would almost certainly be held liable but it wasn't clear to me that their exoneration was because the jury was not composed of miners (the case implied by the book) or simply because Company/Health and Safety legislation was not appropriately in place at the time. The book was well-written however and an interesting and reasonably technical read should you be interested in the history of mining." This entry was originally posted at https://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/707805.html.