An Irishman's Diary

IN The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell painted a memorably grim picture of life in the Lancashire town's coal-mines

IN The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell painted a memorably grim picture of life in the Lancashire town's coal-mines. He witnessed it up close, having first braved the reluctance of everyone concerned to bring such a "nuisance" down the pit during working hours, and then tortured his six-foot frame on a mile-long journey underground, most of it through four-feet-high shafts: a process that took him an hour, writes Frank McNally

His reward was to see coal-mining, circa 1937, in all its terrible glory.

"At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there - heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire. . .except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust." Three decades before Orwell visited Wigan, even that deficiency in the vision of hell was rectified by one of town's mines, with terrible consequences.

On a Tuesday evening in August 1908, a gas explosion at the Maypole colliery started a fierce fire and with it more explosions. The subsequent disaster could have been worse. A short while earlier, more than 500 miners from the day shift had finished work. But 79 men - many of them Irish - had just started the evening shift. Only three got out alive.

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Rescue attempts were doomed from the start by the conflagration raging below. An eye-witness later recalled the fraught scenes at the pithead as friends and colleagues arrived to help:

"One of our rescue team, a young man named Grennan whose father belonged to Westmeath, became hysterical. He was crying and shouting and demanding a lamp. I eventually persuaded the lamp man in charge to supply Grennan and myself with lamps. We went towards the cage amidst shouts from the crowds to come back.

"The colliery officials ordered us back and a policeman was put on duty - no one was to go up the steps on the brow again. A short time afterwards the worst and most terrific explosion took place - it blew the head gears, wheels and pulleys yards away, galvanised roofing. . .was blown over fields, and the crowds stampeded. . ."

By the time work began to repair the mine's shattered ventilation equipment, the fate of those underground was sealed. On August 20th, 1908, The Irish Times reported scenes "pitiful in the extreme" among the large crowd gathered outside the pit and described the now-calmer rescue mission:

"An impressive silence characterised the working of the groups of energetic but sad-eyed men, broken only by the heavy sound of hammers falling upon the ventilation gear."

The paper also noted that, "as has frequently been the case in the last 28 years", the disaster occurred almost immediately after the issue of a "colliery warning". This was a weather alert published in newspapers at times of high air pressure, urging miners to beware of escaping firedamp - a combustible gas given off by coal - and to keep dust moistened in the vicinity of blasting operations.

But such disasters were, as the paper remarked, all too common. In England and Wales, there had been at least eight incidents causing multiple deaths in the previous 15 years. And 1906 had seen what remains to this day Europe's worst mining disaster when more than 1,000 people - including many children - died at Courrières in Northern France.

In the Maypole, most of the bodies were not recovered. The mine itself became their cemetery: a priest read the burial service on the pit brow before the shaft was sealed down. Subsequent inquests and inquiries found that the explosion resulted from shot-firing and perhaps undue care with gas. But, as was noted, the fireman had not lived to explain.

Among the Irish dead, the greatest concentration - 13 - came from Mayo. Which is why, later this week, that county is hosting a series of events to mark the centenary. Mayo representatives travelled to Wigan for the actual anniversary last month. Now Wigan's mayor, Rona Winkworth, will return the compliment, among other things laying a wreath on Friday at the grave of Michael Davitt.

Other events include the dedication tomorrow of a room at the Hennigan Heritage Museum in Swinford, in honour of the Maypole victims.

As a tie-in to the commemorations, the Mayo Emigrant Liaison Committee has organised a fund-raising dinner on Friday night in Castlebar. The MELC is a decade-old initiative founded to help poor and elderly Irish emigrants in Britain - the people whose postal orders home were an important part of Gross National Product in the decades before the Celtic Tiger.

The committee's activities include organising an annual holiday to Ireland, the latest recipients of which - 50 of them - began arriving yesterday from Birmingham Irish centre, Irish Community Care, Liverpool, and London's Simon Community.

Tickets for the Castlebar dinner cost €35 and are still available from Kevin Bourke at 087-2439748.