The Tynewydd Colliery Disaster

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Word of the disaster spread throughout Britain. Reporters who came to the site found themselves at a loss because they spoke only English. A Welsh reporter, Owen Morgan, known as Morien, acted as translator.

Meanwhile, the water slowly receded as the pumps wheezed and clanked. On Sunday night, after four days and eight hours, another effort was made to rescue a group of four men and a boy trapped below in the black water, with a bubble of compressed air to fill their lungs. (Though the pressure was hard on them, the high concentration of oxygen kept them from suffocating.) At the onset of the flood, the miners had fled to the face Thomas Morgan had been working. The tunnel flooded, but they could rest on ledges above the water, where they wedged themselves into a coal tram, relying on each other for warmth. A couple of them even tried to swim out but were rewarded with failure and cold, wet clothes.

The only way to get to the trapped men was to cut through 113 feet of coal. If the miners could survive the length of time that would take, they would then face the danger of drowning when the breakthrough occurred and the water rushed in to replace the escaping air. Calculations indicated that the men’s heads probably would remain above water.

Many people volunteered to work on the four-member rescue teams. As Ken Llewellyn writes in Disaster at Tynewydd: An Account of a Rhondda Mine Disaster in 1877, the most thorough study of the event, ‘Each man had been warned of the dangers from the water, the gas, and the compressed air. They had an excellent chance of being drowned, crushed, burnt or suffocated.’

They began their work at 3 pm, Monday, 16th April, and worked full-out, in four-hour shifts. At the end of the first 24 hours, they’d cut through 48 feet. So great was the rescuers’ desire to free their comrades that each team had to be forced to quit at the end of their shift so they wouldn’t become completely exhausted.

Up above, officials puzzled over how to deal with the compressed air so the trapped miners wouldn’t drown when the rescuers broke through. They decided that air locks would be built behind the rescue teams and air would be pumped in so the pressure couldn’t fall uncontrollably.

The teams had been signalling the trapped miners every six hours. At 3 pm on Wednesday, their signal received no response. They tried again, and according to Llewellyn, ‘to their great joy they heard a voice indistinctly from behind fifteen feet of coal. The next team worked as if their own lives were at stake; the South Wales Daily News said ‘the rapidity with which the work has proceeded is unparalleled.”

At 7 pm they heard one of the men calling to them, saying he ‘thought the hole was nearly through but that they should work a little to the right.’ Excitement began to build above at the pit head, and telegraph wires hummed with the news.

By Thursday morning, the rescue team had come close enough to the survivors to bore several small holes through to the men and make some abortive attempts to push food through to them. (They quickly plugged the holes again to limit the escape of air.) Engineers prepared the first airlock but could not make it airtight. As volunteers bored another hole into the intervening coal, ‘a large discharge of gas put out the flames in the safety lamps.’ The miners were excruciatingly sensitive to the danger of a gas explosion-in 1856, 114 had lost their lives in the first big explosion in the Rhondda Valley, at the Cymmer Colliery. There was a strong possibility that additional pockets of explosive gas would be released if the compressed air was allowed to escape. Fear nearly overwhelmed the rescuers’ determination to go on.

But Abraham Dodd, Thomas Jones, William Thomas, Isaac Pride, and Daniel Thomas overcame their dread. Trusting the calculation that if they allowed the compressed air to escape, the water would rise only to the trapped men’s necks, the volunteers unstopped the holes. Air thundered through the breaches, laced with gas that made their safety lamps flame blue. The men behind the barrier waited in terror as the water made its cold progress up their bodies. Then it finally ceased beneath their chins.

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