Charity's Pitfalls: The Senghenydd Disaster

October 14th marked the eightieth anniversary of Britain's worst ever coalmining disaster: the Senghenydd explosion of 1913 in which 459 South Wales miners were killed. It may seem that with such huge catastrophes – it is to be hoped – a thing of the past, and with the coal industry apparently in irreversible decline, such disasters can be of little, if any, relevance to those of us living in the 19')Os. However, this is by no means the case. For with the coal industry about to be privatised, the welfare state about to be 'reformed' (and three miners killed by a roof fall in Nottinghamshire in August), the disaster and its aftermath raise issues that should still be of concern to us today, several generations after the event.

The Universal Colliery, Senghenydd, lay in the tiny Aber valley, five miles to the north of Caerphilly. It had been developed in the 1890s by one of the most influential – no to say infamous – of South Wales coal owners, Sir William Lewis (the first Lord Merthyr), and then by the Lewis Merthyr Consolidated Collieries of Hafod, near Pontypridd.