Fifty years ago - on September 18, 1959 - 47 Lanarkshire miners died in the Auuchengeich pit disaster. I was there and had the privilege of writing this 'In Memoriam' at the unveiling of a moving new memorial ...

THE PIT OF DEATH

A rookie reporter, I had been sent along the old A8, long before motorways, to cover the disaster for a now-defunct Edinburgh evening paper – a copy of the Hollywood hack in my drape suit, knitted tie, Humphrey Bogart-style trench coat slung over my shoulder and my new suede shoes ruined by the coal dust of the nearby bing we used as a grandstand to watch the tragedy unfold.

Since then, in a long career, I have been on the scene amid the carnage of plane crashes, train crashes, a tower block collapse, fires and terrorist bombings and managed to remain the dispassionate observer. But the sights and sounds that remain most vivid in the memory are those of Auchengeich …

Especially the moment when the Coal Board chairman Bob Parker, his face grey with strain, stepped under the floodlights to tell the apprehensive crowd that the firefighters and rescue teams had been withdrawn and as he spoke thousands of gallons of water were pouring into the road where the men were trapped.

Horror

As the full horror sank in, women buckled at the knees and collapsed amid the sounds of sorrow and men groaned and shook their heads in helplessness. Some shouted: “They should never have been down there … It was the fan, the fan …” before police moved them away. It was an appalling end to a day that had started 16 hours earlier in sunny normality.

The men of Auchengeich had gathered as usual at the pithead to start their first shift after a three-day strike; there was the usual banter and talk of the previous night’s TV -  magician Chan Canasta and Boots and Saddles on the BBC  and Emergency Ward Ten, Jig Time and Take Your Pick on Scottish TV.

As the first cageload climbed into the train at the shaft bottom for the mile-long eight-minute ride to the coalface, they could not know they were riding to their deaths. Ahead of them, a fan belt had overheated and sparked off oil deposits and vapour. Within minutes, fire – the great enemy underground –was raging.

Tragically, the men in that first train smelled the fumes as the bogies started to rumble down the slope to the coalface but ignored it as just another underground smell. Minutes later, they were choking and gasping for breath as the bogies ran into smoke and deadly carbon monoxide and they signaled frantically for the winchman to haul the bogies back – but of the 48 on the train, 47 died where they sat only a few hundred yards from safety.

The winchman, who was being suffocated by fumes and heavy black smoke, had heard footsteps coming toward him and feared if he started the train up again it would run down whoever was running to safety.

The only man to escape of the 48 who climbed aboard the death train was 6ft 4 ins Tommy Green – ‘Big Tam’ – who decided it was going too slow. He jumped off, pick in hand using it like a blind man as he groped way back, finally collapsing just as other miners came to search for their mates. One said: “I kicked something in the darkness. I knelt down and found I was standing on a man’s face.”

Big Tam said: “I tried not to breathe, then I realised it was desperate as men were choking all round me. I didn’t think we were going to make it, so I jumped off and started stumbling back. The smoke became so thick I couldn’t see an inch in front of my face. I didn’t think I was going to make it but finally I got to where other men were waiting. “When I came to again at the pit-head, I opened my eyes and I saw blue sky. I took a deep breath and the air felt very clean.”

There were other stories of lucky escapes - a miner who dallied at the pithead for his pal … a husband whose wife had not heard the alarm clock … others who wanted a day at the Ayr Gold Cup … and the man who stood aside to let a mate get on the train because he was a piece-worker: “I thought I was doing him a good turn but he went to his death in my place.”

One of those waiting at the shaft bottom for the next bogie to the coalface was Ian Lowe, now 71 and still living in Chryston, within walking distance of the pit. He talks matter-of-factly of something that happened to miners, with no sense that it was an extraordinary way to make a living and even more to have undergone that experience and then gone back down the mines for the remainder of his working life.

He recalls: “If you didn't go down by 7 am, you didn't get a day's wage because by then the coal was moving. The older men got to the pit as much as an hour early to be sure of a wage, but with us younger ones it was always a last-minute dash. “So we saw the bogies leaving with the men who died and we were to be the second last tow. There were 33 of us sitting there when we felt the smoke coming out, and we knew it was a fire, the worst thing that could happen underground.”

Inferno

Ian was one of the 20 or so who, without thought for their own lives, grabbed fire extinguishers and hoses, and head towards the inferno, a mile deeper into the pit: “It was like pea-soup and we had to feel the rails to get along. The wood in the roof had never been replaced and was all rotten so it burned like tinder and the steel girders were red-hot.

“To get along the roadway, you had to keep hosing above you as the burning wood fell on you and you had to keep hosing your feet to stop your boots from being burned off.”

His wife Helen, newly-married, heard the news as it spread round the village and she rushed up to the pit with the other women; she did not know for hours whether Ian was alive or among those who were trapped.

Ian shrugs: “Going down the pit was just a thing you did to make a living - even though sometimes it was like a war with men dying in their tens. The places where we worked, you were lying or kneeling in a space only a couple of feet high with no room to get out of the way, so a small accident could become really big.”

During the morning, as word of something terrible at Auchengeich spread to Chryston and other villages, women dropped what they were doing and ran to the pithead. In the rush, there was no-one to mind the bairns so mothers gathered them up and took them with them. Children at local schools, whose fathers worked at the colliery, were told by their teachers to go home.

The womenfolk stood all day, some still in their slippers and aprons, others in sensible shoes and heavy long ‘New Look’ coats; they cradled their babies and kept older children close by their sides. They could only stand hand-to-mouth in silent agony and expectation, most staring up blankly at the winding wheel and the smoke rising ominously from the shaft. One headline summed it up: “This is the cost – in tears.”

To begin with, there was an occasional “Thank God!” and tears of relief as a loved one came out of the cage alive. But for the others, hope was slowly draining away.

A dozen ministers and priests, including Bishop James Scanlan in dog collar and miner’s hat, moved among them, comforting and leading small groups in prayer; the ever-ready Salvation Army dispensed tea and sandwiches from the wagon that always seemed to turn up at such times of need.

One of the first people to descend into the smoke-filled colliery was the local GP, Dr George Jamieson – now 81 and still living in nearby Muirhead - who was in practice with his father. Called out just after 6am, he pulled a sweater and trousers over his pyjamas and was still in them as he sat underground waiting to see if there was anyone still alive who could be helped: “We waited for approximately 3 hours - just waiting, waiting, waiting with a lack of communication from any source. We sat behind the closed rubber door not knowing what was going on due to the lack of communication. There were no phones there and the only communication was by pulling on a wire.”

Later, he and his father had the grim task of signing the death certificates for the 47 victims, many of whom had been their patients.

When the day-long wait ended with the announcement of the flooding to starve the fire of oxygen, Abe Moffat, the Scottish NUM president, assured the families everything that could be useful had been done but there was no use waiting at the pithead any longer.It was confirmation they would never see their men alive again. We all knew the men had probably been dead before we got to Auchengeich but hope dies hard … 

‘All Hope Lost’

Three days later, when the water had been pumped out, recovery teams found the bodies and, watched by a stonily silent crowd of 200, they were brought to the surface swathed in mortuary blankets. It was confirmed they had not been burned nor drowned but had died quickly from heat and suffocation.

The disaster happened on the Friday and next morning it was front page news – “All Hope Lost” - but by Monday, the ‘pit of death’ story had been relegated to an inside page. Pit disasters were not that uncommon and miners had always been expendable in the drive for coal production and profits. They were regarded as necessary human sacrifices to King Coal.

The usual official inquiry was held and its report was scathing of the failures, neglect and recklessness which had caused the deaths: fire-fighting arrangements were inadequate; the fan had not been inspected at the prescribed intervals; the belt which caught fire was not the fire-resistant type ordered by the NCB; and, above all, the men should have been withdrawn as soon as there was the slightest sign that fire might have broken out below ground.

Recommendations were made in the hope of preventing such a tragedy being repeated at other pits. But, of course, it was too late for Auchengeich and those left who knew the truth of the lament written by Labour MP Norman Buchan:

THE 50^th anniversary of the Auchengeich disaster was marked by the unveiling of a new memorial on the site. For the 25^th anniversary, at the time of the coal strike, local miners built a monument with their own hands, incorporating the old winding wheel. It is being extended as a memorial garden with its centerpiece the statue of a miner by Ayrshire sculptor John McKenna. The statue has been commissioned by property tycoon, Brian Dempsey, who was brought up alongside families who lost men in the disaster. His father James Dempsey was MP for Coatbridge and Airdrie from 1959 to 1982 and was one of the miners’ MPs who waged a long campaign to have pneumoconiosis recognized as an industrial disease. Brian Dempsey said: “It was the 'lowest-of-the-low' job, literally and metaphorically. Perhaps that's why there was a unique sense of comradeship in communities like ours which still exists today.” Twelve years old when the disaster happened, he recalled: “Our close neighbour was Willie Meehan – an Irish Catholic from Donegal, father of four children – who went out to work that morning and never came back to his family. He was a big, handsome man who would stop on his way to the pub and buy ice cream for all the children in the street. “We were told 'you can't play in the street'; as a mark of respect for the grieving family. I asked my father "Why did he die?" and he just said: "Because he's a miner."