A potentially fatal disaster was averted 100 years ago this week after an unthinking teenager worker was hauled in front on magistrates for carrying cigarettes and matches into the Newtown Pit in Pendlebury.
Henry Rigby, 15, could have sparked a major incident if gases had ignited from his lighting up in the Salford mine, the court heard.
Working as a haulage boy at Newtown Number 2 Pit, Rigby was collared by his manager Mr Rushton when he was caught in a work cabin deep underground which was filled with tobacco smoke.
The plumes of smoke escaped out of the cabin door when a suspicious Rushton walked in, and at the same time young Rigby dashed out in fear for his job.
He was quickly apprehended and given a sharp lesson in health and safety by his furious manager.
The Eccles and Patricroft Journal of 1915 told how Rushton found spent matches and several empty cigarette packets in the cabin: damning evidence against the young lad to say the least.
At the time there were 400 men working in the pit and if an explosion had occurred the consequences would have been chaos beyond belief.
Newtown Colliery – from Manchester Collieries ‘Carbon’ Magazine December 1932 via Flickr
Mr Percy Wood, a mining safety engineer, was called to give evidence in court.
He told magistrates that in all his years of experience he had never known a case of someone being foolish enough to smoke down a pit, especially one in which safety lamps had to be used at all times.
Read: Clifton Hall Colliery disaster of 1885 kills 178
Once every three months each miner going to the coal face was searched for cigarettes as a matter of course.
Taking the stand young Mr Rigby denied that he had run away from Mr Rushton and did not think there was any danger in smoking down the pit as there was a fire in the same pit.
Mr Rushton accepted the point but said the furnace was a long way from the cabin and if just one spark had ignited gases in the mineshaft air then hundreds of lives could have been lost.
Summing up, the Magistrates said that if Rigby had been just a couple of years older he could have been tried as an adult and would certainly have gone to jail, such was the seriousness of his offence.
But Rigby, much chastened by the whole ordeal, was handed a lesser punishment of a £3 fine and a warning.
This was only five years after Britain’s worst coal mining disaster when 354 men and boys were killed at the Pretoria pit, Westhoughton on December 21, 1910.
This was thought to have been caused by an accumulation of gas from a roof collapse the previous day.
Entire families were wiped out in a second and hardly a local family was not affected by this terrible catastrophe.
I think its safe to say that Mr Rushton’s prompt action averted a possible disaster which could easily have equalled the terrible loss of lives at the Pretoria pit.
Newtown Colliery itself closed in March 1961, with the loss of 476 jobs.
