15-year-old Herbert Jones was a grafter, that much we know: most children of his age in 1915 would have left school at 12 to find full-time work and support their family.
At 14, he secured a job as a colliery haulage hand at the Newton Colliery in Pendlebury, waking at dawn and travelling every day from the home he shared with his grandmother at Gate Street in Swinton.
12 months passed without serious incident but on the morning of Thursday 19 June, poor Herbert would meet his end.
His gran Martha Cordwell told an inquest at Swinton Public Hall that Herbert had left home that morning in his usual good health.
He, along with hundreds of other men and boys, would descend hundreds of feet underground every day to carry out the backbreaking work.
As miners cut and chipped coal from the rock face, he would crouch down in the pitch black and scoop up the coal, depositing it in heavy metal carts to be taken to the surface.
At around 10am that morning coal miner James Carroll, 28, who lived at Stafford Road, Swinton, was working around 60 yards away from Herbert when he heard a train of sixty coal wagons coming through the blackness towards them. He shouted at the boy to stop the carts but heard a sickening crash.
As Carroll felt his way over to the scene of destruction, he noticed the lad lying on his back on the train lines, with six metal wagons overturned behind him.
His distraught grandmother told the inquest a colliery ambulance had brought the bruised and battered Herbert home to Gate Street at around 11am, but he never regained consciousness and died an hour later.
The inquest heard from Mr J. Croston, who represented the Clifton and Kearsley Coal Company. He admitted a wire rope which pulled the waggons along the train lines had slipped off a pulley and was lying against the side of the tunnel.
It’s thought the runaway carts smashed into Herbert Jones and sent him crashing into the colliery wall.
But he added: “The haulage system in use in this mine had always worked satisfactorily and this was the first accident of this kind.”
The inquest was presided over by the Manchester County Coroner, Mr Leresche.
Mr J. Sutton representing the Miners Federation told the Coroner he did not think the company had been negligent but wanted to prevent further tragedies.
He said: “When we read of a colliery explosion we are told that it was at the safest mine in the country, yet the explosions happen and this accident has happened.”
Recording a verdict of accidental death, Mr Leresche concluded Herbert had been knocked down either by the wagons or the wire rope as it slipped free from the pulley.
It is hard to think in these more progressive times of a 15-year-old boy working down a coal mine and enduring such backbreaking work at such a young age.
To lose Herbert at that age was evidently heartbreaking for his parents and grandmother, who would not have received any compensation from the Clifton and Kearsley Coal Company.
