The Hartley Colliery Disaster

[...]a forty-two-ton beam engine—the most powerful in England—had been installed to pump out water. The collision also sealed off the mine’s single shaft and blocked egress for over two hundred men and boys stranded underground: “at a single blow, escape, food, and air were simultaneously cut off” (“The Hartley Colliery Accident,” Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal 62). Newspaper correspondents’ descriptions plunged readers into sensory immediacy: the cold weather; the blank stares of the desperate relatives as they walked back and forth; the overcrowded inn, which was the only place in town catering for thousands of people; the sounds of slow progress underground. When an accident-compensation bill was introduced in Parliament in March 1862, Member of Parliament H.A. Bruce noted that “the Hartley Colliery accident occurred through the breaking of a cast-iron beam; and although thousands of similar beams were daily in use throughout the country, yet, if the proposed Bill were to pass into law, the owners of that mine would be held liable for damages to every widow and orphan affected by the accident” (United Kingdom, 19 Mar. 1862).