Burns Pit Disaster

A Memory of Stanley.

From his seat, by the fire, my grandad could see the great mound of the spoil heap of Stanley Burns Pit. It was the site of a horrific explosion, on 16th February 1909, in which 168 men and boys lost their lives. He would sometimes talk of the day he heard the enormous explosion, he was 12 years old at the time.

The grandfather of Kevin Keegan (he who played football for Liverpool and England and was once manager of  Newcastle United) was one of the few men to escape from the mine that day. It's worth bearing in mind that if his grandfather had not escaped, then there would have been no Kevin Keegan.
200,000 people were supposed to have invaded Stanley on the day of the funerals.

“The pal of death hung over the whole neighbourhood. It was a week never to be forgotten.”
“The bringing home of the bodies, heart-rending scenes at the pit. Wherever you look, you are brought face to face with death.”
“There, borne on the shoulders of those who were once their companion in life was the last remains of some of the victims of the disaster.”

Recently Derrick Lait of the Durham Mining Museum wrote in The Northern Echo, “When you think of all the hardships these men and their families endured, it was incredulous that the families received docked wages at the end of the week, because their men had not completed their shifts”. That was the callous mine owners, for you, who wanted profits above anything else. The miners and their families were not thought about very highly.

Michael Bailey wrote a poem entitled ‘The Tragedy of the Mine’.

"The sixteenth of February, Nineteen Hundred and Nine,
Was a dreadful day, at West Stanley Mine.
That afternoon, at a quarter to four,
A hundred and sixty eight lives were no more.
A thunderous roar, through the town rang,
Fifty seconds later came the big bang,
Everyone in Stanley, just froze a bit,
They knew there was trouble at Burns’ Pit.
Eyewitnesses who had been standing close by,
Said the flames from the shaft had lit up the sky.
The whole town made their way to the pithead,
Not knowing then how many were dead.
As darkness fell and the frost glistened bright,
They knew this would be a very long night.
Someone in the crowd said, “Isn’t it strange,
It’s the Anniversary of the explosion at Trimdon Grange.
A small girl sobbed while saying a prayer,
“Please Lord help me, my dad’s down there,
Also down there, are my two brothers,
And it’s only a year since the death of my mother”.
After eight hours waiting came a wonderful thing,
The Tilley seam telephone started to ring.
Mark Henderson called, “There’s twenty six of us here”.
That news made the crowd give a tremendous cheer.
Henderson’s bravery, meant these men were alive,
He’d led then to safety in groups of five.
The rescuers toiled underground,
‘Til no more survivors could be found.
To have no father was many a child’s fate,
Tommy Riley left eleven bairns, Luke Reay left eight
The boy McGarry’s body was found,
He’d just gone down with his dad, for a look around.
Why he’d gone down there, made people wonder,
He wasn’t due to start, ‘til the following Monday.
The search was abandoned, for Rodgers and Chaytor,
Their remains were found, twenty-four years later.
To remember these miners as each year goes by,
Just think of a set of dominoes.
Using this method, they won’t be forgot,
Each victims represented by a white spot.
Those men and boys endured great pain,
Yet the loss of their lives had not been in vain.
The town was denuded of a generation,
But it forced the coal owners into new legislation.
In some homes in Stanley, every Tuesday,
Is still referred to as bad news day.
Those miners went to work full of mirth
And were all destroyed in the bowels of the earth."

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