3-052-397 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Leycett Colliery Disaster: friends of the miners waiting at the pit mouth, 1880. '...explosion at the Leycett Colliery, near Newcastle-under-Lyne, Staffordshire, on Wednesday of last week, by which sixty or seventy lives were lost...[View of] the distressed friends, wives, and children, or parents, brothers, and sisters, of the unfortunate men who were known to have been at work below, despondently awaiting the result of a continued search in the subterranean galleries and recesses. That part of the Leycett Colliery, belonging to the Crewe Iron and Coal Company, in which this disaster took place, is the Fair Lady Pit, opened about a twelvemonth ago; and its levels were driven through the seven-foot Bambury seam of coal, which is very "fiery" or productive of carburetted hydrogen gas, called by the miners "fire-damp." The dead bodies of Mr. Greener and his son were sent up in the afternoon, with nine others, and this sad work continued next day. The burial of sixty-two of the dead took place in Madely churchyard on Sunday. An inquest has been opened, and a subscription to relieve the distressed families has also been commenced'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.