Ronnie Steele: Black clouds gathered in the Barnsley skies

ONE thing needs to be made crystal clear from the very start of this week’s column: Not all Victorian mine-owners employed boys and girls to work down their pit. Some banned them because roof-falls and explosions were so commonplace they didn’t want the blood of children on their hands.

The Clarke family of Silkstone, living in the luxury of Noblethorpe Hall, had no such qualms – they were eager to employ children underground for a miserly sixpence a day (2.5p in today’s money). They were much cheaper than adults and it meant that whole families could be forced to extract coal as a team – father, mother and off-spring.

Out of 170 who worked below the surface in Silkstone, 100 were children, as young as five, doing shifts of 12 hours. They were expected to sit alone in candle-light, opening and shutting draught doors, with only rats for company. When the candle went out, they spent the rest of the shift in pitch blackness.

Others children had to push overflowing coal tubs using their arms and heads, like spindly rugby players in a modern-day scrum. It was easy to identify them in the street or church by their bald scalps.

Then, on Wednesday 4th July 1838, exactly 187 years ago today, ominous black clouds gathered in the Barnsley skies as workers laboured deep underground at the Huskar Colliery.

No one knows what thoughts went through the heads of those mothers looking after babies at home, or those folk too old or sick to work. Perhaps they felt an eerie sense of doom as the heavens turned day into night. Or, maybe, they wondered what God had in store for them, because a fear of the Almighty had been drummed into them from the cradle.

Then, at 2pm, the heavens opened and rain lashed down in biblical fashion, and hailstones as “big as golf balls” devastated the countryside. The poor, unfortunate Clarke family saw their lovely garden flowers laid low, and those reposing at nearby Wentworth Castle had their precious glasshouses damaged.

Meanwhile, the children, working below the surface, heard the rumble of thunder – the exact same explosive noise they’d witnessed the previous year when their pit blew up. Abandoning their posts, they ran to the pit-bottom and waited to be hoisted to safety in the shaft cage.

However, the freak storm had extinguished the fire that powered the steam engine that lifted the cage, as rainwater gushed down the vertical shaft. In charge, Mr Billy Lamb, called for calm and patience but the 40 terrified children chose to flee up a steep dayhole.

Little did they know, as they closed the draught door behind them, that a swollen stream was about to burst its banks and gush down the ‘drift’. The raging torrent knocked the children off their feet and smashed them against the closed doors as the deluge filled the tunnel. A lucky few found refuge by climbing up into side-crevices, but 26 boys and girls, aged between seven and 17, were never to see sunlight again.

One eye-witness described the horrific scene on Silkstone High Street as the lifeless children were returned to the village on carts: In the middle of the road, wailing mothers sank to their knees, “tearing out their hair” by the handful.

Meanwhile, the Clarke family were already planning ‘damage-limitation’. They would absolve themselves of any trace of guilt by ‘graciously’ sponsoring a beautiful monument for the drowned children. Its threatening inscription would suggest that the tragedy was a vengeful act of God – a kind-of celestial retribution. And any loose talk of penny-pinching negligence by the owners would be made taboo – at least in polite circles.

How solemn Silkstone must have been on the day the Huskar Babes were laid to rest at the edge of the ancient churchyard. And how many mourners, not rendered temporarily insane by grief, would have bubbled with rage?

The poor people of the area may have paid a cruel price for the avarice of the few, but their descendents will never allow this terrible day to fade from history. Never!