Remembering Gresford
Today, 22 September, marks the 90th anniversary of the Gresford mining disaster. To this day, the bodies of 253 miners remain in the pit underground below Wrexham. In 1934, the industry was rocked by the inquest into the disaster where accusations of forged documents, preventable deaths, and inadequate safety protocols were highlighted, echoing contemporary inquiries into disasters, such as the damning inquest into Grenfell which was published earlier this month. Nowadays, the disaster is remembered as a poignant moment in Welsh history.
In 1934, 266 men and boys perished when coal dust caught alight, causing an enormous explosion in the works of the Gresford mine. After several rescue workers died attempting to reach men trapped by the blast, it was decided that the pits should be sealed: nobody was left alive. The bodies of the vast majority of the men were not recovered.
For the families of the dead, this meant that they had no body to bury. Henry Walker, Chief Inspector of Mines 1924-1938, explained to the families that recovering the bodies would be too difficult. Speaking to the family of John Clapper, who had worked close to the coal face where the explosion happened, he explained that he would have been blown to pieces, telling the family ‘I’m not going to get any [bodies]. I’d rather let it be their grave.’
For families of the dead, this meant that they had no body to bury.
The decision not to rescue bodies from the Gresford pit was a highly unpopular decision among the families of the men who were entombed, who lobbied officials to try and force them to retrieve the bodies of the dead. Some of the Gresford widows protested at conferences set up to discuss the remains, in which the bereaved had no official say, demanding news and making their own views known. One woman wrote to request the body of her brother be brought up, saying ‘the shock may be over with some people but it is not over in my home.’ This lack of bodies had a marked impact on the victims’ families. One widow explained ‘it was awful… you can’t describe it… it was so terrible… they didn’t have a chance of getting him home. It was awful, awful… his name’s on the stone in the cemetery… me Mother and my little girl are there, but my husband isn’t, only his name.’
At the disaster’s inquiry, Stafford Cripps, a former barrister turned Labour MP, questioned the colliery managers and delivered a resounding closing statement which blamed managers for preventable deaths, finding that they had forged documents after the explosion. The mining company was only convicted of inadequate record keeping. This ruling was met with contempt by the press and public.
Roger Laidlaw has charted the cultural memory of the Gresford disaster, arguing that it transformed from a bitter argument over how the disaster began, to a memory which glossed over this important part of workplace history. Yet this was not enough to cement the memory of Gresford as one where the colliery managers were proven to be in the wrong—and the disaster as a tragedy, without political edge, is the story which had dominated by the 1990s and remains to this day. When the pit closed in 1973, the only part left standing was the pithead which was to act as a monument to the entombed men. Following a grassroots campaign, led by the sister of one of the dead, this was officially recognised as a public memorial in 1982.
In the last couple of years, the memory of Gresford has once again become increasingly popularised, with a new global audience exposed by the Disney+ show Welcome to Wrexham. A 2023 episode focused solely on the Gresford disaster. It linked the football club, Wrexham AFC, to the disaster, as some men were working an extra shift in order to watch a home match when the disaster occurred. Now, the Wrexham AFC football shirts have the year of the disaster, 1934, on them. The new owners of the club are trying to create a fresh memorial outside a planned football stand, by moving a pit wheel to the new stand, mimicking the pithead memorial created by families of the dead in 1982.
For the 90th anniversary, a host of commemorative events, from the performance of a new opera through to remembrance services and a candle lighting vigil, have taken place.
Featured image by Llywelyn2000 via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.