A SIMPLE ceremony takes place in the small town of West Calder today to mark the 70th anniversary of the Burngrange pit disaster, which claimed 15 shale miners’ lives. It says a lot about how close-knit some of our communities remain that the event continues to carry hurt in the town and neighbouring villages.
Sirens had wailed outside as towns-folk packed into the Regal cinema that Friday evening in January 1947. The pit agent, John Stein, interrupted the show and took the stage to call for men from the rescue teams to step forward. Deep underground, a gas explosion had sparked a raging fire and several men were trapped by roof collapses caused by the blaze.
It was an unenviable task. The nature of the pit, and the fire, was such that the rescuers would have known that those trapped were most likely dead already. One man who had witnessed the initial explosion, John McGarty, had been carried through the mine’s honeycomb of tunnels to the surface after suffering head injuries but died en route. Another 14 men, trapped in another section of what had been classed a “showcase pit”, perished close together, having succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Their names, listed in a plain, almost humble memorial in the centre of West Calder, reflect the Scottish and Irish origins of West Lothian’s shale mining communities: Gaughan, McCauley, Easton, Heggie, Muir, Findlay and so on. For 15 families and the people around them, life would never be the same.
Bert Carroll, from the village of Seafield, was five years old in 1947. Two uncles, Davie and Willie, perished in Burngrange. That night, Bert’s grandmother lost two sons and seven of his cousins lost their fathers. He still remembers the sound of the sirens and the family sadness. Another victim, William Ritchie, was underground because he swapped shifts with his brother, whose wife was ill after having given birth. The child born then, George, grew up to found a respected local business.
The tragedy – caused when gas was ignited by one man’s acetylene lamp – shocked the industry. The report of the public inquiry, held at Seafield, grimly records each stage of the explosion, from its cause to its aftermath. Even the whereabouts of each man and his equipment – rucksacks, jackets, safety helmets – is recorded on a diagram with the clinical detachment of the genre. Recommendations were made, medals awarded and conclusions were drawn before the world moved on.
Throughout the industrial age, communities have lived with the stark risk that some people, sometimes, do not return safely from their daily work. Even today – with major disasters like Piper Alpha, factory fires in Asia, or the mercifully few incidents in our modern-day construction and extractive industries – we are used to hearing of and seeing spectacular and deadly incidents in the workplace.
It is within working communities that the consequences are felt most deeply. Even seven decades and two generations on, the sadness on faces in West Calder this morning will be genuine. Everybody there knows somebody who lost a loved one that cold, dark January evening.
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