THREAD. Today I turn 55 with the country still mostly in lockdown ("happy birthday to me"), so living in the present is weird enough. But I will also be remembering these thirty-one men, average age 40. 
Around 25 years ago, the BBC threw out some tatty books which were their (very old) way of cataloguing their sound archive. I kept one and found my birthday, 17/5/65 in it. That's how I first heard about the Cambrian Colliery explosion which happened in 1965, the day I was born.
The seam where the miners worked was 900ft underground. There was a leak of "firedamp", which at the time was the name given to any explosive gas in a mine. The gas leak in the Cambrian Colliery was probably methane, which will explode at a range of 5-15% concentration.
Miners had safety lamps by the 1900s of course, but in this case a spark was created when electricians went down the shaft to repair a broken switch panel which should not have been exposed while they worked. A fault in the ventilation of the mine that day had not been noticed.
The colliery was located near Tonypandy and Blaenclydach, with 800 employed there. The explosion ripped through the number one pit as the miners neared the end of their morning shift. Bill Richards, a senior measuring clerk, was there:
And this from Bill is very moving.
What devastated the families was that 60 years earlier there had been a similar explosion at the same colliery. In 1905 the blast was so strong it blew the miner's cage-lift up and out of the shaft and right off the end of the winding gear. 33 died that day; nothing changed.
1965 was different. There was a huge inquiry. New safety measures came in across South Wales coalfields; no longer would electricians be sent down to work on live switchboards in air that fed into the rest of the mine. Nothing like Cambria happened again.
Most of the miners came from the tiny community of Clydach Vale, which has a population of just 3,000. If you look on Google Maps you see the colliery still flagged.
If you go there now, you can find the entrance to Pit One, where the men died. The colliery has been out of action for more than fifty years now. The area has been reclaimed by nature. But this is a memorial.
This is Ernie Breeze, 38, the colliery manager, who died on the day I was born. He had three children.
This poem by Philip Larkin was written in 1969.
