Gresford Disaster - Inquiry

Inquiry

By the end of September 1934, 1,100 Gresford miners had signed on the unemployment register. Relief funds were set up by the Mayor of Wrexham, the Lord Lieutenant of Denbighshire and the Lord Mayor of London. Their efforts raised a total of more than £500,000 for the dependants of the victims (£81m in 2010).

On October 25, 1934, the official inquiry opened at Church House on Regent Street in Wrexham. It was chaired by Sir Henry Walker, His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Mines. The miners were represented by Sir Stafford Cripps; the mine owners, mindful of the fact they could face criminal charges, hired a formidable team of barristers including Hartley Shawcross. Two mining assessors, one approved by the miners and the other by the colliery management, were also appointed to assist Walker and the inquiry.

The miners' legal representatives presented theories at the inquiry as to cause of the explosion. Cripps said he believed an explosion was triggered down near the 95's by shotfiring near a main airway. The blast had ignited a pocket of firedamp which had accumulated in the drift due to inadequate ventilation and the lax attitude of the mine owners to monitor gas levels contrary to section 29 of The Coal Mines Act 1911. The assessor approved by the miners also theorised that a large quantity of methane gas, which had accumulated at the coal face in the 14's district, may have been ignited through an accident with a safety lamp or from a spark from a mechanised coalcutter.

Although recovery teams wearing self-contained breathing apparatus had re-entered the sealed pit in May 1935 (for purposes of the inquiry), officials from the Westminster and United Collieries Group would not allow any attempts to be made to access the Dennis section. The company cited the dangerous conditions and remains of the victims as the reason. As such, no examination or inspection of the deeper parts of Dennis were ever undertaken.

This decision was widely perceived as a deliberate attempt by the mine owners to cover up any evidence of their culpability in the cause of the explosion. As there were no other reports concerning the deeper parts of the section, the inquiry considered the explanation presented by the legal representatives of the pit's management. They countered the miners' theories suggesting firedamp had actually accumulated further up the Dennis main road just beyond the Clutch (at a drift named the "142 Deep"; this was part of the main road where the underground haulage machinery was located). The gas was ignited at the Clutch when a telephone was used to warn miners of the influx of firedamp. The assessor chosen by the mine owners also stated the explosion could have originated higher up the Dennis Main Road just beyond the Clutch.

A year before the inquiry published its conclusion coal production resumed at Gresford from the South-East Martin section in January 1936.

In 1937 the inquiry published its findings. Despite considering management failures, a lack of safety measures, bad working practices and poor ventilation in the pit, Walker drew very cautious conclusions in his final verdict about the cause. This was largely because the two assessors chosen by the miners and by the pit's management, and the barristers representing them, had given widely different suggestions as to the source of the explosion. With the absence of any proof, the inquiry could not attribute any outright blame or definitive cause for the disaster. This uncertainty also meant the Dennis districts would remain sealed.

But in a debate in the House of Commons in February 1937 following the release of Walker's report, the politician David Grenfell condemned the management of the colliery because the miners' testimonies had told:

...of lamps having been extinguished by gas, blowing the gas about with a banjack, of protests and quarrels about firing shots in the presence of gas. There is no language in which one can describe the inferno of 14's. There were men working almost stark naked, clogs with holes bored through the bottom to let the sweat run out, 100 shots a day fired on a face less than 200 yards wide, the air thick with fumes and dust from blasting, the banjack hissing to waft the gas out of the face into the unpacked waste, a space 200 yards long and 100 yards wide above the wind road full of inflammable gas and impenetrable for that reason.

Later in 1937, legal proceedings were started in Wrexham's petty sessions court against the pit manager, the under-manager and United & Westminster Collieries Limited, the owners of the mine. Aside from the evidence of poor working practices, it was discovered that Bonsall had after the accident instructed an assistant surveyor, William Cuffin, to falsify records of dust samples when none had actually been taken. However the court dismissed most of the charges without the mine owners ever being called to give evidence. The only conviction against the management at Gresford Colliery was for inadequate record-keeping, for which Bonsall was fined £150 plus costs.