The White Slaves of Barnsley

On the 4th of July 1838 a disaster took place at the Husker Pit in which 26 children were killed. Although the disaster was relatively small compared with many of the larger mining disasters which were occurring in Barnsley at that time, it caught the attention of Queen Victoria. The Queen sent a deputation to Barnsley to hold an enquiry. The enquiry’s report led Parliament to ban children under the age of ten from working in the mines in 1842 although the Mines Inspector in his 1878 report disclosed that boys between ten and twelve were still working underground.

Today, a memorial in the form of a small drift (tunnel) coming out of the hillside with a sculpture of a child can be found at the side of Moorend Lane (Nabs Wood) in Silkstone Common. However, the real site of the disaster took place in a little known location, deeper inside the forest where the partially collapsed drift entrance and the deadly stream that runs along side it can still be examined.

On the morning of the disaster, very hot weather led to a violent afternoon thunderstorm. The stream running alongside the Moorend Lane Pit became a torrent which put out the surface furnace fires and made the Moorend Lane shaft inoperable. On attempting to escape via the old Husker (House Car) drift, the children found themselves trapped against air doors. The water had also flooded into the drift and its weight was bearing down on the air doors above the children. Eventually the doors gave way and the children were drowned and crushed.

The enquiry found that children as young as seven were working up to 12 hours a day in the pit. Adolescent girls were employed alongside men who worked naked. The youngest children worked as trappers. They sat in a little hole with a length of string attached to an air door. When they heard an approaching wagon they pulled the string and opened the door. They sat in the dark on a damp floor with exposed drafts. Other children not only had to haul wagons but also had to help fill them. The report concluded that severe beatings were rare but the children had to be kept at work and therefore only slight beatings occurred! One witness told the delegation that some children were disciplined with a pick shaft or anything else a collier could get his hands on.

These children were nothing more than slaves, forced to work to earn a pittance for their hard up families. They were by no mean unique to the mining areas of Barnsley, their “employment” was widespread throughout the whole of the UK. Another memorial can be visited in the Church yard on the High street in Silkstone. Isn’t it typical how the liberal leftists who have been apologising about Black African slavery for the last 30 years have never commented about slavery issues closer to home.

Mark Kaye