Sheffield Daily Telegraph – Wednesday 10 July 1912
Saved By King’s Visit.
Albert Wildman, a dataller, of Ivanhoe Road, Conisborough, was one of the two men who survived the explosion. In the ordinary course he would have been employed in the workings where the explosion actually occurred, but owing to the absence of a man who was taking a holiday because of the King’s visit, he was sent to work at a spot about 600 yards away.
This is his story :
“I went down the pit at ten o’clock and was going along with the other men, when the deputy put me on work with a man named Humphreys, because one of the men was on holiday. My mate, Joseph Bycott, went down into the workings, and he’s dead now. But for the King’s visit, I should be dead also.
“ An hour or two passed, and we were getting along swimmingly with the work. We were doing a bit of road-laying, when all of a sudden the air reversed, and it grew very hot. I can’t tell you what it was like, but it was fearfully weird. This was about 1.15 a.m. We didn’t hear a sound, but the air, which had been blowing in one direction, suddenly started blowing in exactly the opposite one. The sensation it gave me was just though a big clock had been ticking and had suddenly stopped.
‘‘We decided to make investigations. One or two other men had come from other parts of the colliery, and we went slowly forward through the darkness. Suddenly one of the men shouted. We had come upon the scene of the disaster. At this point the pit was just one awful crumple. Lumps of roof and piles of muck were in all directions, and fragments of shattered tubs were scattered all about. The air was rather foul, and we decided we had “better not forward for a few minutes. I ran to the pit bottom and gave the alarm.”
Discovery of First Victim.
It would be about half-an-hour from the time when we felt the air reverse that we really discovered what had happened,” said Edward Humphreys, dataller, of Annerley Street, Denaby. We had gone for some distance when we struck foul air. We waited bit, and the air gradually cleared, and we went forward again. We were in the thick of the wreckage now. The tubs were smashed to atoms and the girders were twisted into all shapes and scattered up and down the working places.
“Suddenly we saw something white sticking out of the dust. It was the body of a man. He lay with his head on his arm, as though he had tried to shield his eyes. We pulled him up out of the dust in which he was nearly buried and rolled him over, but he was quite dead. He was Martin Mulrooney, a dataller, of Mexborough. A little bit further was the smashed body of a pony. I went back the pit-bottom to summon all the rescue men and ambulance men available.”