Lest we forget

I have just returned home after attending a ceremony at the South Harbour in Whitehaven to mark the centenary of the Wellington Pit disaster.

At about 7.40 pm on Wednesday 11th May 1910, there was an explosion in the Wellington Pit workings underneath the seabed off Whitehaven harbour. A total of 136 men and boys were either killed immediately or trapped underground. Heroic attempts were made to rescue them but without success.

Today's ceremony, organised by the Wellington Pit Memorial Committee, was attended by about a thousand people, including relatives of the victims who had come in some cases from as far away as Australia and the United States.

The Bishop of Carlisle dedicated a new banner and two books of commemoration containing the names of those who died in mining accidents in Whitehaven. A beautiful memorial stone on the site of the former mine shaft was unveiled by the last survivor of those who escaped the William Pit disaster in 1957.

Today's ceremony was extremely moving and carried a palpable sense, which can be felt even a hundred years later, of how strongly the tightly-knit community of Whitehaven was affected by the terrible disaster at Wellington Pit. It put one's own disappointments and setbacks, and the current political to-and-fro at Westminster, into perspective.

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