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On Thursday, 16th January 1862 there took place, in the small community of New Hartley, near Blyth in south-east Northumberland, the greatest mining disaster in the history of Britain's coalfields. On that day, 204 men and boys were lost when the giant beam of the pumping engine snapped and twenty tons of cast iron hurtled down the only shaft, blocking all attempts at rescue for several vital days. Nearly all the fatalities were caused by gas which quickly built up in the workings, and the entire community of New Hartley was overwhelmed by the tragedy. Almost every home in the village lost a breadwinner, and in some the coffins were said to have been stacked from floor to ceiling. The funeral that followed on January 26th was remembered for generations - for despite the fact that a few bodies were taken to Cramlington, Cowpen and Seghill for burial, most were buried together in the churchyard at Earsdon, four miles away, and it is said that the last coffin had not left New Hartley when the first was reaching the churchyard, thronged by 60,000 people who had come to stare or to mourn.

This article is intended to give some account of the families involved in the Hartley tragedy. The information is taken mainly, from records at Northumberland County Record Office which holds not only the 1861 Census, taken only nine months before the disaster but also the surviving records of the Hartley Relief Fund which throws some light on the subsequent history of the bereaved families, long after the crowds had dispersed.

Many of the miners lived in the new mining village of New Hartley, close by the Hester Pit (opened in 1845), where the disaster occurred. T. Wemyss Reid, in his graphic description of the rescue efforts, for the Newcastle Daily Journal described it: "as unpicturesque in appearance as possible. It is comprised in two long rows of houses ... in the form of a letter L, with a few small gardens on the other side of he muddy road in front". The long side of the L included the single (or Long) Row, and the Double Row; the shorter side was the Cross Row. There were two outlying rows -- Quarry Row to the North, and Hastings Row to the South. In addition many, miners lived scattered around in hamlets such as Silver Hill or Dairy House, or in the village of Old Hartley some two miles to the east.

No man knew the people of these single-storey rows better than the colliery viewer, Joseph Humble. The viewer's duties were those of a manager who would be responsible for the day-to-day running of the pit, hiring workers, and so on. It was fitting that he had been chosen as census enumerator for much of the area in 1861: he would have known many of the families personally and would have their confidence in recording their details. Incidentally we have been able to find a good number of the miners' families in the 1861 census, but by no means all. Many would have moved into the area at the annual spring hiring in May, and in particular there was a big influx of new families from Scotland up at Quarry Row.

Joseph Humble played a vital role during the anxious days following the closing of the shaft. He it was that kept communications going between the rescuers, led by the renowned 'sinker', William Coulson, and the anxious families at the pithead. He it was that was asked to go down once the way was open and see for himself the huddled rows of bodies with sons cradled for protection in their fathers' arms. His words poignantly expressed the grief sensed by all around him: "Oh, my men, my canny men, they would have done ought for me and there they are all lying dead and cold".

Finally, once the funeral was over, it was Joseph Humble who was given the task of taking the first payments of the relief fund round the rows to the bereaved families. The company gathered everyone together either into the five main rows, or into houses in Old Hartley with the exception of a couple of families in Silver Hill and Dairy House. The fund money poured in from all over the country, and increased rapidly, reaching £50,000 by February 13th and over £75,000 by early April. Apart from special payments for various purposes, it was decided to give 8/6d. weekly to each widow, 12s. to a widow with one child, and 15s. to a widow with two children. Many of the widows remarried but twenty years after the disaster there were still over seventy recipients.

Readers interested in tracing any family in detail would be rewarded by a careful search of the surviving records of the Relief Fund, to be found in Northumberland County Record Office, reference NRO 488, New Hartley Colliery Accident Relief Fund Papers 1862-1903. The collection includes an index to the names of the 'sufferers' (i.e. surviving next-of-kin) and Joseph Humble's first notebook, a complete schedule of 'sufferers' set out by order of houses and rows, with details of payments given in February and March 1862. This notebook is full of informative notes and comments, and most of the details in the lists given below this article have been drawn from it. We did not have time to look at the subsequent lists in detail, but it was immediately apparent that it would be possible to trace the subsequent history of any recipient of relief over a considerable period of time, perhaps twenty or more years if one was lucky. We hope that the details below will at least be sufficient to help the reader decide whether any relationship with one of the Hartley families does in fact exist, but there remains much more to he discovered among the surviving documents.

The 204 victims are listed below. Order is roughly alphabetical but known close relatives are placed in family groups, father first, sons in order of age. Spelling of names is as on the Hartley Memorial Monument in Earsdon churchyard, except in cases where these are clearly wrong. The age at death is given as on the monument, but a number of these were wrong and if so, are given in brackets. We have given more credence to the 1861 Census or the relief fund notebooks, but there seems little doubt that some widows simply did not know their husbands' true ages. Where the address in 1861 is known, this is also given after the victim's age. The exact address of every widow was given in the 1862 relief fund notebooks but many soon moved away after only a week or two, so we have not recorded them here. Under 'next-of-kin' the widow's christian name is given plus, in parentheses, the names and ages of all known children, including babies born after the disaster.

N.B. All places mentioned are believed to be in Northumberland unless otherwise shown. Abbreviations are generally straightforward., bn. = born, a/n = above-named.

This article was first published in the NDFHS Journal, Volume 7, Number 4, September 1982.

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