"Unanimously Decided"

Creswell is a grimy Derbyshire coal-mining town, but the folk of nearby villages called it "happy Creswell." It boasts a model village housing development, a crack shooting team, a brass band famed for miles around. Its mine, reputed to be one of Britain's safest, is equipped with up-to-date conveyor and ventilation systems. Output per man-shift is two tons, nearly double the national average of 1.05.

In Creswell's mine at 4 a.m. one day last week a fire broke out 1,000 ft. below ground on one of the newly installed rubber conveyor belts. Of 99 miners in the area, 19 crawled to safety, 80 were trapped. Said one who got out: "The men in our party who lagged behind, crawling on their hands and knees, were dragged along by others."

For hours shivering miners' wives, their scarves tightly knotted beneath blue pinched faces, stood round the pithead in stunned misery, while Salvation Army officers served tea and prayed, and squeaking shaft wheels lowered rescue teams into the smoke-choked mine. Meanwhile, grim-faced union and government officials sat in conference. At midday they issued a statement.

Shaft wheels halted, children stood silently in empty coal trucks and villagers tensely closed in on a pit official as he read aloud from a pink slip of paper: "There is no possibility of any of the men remaining in the district affected being alive . . . It was then unanimously decided that no course remained except to seal off the affected part of the pit. This work is now taking place."

Some women fainted, others knelt in prayer. The shaft wheels turned again, this time lowering sand bags to seal off the area where the 80 men had died.

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