Day 40: Praying for communities that have suffered pit disasters (1913)

Join with Salvationists of the Wales Division for day 40 of 150 days of prayer.

• ‘He gave me a new song to sing. It was a song to praise our God. Many people will see what God has done to help me. Then they will respect and obey him. Yes they will trust in the Lord’ (Psalm 40:3, EasyEnglish Bible). 

1913

In Senghenydd on 14 October 1913, 439 people lost their lives in the worst pit disaster in UK mining history. The 25 October War Cry reported on ‘The Salvation Army and the sorrowing ones at Senghenydd’.

‘This photograph – which may be regarded as symbolic of the Army’s attitude towards the Welsh widows and orphans – shows our officer, Adjutant Lennard, of Pentre, and the wife of one of the victims. When the photograph was taken the woman’s husband and two sons were down in the mine, also a man who boarded with the family. The sons have since been brought up alive, but the husband and boarder are among the entombed. The officers visit the woman regularly.

‘Of the 900 men 435 are dead, and the greater number are entombed in the ways and galleries of the blazing mine. They leave nearly a thousand widows and orphans.

‘One of the first to go down after the explosion was Young People’s Sergeant Major A Coram of Ebbw Vale, an experienced member of the St John’s Ambulance Corps and also a local instructor. Band Sergeant Sands and Brothers Bellis and O Jones, who were in the pit at the time of the explosion, are among the Salvationists who have several times been down the mine with rescue parties.

‘The ranks of The Salvation Army itself have been thinned by the disaster. At least ten of its members have lost their lives, and the death of one of them, Emrys Williams, makes one of the saddest stories of the great tragedy. His mother is a nurse – a strong kindly faced woman who, despite her own anxiety for her son’s fate, has been working day and night among the injured, facing horrible sights in the mortuary and comforting bereaved wives and mothers. 

‘The woman who had done so much to comfort others could find no comfort for herself, and many heads bared in sympathy as she went weeping down the hill [where] she met a coffin – her son’s coffin – coming up on the shoulders of two men. That is why grief, appalling, dignified and silent, broods over Senghenydd.'

Prayer

• Many communities in Wales have been impacted by pit disasters. Pray for those who hold family members in their hearts.
• Bless those who have continued to live their lives for others despite the pain that they feel.