Industry
Relatives of miners at Levant Mine wait anxiously for news of their loved ones at the time of the disaster on the 20th October 1919.
In 1919 there was a terrible accident at the Levant mine, near St Just-in-Penwith, when the man-engine rod broke, killing some 31 miners. Another disaster was the flooding of East Wheal Rose mine, at Newlyn East, after a freak rain storm on 5 July 1846, when thirty-nine miners lost their lives. There are numerous other stories of accidents in Cornish mines. Rock falls underground were a common cause of injury and death, and so too were premature explosions (when miners were blasting the rock) and the many cases of exhausted miners ‘falling away’ from ladders.There were also boiler explosions, and sometimes mineworkers were horribly maimed when accidentally caught up in moving machinery. The men and boys working underground were those most likely to be hurt in mining accidents but sometimes the women and girls employed at surface to sort and grade the ore were also injured or killed: perhaps by becoming entangled in machinery, or falling down an unguarded shaft. These women and girls, or ‘bal-maidens’ as they were known (after the Cornish language word ‘bal’, a mine), were a familiar part of the Cornish mining scene until machinery took over their role in the latter part of the nineteenth century.