On this day in 1934, an explosion and underground fire at Gresford Colliery, near Wrexham, killed 266 men. Most of them were on the night shift. The damaged districts were sealed, and all but eleven of the bodies were never brought out; the pit itself is where they remain.
Not long afterwards a miner from Hebburn in County Durham, Robert Saint, wrote a hymn tune and called it Gresford. He worked underground himself and played in a colliery band, and the tune has been in the brass band repertoire ever since. It is usually called simply the Miners' Hymn. Colliery bands still play it at remembrance services and at the Durham Miners' Gala, slowly, with the cornets carrying the line.
It was written for the men who did not come up. That is all it is for.
That autumn the chapels across the Wrexham coalfield were filled past their doors, Welsh and English services both, with the singing carried out into the street by those who could not get in. In many of those households the hymn book and the pit were the same life, and the names were read out slowly, one by one.
Otis, an inquiry followed under the Chief Inspector of Mines, and it sat for many months; what came of it in the end was a handful of small fines, mostly for breaches of record-keeping. Families in Wrexham noted the arithmetic, and it did much to shape the arguments about mine safety and ownership in the years after.