THE GRESFORD ENQUIRY
TT is to be hoped that Parliament will be fully I conscious of its responsibilities in the debate which has been arranged on the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the disaster in which, on September 22nd, 1934, 265 men were killed at the Gresford Colliery in North Wales. The Report has at length been pub- lished, two and a half years after the Commission began its work. The results of the enquiry are in many ways inconclusive. They are highly technical and difficult for the ordinary man to understand, and each of the three members of the Commission has come to separate conclusions and each has made a separate report. This was perhaps inevitable. The Commis- sioner, Sir Henry Walker, is H.M. Chief Inspector of Mines ; of the two assessors, Mr. Brass is a colliery director and Mr. Joseph Jones is President of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. Their failure to agree suggests that a more conclusive result might have been reached if the Commission had included two independent assessors, unconnected with bodies which, each in its own way, have a deep interest in the findings. But, in any case, the cause of the disaster cannot be finally ascertained so long as the Dennis section of the pit, where the explosion occurred, remains sealed.
The conflicting reports of the Commission's members are an added reason for publishing the evidence on which each of them is founded. Even then it will be almost impossible for the layman to decide whether Sir Henry Walker, Mr. Brass or Mr. Jones is in the right ; but what seems immediately apparent to the layman, after a study of the Report, is that the con- ditions at Gresford Colliery would never under any efficient system of inspection have been what they were, and .were certain, in the end, to lead to disaster. The men themselves were partly aware of this, yet, from fear, carelessness or the fatalism of the collier, they connived, at breaches of, the law. In this, certainly, as Sir Henry Walker points out, they were partly to blame ; but it is difficult not to attribute a greater responsibility to the management and ownership, which profited by such illegalities, and to a system of inspection under which they were possible.
The Gresford Colliery, until the disaster, had a good record as mines go. The fatal-accident rate and the injury rate were lower than in the other North Wales mines and below the rate for Great Britain. Yet, at Gresford, the system of ventilation was faulty. The quantity of air in certain parts was never measured, as required by Acts and regulations. Regulations con- trolling hours of work and methods of shot-firing were repeatedly broken. The deputies' reports were not kept. Regulations controlling stone-dusting were not carried, out The provisions of the 19o8 Act were " to all intents and purposes ignored." The air measure- ment figures, required by the Coal Mines Act, r9 t r, were, on the instructions of the manager, not made after June, 1934 ; the figures entered in the assistant surveyor's notebook in July and August were imaginary, and concocted on the instructions of the manager a day or two after the disaster. Certain inspectors were at fault in their dealings with the mines over a number of years. There was no consulting engineer except the secretary of the mine, and Sir Henry Walker has " an uneasy feeling that Mr. Bonsall [the manager] may have been overridden."
Thus, in the Gresford pit legal regulations for the safety of miners were habitually ignored. The layman, though he may be unable to appreciate the significance of particular breaches of the law, cannot but believe that, regularly committed over a period of years, they must lead to disaster ; he is tempted indeed to draw damning conclusions from the forgery of essential records. His greatest concern, however, is to discover how such habitual breaches of the law could go undetected and unpunished. Sir Henry, whose impartiality must have been under a severe strain, found no justification for imputing any general neglect or incompetency to the inspectorate. If that is so, it can only be because the inspectorate, at present, is too overworked to give adequate attention to each mine or because it possesses inadequate powers of enquiry. Certainly no system of inspection can be thought efficient which permits such conditions as those which prevailed at Gresford ; and what is possible at Gresford is possible elsewhere. It is equally clear that the management should not be able, for whatever reason, to pursue a course which can only be described as criminal negligence. After reading the Report one is tempted to believe that the methods of management at Gresford made disaster inevitable.
It must be observed, however, that one of the con- tributory causes was the connivance of the men, due perhaps, as Sir Henry observes, to fear of victimisation. It is remarkable that for three years the pit was not visited by any workmen's inspectors. Sir Henry suggests that the omission arose because many of the men at Gresford were not members of the North Wales Miners' Federation ; one of the admirable features of his report is his insistence that every miner should be a member of an effective trade union, which can protect not only his wages and his conditions of employment but his life. Certainly the Report suggests that, at present, Parliamentary enactments and Government inspection are inadequate to protect the miner, and he would be wise to take his own precautions against a terrible death.
It is to be hoped that the debat'i in Parliament will allow a thorough discussion of these points in the Report. There is no reason why they should be a matter of party controversy. The death, in tragic circumstances, of 265 men is a national disaster ; the conditions at Gresford were a national disgrace. It is for Parliament to prevent a repetition of them, by increasing the stringency of safety regulations, and by a reorganisation of the inspectorate which will ensure that they are enforced. The Government should be assisted in this task by the work of the Royal Commission on Safety in Mines, which held its first public session a year ago. The publication of the Gresford Report ought to be an added incentive to the Commission to reach conclusions which may be the basis for new and evidently necessary legislation.
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