Edward Shaw was the manager at the Universal, and when it was over he was prosecuted under the Coal Mines Act of 1911 for breaches at the pit, among them a ventilation fan that could not be reversed. The orders had been on paper for two years. The fines that followed were small.
439 miners died underground, and one of the rescuers with them. The rescue brigades went down in relays because nobody could stay long in that air, and the work went on for days. In the photograph taken outside the pit you can see the crowd standing on the open ground, flat caps and hats and a bicycle propped among them, the LEWIS wagons and the two headframes behind. They were waiting for names. Senghenydd was a village of a few thousand people, so there was hardly a street in it that did not lose a man or a boy. The same colliery had killed 81 men in 1901, twelve years before.
The prosecution ended in fines of about twenty-four pounds against the manager and the company together, and people did the arithmetic at the time: it came to a shilling or so a man. One of the Welsh papers put it exactly that way, miners at one shilling and a penny farthing each.
Most of the men who lived through the blast itself were killed by what came after it — afterdamp, mainly carbon monoxide, which binds to the blood far more readily than oxygen does. That is why the brigades could only work in short relays. Wendell, thank you for the names being the thing you ended on.