It was a dark December night, with collars turned up to guard against the cold and warm breath floating on the night air. Young James Lewis aged 15 and his father, David Lewis, made their way to the Naval Colliery, Pen-y-Graig to start their long and strenuous night shift in the dark and treacherous bowels of the Earth. 
Both would have carried a ‘snap tin’, a metal box in which miners carried their food for their shift, no doubt lovingly prepared by Mam and wife Ann. Little did Ann know, when they left for that fateful shift, that she would never see her son James or her husband David alive again. 107 men and boys aged from 14 to 75, were on shift the night of December 9th 1880, some four hundred and forty yards in to the unforgiving dark, below the soil and the Parsh of Llantrisant. Their work was to mine black gold. Dislodging it from the earth, by pick and by shovel and by hand, bringing it up to the surface. The black rock 300 million years in the making, in vast quantities of 500 tonnes every 24 hours.
It was what the colliery owners had become accustomed to. Disaster struck at around 1.15am, December 10th. A firedamp. A deadly explosion underground when methane gas or any coal gases are ignited. With the alarm raised from the surface, people gathered at the pit mouth. At first light, brave Mr Richards and Mr Davies lead 30 fearless volunteers, including Mr Galloway the deputy mine inspector, in to the Naval downcast shaft to rescue the 107 that went below the previous night.
Cheers of joy, shouts of relief rang out when four men were found alive at the foot of the down shaft, followed shortly by another.
The relief of finding life was short lived as only 1 other soul was found alive. 50 hours after the explosion, sheltered, miraculously, from the blast, fire and fall of stone, in a natural crevice in the coal wall, beside him, a dead miner lay, his only companion in those long and dark 50 hours. When the still and lifeless bodies of father and son David and James Lewis were brought with dignity and care to the pit mouth on December 13th, the South Wales Daily Newspaper reported in its next day’s edition, “from early morning until dark, a Scottish like thick mist rolled down from the hills, soaking to the skin, with the damp it brought, those who lingered at the pit mouth, longing for news of their loved ones”. David died from the horrific injuries he had sustained and alongside him James had died of suffocation. Did David use, in an act of pure love, his own body to protect his son from the anger of the underground that night? Unintentionally preventing the boys ability to draw air, when they fell to ground. We will never know.
They were buried at St John’s graveyard in Tonyrefail. In a grave already tragically occupied by James’s baby brothers, Thomas John who died aged 2 years in 1874 and baby Benjamin 9 months, who died in 1872.
Of the 101 souls lost that morning, eight were under the age of 18, the vast majority were supporting young families.
Brothers died beside brothers and, fathers died beside sons. For the price of coal.
By Angharad Spooner 12/11/23
