Recollections / With Photogravure Portrait of the Author and a number of / Original Letters, of which one by George Meredith and / another by Robert Louis Stevenson are reproduced in / facsimile

by David Christie Murray

When I enlisted under Dawson's banner, on the Birmingham Morning News, I was the junior reporter, but in the course of a month or two, I was promoted and became the recognised descriptive writer on the staff. Throughout my journalistic experience I have been fortunate in one respect. The men under whom I have worked have, for the most part, had the knack of extorting one's best, and one of the ways of extorting the best of an enthusiastic youngster is to let him know cordially when he has done well. I shall never forget the flush of resolve which came over me when Dawson first laid his hand upon my shoulder with a cheery “Bravo, my lad,” in acknowledgment of a piece of work of mine. It was the first really great chance I had had. I was just newly married at the time and supposing my work to be over for the day I was taking my way homeward, when the printer's “devil” overtook me after a breathless run and told me that I was wanted at the office. I went back to learn that there was a mine on fire at Black Lake, some seven miles away, and I was bidden to go and see what was to be seen there.

A hasty search through the time-table showed that there was no train running in that direction for an hour or two and so I was bidden to take a hansom and to use all despatch. The scene of the disaster lay a mile or two past the house in which I was born, and by the time at which I reached this point I could see that the tale was true. It was a perfectly still and windless evening with an opalescent sky, and far away I could see a great column of smoke rising like the stem of a giant mushroom and over it a canopy of smoke like the mushroom's top, and as I drew near I could see that the lower part of the column was faintly irradiated by the flames at the bottom of the pit shaft. The mine was situated in the midst of an open field and there was a great surging crowd about it which made way for me at a word. Round about the bed shafts of the mine, the downcast and the upcast, a little space was held voluntarily clear and half a dozen men in coaly flannels were standing there. A little tin pot of an engine in a miniature of an engine-house was labouring and panting at a little distance, and almost as I arrived upon the scene, the great iron bucket capable of containing as I should judge some five or six hundred gallons, was brought from the upcast, lowered there, set upon a trolley and then run along the rails until it could be emptied into the shaft in which the fire was raging.

This poor attempt to extinguish the flames was continued for perhaps a quarter of an hour, but at last one of the little band said, “This is no good, lads, we might as well stand round in a ring and spit at it. We shall have to get the 'Stinktors' out. A man or two will have to go down.” The coal-smeared men were all standing close together and they looked at each other with faces pale beneath the grime. For a second or two none of them spoke, but at last one said, “Will you make one?” and the first man answered with a mere nod and a sullen-sounding growl. The others were appealed to each in turn, and each gave the same sulky seeming acquiescence. I had at the moment no idea as to what it was actually proposed to do, but the plan was soon made clear. What the first speaker had called “stinktors” turned out to be little barrel-shaped objects about one foot by two.

They were called “l'extincteur,” and they contained some gas which in combination with water was fatal to fire. But when I reflected that in a confined space like that into which they proposed to venture, any gas which was fatal to fire would in all probability be fatal to human life, I almost wondered if the men were mad. Mad or no, they made their preparations with a deliberate swiftness which showed that they knew perfectly well what they were about. The man who had first proposed the venture was the first to set out upon it. The large iron bucket, technically called “bowk,” was attached to the steel wire rope which hung about the smouldering shaft. The man stepped into this, the chain was passed about his waist, he was smothered in heavy flannels which were tied about him with cords; the end of a long coil of dirty, oily, coaly, three-ply twine was fastened round his right wrist, and he was swung into the smoke. The word was passed to the engine-room, the little tin pot of an engine began to pant and snort 30 or 40 yards away and the man dropped out of sight. The coal-smeared comrade who had charge of the twine paid it out delicately fathom by fathom. It was the only link between the adventurer down below and the chance of life, and the merest tug at it would have caused an immediate reversal of the engine and would have brought him back to bank. But no signal came, and for anything that anybody there could have told, the man below might have been suffocated by the smoke. There was not a sound to be heard but the creaking of the wheel as it revolved above the shaft and the hoarse panting of the little engine, and the crowd which had by this time grown to vast dimensions waited in so tense a silence that there was something awful in it.

How long we waited I cannot tell, but at last the signal came. The word was flashed to the engine room and the rope came gliding swiftly upwards. The hero was comatose and was hanging all limp and loose by the chain which had been passed about his waist. He was seized, swung to one side and lowered and landed and one great fiery flake of flannel as big as a man's hand fell from the rough garments in which he was swathed from head to foot. A bottle of whisky came from somewhere and was put to his lips and in a while he recovered consciousness though he was still gasping and choking and his eyes were streaming. In the meantime another man, as good as he, was ready, and he came back, as it turned out afterwards, blinded for life, but neither that nor anything that fear could urge could stay the rest, and man after man went down and faced that lurid smoke and hell of darkness undismayed, until at last their valour won the day and they brought out every man and boy and beast. One coaly giant yelled, “That's the lot,” when the last batch came up, and then the crowd went mad, weeping, cheering, dancing mad. I have seen many deeds of valour in my time, both in peace and war, but I have never seen anything to match the Black Lake rescue for deliberate courage.

I feel inclined to say less about the courage displayed by the members of the next rescue party whose work I saw, for the very sufficient reason that I was a member of it To tell the honest truth, I had not the remotest idea that I was courting any sort of danger. At the Pelsall Hall colliery, which lay two or three miles from Walsall, there had been an inrush of water from some old deserted workings near at hand, and twenty-two miners were imprisoned. The water filled the shaft to a depth of sixty feet, and so the rescuers were really hopeless of being able to pump the mine clear before the prisoners had been reduced to a state of absolute starvation. There was always the certainty that the inrush of water would be followed by an influx of poisonous gases. This, in fact, proved to be the case, and every man had been dead a week before the first body was recovered.

I began my friendship with Archibald Forbes at Pelsall, and I began it in a rather curious fashion. The place was a wretched little mining village with a solitary beer shop in it, and there was only one house in which it was possible to secure decent accommodation. I bargained with its tenant for a bed, and agreed to pay him half-a-crown a night for the accommodation. Forbes had made a precisely similar arrangement with the woman of the house, and there was but a single bedroom to be disposed of. Neither of us knew anything of the other's bargain until the following morning. Forbes was under the belief that an attempt at descent was intended to be made that night, and that it was to break into an old abandoned air-way which had long been bricked up at the side of the shaft, and was believed to lead to the stables of the mine which were situated at a point above the level of the flood.

The dialect of the Black Country, when spoken at its broadest, is not easy for a stranger to understand. I, as a native of the district, was of course familiar with it, but Forbes was out of his element altogether, and might almost have tried talking chockjaw. I, knowing perfectly well that the intended attempt could not be made for at least twenty-four hours, went away with a comfortable mind and slept in Bailey's cottage. When I left the door next morning I saw striding towards me through the mud a very begrimed and unprepossessing-looking figure. It was, after all, a man with a two days' beard, a very dirty face, a collarless, grimy shirt, who wore heavy ankle Jack-boots, and had his trousers rolled above his ankles. This person accosted me brusquely. “What are you doing in that cottage there?” he asked me, and I asked in turn, “what business of his that might be.” He told me he had hired and paid for the only available bed in the house from the landlady, and I told him that I had hired and paid for the same accommodation through the landlord. The stranger claimed precedence, and was good enough to tell me that if he found me attempting to infringe upon his privileges he would take the liberty of throwing me out of the window. I was five-and-twenty at this time, stood five feet eleven in my socks, and reckoned myself a pretty good man with my hands, as a pupil of the old Slasher had a right to be, and in considerable wrath at the stranger's insolence, I drew myself up shoulder to shoulder with him, and told him hotly that that was a game that two might play at. There came a quiet humorous gleam into his eye, and when he looked at me for half a minute he burst into a great roar of laughter. “Newspaper man?” he asked me. I answered in the affirmative, and he stretched out an unwashed hand. “I am Forbes,” he said. “I am here for the Daily News; if I can't bully a man I make friends with him.”

Now Forbes for years had been one of my heroes and I was simply delighted to meet him. We struck up an immediate friendship but in an hour he turned into bed and I saw him no more until the following morning when I believed that I had made of him an enemy for life. I learned at the mine head the hour at which the rescue party was to descend and I made arrangements to join it. Then I walked in to Walsall and there hired a saddle horse which I bestowed in the stables of the beer shop. This done, I made my way back to the mine and found the party just in readiness to make the descent. There were six of us, all told, and the little contingent was captained by Mr Walter Neas, who, partly as a reward for gallantry as I believe, was afterwards appointed manager of Her Majesty's mines in Warora, Central India. We were all lowered in a skip together and the position of the air-way having been precisely ascertained one man lay face downwards on the skip's bottom and broke through the brickwork with a pick. The sullen waters of the pool were only some eight or ten feet beneath us. The bricks splashed in one after the other until there was a space large enough for a man to whirl himself into it, and one by one we entered the passage. It was a tremendous scramble, and here and there the roof of the place had sunk so low that we had hard work to squeeze through on our hands and knees. In places we had almost space to walk upright. We came at last upon a face of brick, the wall of the stable for which we were bound and beyond which there was some faint hope of finding the imprisoned men. The sound of our picks elicited no response though we paused more than once to listen, but the wall being at length broken down, we entered the stable and I was the first of the party to perceive the dead body of a man who sat leaning against the wall of coal looking for all the world like a wax-work figure.

I was holding a candle to the dead man's face and we were all gathered round when the light went out suddenly as if it had been quenched in water. In a second we were in pitch darkness and our leader called out “Choke damp—back for your lives,” and in the pitchy darkness back we struggled. I have forgotten to say that water was running down the air-way like a little mill-stream, though it was barely over shoe-tops. We scrambled on with the deadly gas following us, sucked and drawn along by the draught of air. I was last but one and was saved many of the bruises and excoriations which befell the leader. The warning voice would come out of the darkness, “duck here,” or “hands and knees,” and on we toiled, panting and perspiring, until we reached the shaft and were all drawn up again. I dried myself roughly before a roaring fire in the hovel of the mine and then made all haste to the beer shop where I mounted my horse and rode full tilt into Birmingham. The paper had gone to press early that night and the press was already clanking when I rode into Pinfold Street and sat down, all muddy and dishevelled as I was, to dictate my copy to a shorthand writer. What I had to say filled two large type columns and with the copy of the paper in my pocket, I rode back to Pelsall. There I found Forbes at breakfast—he asked where I had been and I produced the paper and showed my work in silence. He read it through without a word of comment, good, bad or indifferent, laid it down upon the table and left the room. I heard him rummaging about in the chamber overhead and by and by he came down with a portmanteau in his hand and without a word or a look left the house. I thought that he was galled to feel that he had been beaten by a novice.