I am twenty-nine years of age, and have been for some years engaged in various capacities in the many departments of the underground workings of the Kimberley diamond mines. During that period I have witnessed many hairbreadth escapes from the innumerable perils of the treacherous subterranean workings, and have seen men launched into eternity in a single second by one or other of those unavoidable happenings which of necessity form part of the miner’s precarious occupation. Personally, however, I have been very fortunate, for my own mining experience has been uneventful—until last week, when I was the victim of a string of events probably unparalleled in the annals of the diamond mines.
On the morning of Tuesday, 11th August, 1908, I went to work as usual, and arrived at the mine shaft a few minutes before six o’clock, feeling in high spirits after a brisk and invigorating three-mile bicycle ride in a calm, bracing, and typical South African dawn, which heralded the commencement of a day that was to prove the most eventful and memorable of my life. Precisely as the mine “hooter” sounded, I, with several others, boarded the huge iron man-cage, and in another moment its human freight was being lowered some five hundred feet down the perpendicular shaft to the main working level of the mine.
Our destination was reached in due course, and the cage came to a standstill at the entrance to the main level, which here resembles a large arch-shaped room, about eighteen feet high and twenty-five feet wide, with sides and roof of solid rock. On the one side is the main vertical shaft, leading to the headgear on the surface above and to the further levels below, while directly opposite, and extending in a straight, horizontal line for nearly half a mile into the bowels of the earth, is the main tunnel to the mine, suggestive of some great corridor, with many side galleries and minor branch tunnels on either side, leading in contrary directions. There is a double track of rails, one for empties returning from the tips and the other for the loaded trucks, which are detached from the electric locomotives at an apex some thirty yards from the loading chute, and from which they run by gravitation, in sets of eight, along the “full-way,” round the left side of the shaft, to the automatic tips, which are situated immediately behind the shaft and on the opposite side of the main tunnel. Here the trucks are mechanically overturned and the contents discharged into the loading chute, a large steel receptacle some twenty feet deep, fifteen feet long, and four feet wide. From this point the trucks run along the “empty-way,” or right side of the shaft, in a semicircle towards the main tunnel, to be finally coupled to the locomotive, and drawn, in trains of sixteen, to the different passes to be reloaded.
In the mine I am known as the “tipman,” and my duties—directing the discharge of the diamond-laden “ground” into the chutes—commence when the trucks, laden with the “ground,” reach the automatic tips.
I was soon at my accustomed post, and before many minutes had elapsed the distant rumbling of the moving trucks in the tunnels became audible. The day’s operations had begun.
I am constantly engaged in superintending the working of the tipping arrangements, and in watching the running of trucks on the proper tracks, which here almost entirely encircle the main shaft, through which the “ground” is eventually raised to the surface in the giant hoisting skips.
On this particular morning I worked without the shortest break, and nothing interrupted the monotonous rolling of the trucks as they went backwards and forwards again and again to be refilled at the loading passes and emptied at the loading chutes, until nearly one o’clock, when, through a slight but unfortunate mishap, I became the victim of a catastrophe which now seems to me like some horrible nightmare, or the effect of temporary delirium, rather than an actual occurrence.
THE FIVE HUNDRED FEET LEVEL OF THE WESSELTON MINE, SHOWING AUTOMATIC TIPS AND TRUCK TIPPING INTO THE CHUTE INTO WHICH WOOD WAS THROWN.
From a Photo by J. A. Glennie, Kimberley.
As before-mentioned, the train of sixteen trucks is divided into two sets of eight trucks each. One set is emptied into No. 1 chute and the other into No. 2 chute. At about a quarter to one my attention was drawn to what appeared to be a slight irregularity in the tipping of the trucks at No. 2 chute. A train had just reached the tips, and the first set of eight trucks was emptied in the usual manner into No. 1 chute, while the second set was directed on to No. 2 chute.