My interest in the Minnie Pit began many years ago when, as a child, I heard stories of the explosion. I also knew some of the widows who still lived in the village. I was aware that miners still lost their lives through the occasional fall of coal or by accidents with machinery. I remember a couple of occasions when my father and his brothers came home with their finger nails broken and thick with coal dust from having to dig out a work mate with their bare hands. But to me the loss of life in the Minnie Pit was incomprehensible when I thought of the boys of the same age in my class at school and that the Minnie Explosion had taken the equivalent of three such classes. Why and how did it happen?

And so the need to record this terrible tragedy was born. However, this need was not to be fulfilled until many years later when I became involved in tributes that were organised to remember the explosion. I was initially involved in a writers group that was set up to record the events of that day in 1918. Unfortunately that group floundered and rather than the opportunity be lost I took up the cause myself. It was important that the information was gathered quickly as the number of people with living memories of the events were dwindling fast and I wanted the book to be about the human tragedy and not just a record of what went wrong.

As the story began to unfold I found the most unlikely of Heroes. They were men I had known as a child who had seemed ordinary nondescript individuals. I was in awe of them, in fact, in writing their story it confirmed my admiration for all miners. The cramped, claustrophobic conditions they have to endure for long hours without daylight should make us all admire them. It must be remembered that although our coal industry has almost disappears, there are many hundreds of miners world-wide who daily face conditions as bad as those that led to the disaster in the Minnie Pit which is about to unfold for you.