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| October 20th | Levant Mine Disaster |
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Until the mid 1850s, miners had to ascend and descend shafts via 10 foot ladders resting on platforms. The miners were always men and teenage boys since women were not permitted to work other than on the surface as ‘bal maidens’ sifting, stamping and collecting the crushed ore). The shafts were often many hundreds of feet in depth and it has been estimated that more miners were killed falling off the ladders, at the end of a shift in terribly hot and dirty conditions or were killed by the miners above falling than in shaft and tunnels collapses and flooding. n 1857, the first ‘man engine’, essentially an early form of a mechanical lift was installed at Levant for lowering, but more importantly raising, miners between the surface and the levels. The engine was popular but it still took half an hour to transport the men from the deepest depth to the surface. |
On this day in 1919, one of the cables of the man engine snapped, sending 32 miners to their death. The engine was almost at ground level when the accident occurred and, although some managed to jump off, the breakage consigned the remaining miners to a certain death half a mile down. Fellow miners came from Geevor and East Pool Mines and spent five days digging out the bodies. That deep section of the mine was never worked again and, in 1930, the entire Levant Mine closed, due to the collapse in the price of tin.
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