Under the ground

A cemetery is a pretty obvious choice for another go at this week's Underneath challenge. And I am a serial cemetery haunter. But there's a couple of twists to the story here.

This is a small graveyard belonging to one of my nearest village's three chapels (it's like that in Wales -  they're for different non-conformist persuasions). This was a seafaring community up until the early part of the 20th century. The great majority of the men's names on these graves are followed by the words 'Master Mariner' and they sport motifs of ropes and anchors. The village is full of captain's houses: solid, no-expense-spared properties built for a comfortable retirement by old salts who'd done well and put aside a bit of capital.

However, those that weren't so lucky are not anchored here. The sea took a heavy toll and many sailors never made it back home, their bodies remaining beneath the waves, victims of disease, injury or drowning. Within a few yards it's possible to read epitaphs to men who lost their lives 'on the way from Newcastle to San Francisco', 'on a voyage from Halifax to Cartagena' and 'on his passage from Galveston to King's Lynn'. (Somewhere else I saw the exact latitude and longitude given of where a sailor died.)

There's another irony too. One young local lad must have decided to turn his back on the sea and try his luck at coal mining over in the valleys on the other side of the country. In the lead up to the 1st World War there was a massive demand for coal (largely to fuel the Royal Navy and other warships) so industrial South Wales sucked in a huge labour force to hack it out of the earth. With the urgency, accidents  multiplied and at least one village son perished underground.

The lower inscription on the foremost gravestone in the shot, barely legible, commemorates Thomas, aged 35, 'victim of the Senghennydd Explosion, Oct. 14, 1913'. The Senghenydd Colliery Disaster was the worst mining accident in the UK and remains one of the most serious worldwide in terms of loss of life: 439 miners were killed when methane gas ignited coal dust and the resulting series of explosions travelled throughout the mine. It is unlikely that Thomas's body was recovered to lie here beside sister Adelaide (the name above his,  she died in 1895, aged 15) and next to his father on the right, a sea captain who lived on until 1924.

[For anyone interested there is an excellent [url=http://www.senghenydd.net/]website[/url] on Senghennydd complete with contemporary images by an unknown photographer who took it upon himself to document the catastrophe.]