Pupils at Nant Y Parc Primary in Senghenydd have been learning about the Universal Colliery disaster of 1913 with the help of a time capsule.
Teachers at the school worked with the Aber Valley Heritage Museum to put together the time capsule which contained a miner’s lamp, several photographs and letters and other artefacts, as well as a miner’s hat wrapped in leather. Members from the Aber Valley Heritage Group came along to an assembly to identify the objects and to explain how they would have been used by the miners.
Headteacher Kirsty Bevan said: “The discovery of the time capsule gives the children a real sense of the history and culture of our area and will be a real boost to the school community.”
Nant Y Parc Primary School is built on the site of the former Universal Colliery, which suffered the largest mining disaster in British history in 1913. Four-hundred and forty men and boys lost their lives in a devastating explosion, a tragedy that affected nearly every household in the Aber Valley.
A Welsh National Mining Memorial is set to be unveiled on the site on October 14 marking 100 years since the disaster.
The memorial will feature a statue, a memorial wall featuring the name, age and address of every man and boy who was killed in the disaster and a landscaped garden.
Meanwhile, in readiness for the 100th anniversary Caerphilly County Borough Council, together with the Aber Valley Heritage Group, has mapped the address of the victims of the mining disaster to show how many places were affected by the tragedy.
The names and addresses of victims and survivors were extracted from the centuryold official inquest and inquiry documents, which were then tidied up and matched to the council’s local address dataset.
Geographical coordinates were added through this matching process, making it possible to visually represent where the miners had lived at the time of the disaster.
Cllr Keith Reynolds, the council’s deputy leader, said: “The council’s address dataset has added real value to the website by illustrating historical data in a modern context, and the results are both fascinating and poignant. The interactive map gives a striking impression in the density of distress on the immediate community and also highlights the distance some men travelled to work, including some from as far as Cardiff docklands.”
See the map at your.caerphilly.gov.uk/abervalleyheritage/1913-pit-disaster/mapping-tragedy