A Collection of Poems

Great disasters have always moved men and women to put pen to paper and express the thoughts and feelings and those of others in verse. The Victorian mining disasters are rich sources of this verse. Much of is was anonymous and it expressed the feelings of the family for their loved one and much of it appeared on the remembrance cards that were fashionable at the time. Other poems appeared as the 'Penny Ballads' that were quickly written after a disaster and sold for one penny in aid of the dependants of the victims of the disaster.

All the poems record the sense of loss that the calamity brought on the loss of a community loosing many of it's menfolk, the plight of those left behind who now had no breadwinner and some record the heroic efforts that were made by their fellow workmen to rescue them or, in many cases, their bodies.

The verses are no great works of literature but they all reflect the feelings and thoughts of mining people, written from the heart and they stand as a true record of the folk heritage of the coal mining areas of Great Britain.

From a Victorian remembrance card for a dead miner.

Farewell! Farewell! My wife so dear,
I am at rest, you need not fear;
No anxious sorrow need you take,
But leave our children, for my sake.