The Men
Workmates, fathers, sons and members of a community remembered as people first.
At eighteen, William was an apprentice engineer working in a colliery when disaster struck a small Lanarkshire mining community. He knew many of the men involved and carried the memory of that day throughout a career spent in the industry.
What happened was not simply an industrial incident. It entered the lives of families, colleagues and an entire community. The loss was immediate, but the questions surrounding responsibility, safety and remembrance lasted much longer.
“They were ordinary hard-working men who left their homes and families that fateful morning never to come back.”
William later spent twenty-five years in collieries. That experience gave him a working knowledge of the underground environment, the machinery and the risks faced by those who went below the surface each day.
Why: A Collier’s Tale was written decades later, not to turn tragedy into spectacle, but to place the people back at the centre of the story. It remembers the courage of the rescue effort while asking difficult questions about the conditions and decisions surrounding the disaster.
The book is one part personal memory and one part industrial history. Its enduring point is simple: the past matters only if we are prepared to remember the human beings inside it and learn from what happened to them.