MEN WHO MAKE MINES SAFER

Hokitika Guardian, 20 April 1927, Page 1

MEN WHO MAKE MINES SAFER

(By Wm. J. Brittain in “Daily Mail”)

Two colliery disasters have come in two days to emphasise the fact that in recent years such accidents have been far less frequent. In the past ten years the death-roll has been hardly a tenth of that for the ten years before.

The secret is the forming of the Safety in Mines Research Board, paid for by mine-owners and miners with a penny levied on every ton of coal.

At the Board’s experimental station on the wild moors of Derbyshire-I have seen mine explosions staged in great steel tubes so that men of science can measure to fractions of an inch and a second exactly how, why, and when mine explosions take place.

The board’s work extends well beyond this station. At Sheffield Fniersity laboratory work is constantly being conducted by Professor B. \ r . "Wheeler, whose devotion to his duly leads him sometimes in the early hours to go off to sleep in his laboratory in order that he call he on the spot to start his labours again with the dawn.

Most interesting of all, to my mind, is the work of the miners themselves, whose ideas have received Hie full help and encouragement of the hoard. It is too early to say that the Elibw Vale disaster was caused by an explosion of firedamp, though the deadly gas was everywhere in the mine after the accident. Yet it. can definitely ho staled that the danger of firedamp explosions will bo almost taken, away shortly hy the introduction of an invention of a pit worker, Mr A. (!. Gulliford, of Dcnaliy Main Colliery. Mr Gulliford submitted to the hoard his rough idea for a device by which the present electric miners’ hand lamps could show the presence of firedamp as surely as the old and treacherous oil lamps. The Safety in Mines Research Board made Mr Gulliford a grant and lent him apparatus to carry on his evening experiments in the tinv laboratory behind his lodgings. Experts in London have perfected this device and soon it will Ik> in the mines. Accidents will lie fewer and we can look to the day when no more will a dead canary ho the sign that a mine has been tested for gas. OUR, DUTY DONE. “So far as Great Britain is concerned, not a vestige is left of the excuse that the privileges secured by foreigners in the country prevent the Chinese people from forming a stable national .luministration. Tn the midst of acute civil war the British offer to all the contending factions the surrender of the privileges they have hitherto enjoyed. But since in this civil war there is no guarantee of order—since, moreover. one powerful factio'u has declared a kind of crusade against Great Britain and has employed violence against British nationals—the Govern meat: are in duty hound to take precautions for the protection of the British men, women, and children who are now in China. Wo have offered a friendly and equitable settlement of all the matters in dispute, and have even gone so far ns to modify the original arrangements for the disposition of the Defence Force. No other Government in the world has made such a strenuous and patient effort to meet whatever may no conceived of as the national aspirations of the Chinese people.