3-008-397 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The New Hartley Pit Calamity: the funeral procession leaving Colliery Row for Earsdon Churchyard, 1862. The Hartley Colliery disaster of 16 January 1862 was a coal mining accident in Northumberland which resulted in the deaths of 204 men and children. '...there were probably 60,000 persons present...carts containing a layer of straw were slowly driven to the door of each cottage, and, amid the weeping and still more agonising signs of silent grief in every sorrowstricken house, the coffins were lifted over the side of the cart and packed in loads of five each...[by] three o'clock, nearly all the corpses had been taken to be interred in the quiet churchyard of Earsdon...Far as the eye could reach up and down the road one unbroken line of heavy-hearted mourners extended till lost in the distance...Round each cart were the immediate relatives of the deceased. All passed along in silence, with their eyes downward cast...along the route spectators had collected, watching, with serious faces and respectful attitude, the passage of the victims of an unparalleled calamity...the churchyard wall was broken through, that the coffins might be borne to the burying-ground through the churchyard...The house in the foreground is the Incumbent's residence'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.