3-008-399 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The New Hartley Pit Calamity: Gilbert Ward, Esq., M.R.C.S.E., 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. Engraving from a photograph by the London Stereoscopic Company. 'Mr. G. Ward, of Blyth...is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He has an extensive practice in the colliery districts, and holds several public medical appointments. He was for many years Vice-Consul for France at Blyth, and for his professional services to the people of that nation visiting that port his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon, in 1848, decreed him a gold medal of the first class. In the catastrophe at Hartley Mr. Ward, with his usual philanthropy took a prominent part. He placed himself at the mouth of the shaft, and, for two days and two nights succesively, midst storm and hail, he never left his post except to administer relief to one or other of the heroic sinkers who were continually being brought up more dead than alive from the obnoxious gas they had inhaled in their endeavours to extricate the buried miners'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.