Set amidst the wooded slopes of former slag heaps in the village of Marcinelle, where the Charleroi suburbs meet the Wallonian countryside, it’s hard to imagine the awful scenes that took place at the Bois du Cazier coal mine at 08:10am on August 8, 1956. Today, this is a place of tranquility, the now silent headframes that winched men and machinery more than a 1000m below ground stand like ancient totems over sacred land.
As much as it is a piece of industrial heritage, recognised by UNESCO for its outstanding universal value, it is also a memorial to the 262 men of 11 different nationalities who died here in what remains Belgium’s worst ever mining disaster. More than half of those who died underground, some 136, were Italian. They were just one small part of the tens of thousands of Italians who came to Belgium as guest workers nicknamed, “men for coal”.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, devastated European countries looked to the future and to rebuilding their economies. In Belgium, reopening the mines and exploiting the Wallonian coalfields were priorities. The government declared a “battle for coal”, but the chronic shortage of workers prepared to go underground into Belgium’s notoriously unsafe mines hampered progress.
Conditions in Belgium’s mines were truly appalling. Even before the war they had to rely upon guest workers from poorer regions of Europe willing to work in dangerous and poorly maintained mines for low wages. The labour shortage in Belgium after the war was even more acute. In Italy, however, there was rampant unemployment and a surplus of workers. In 1946, the two governments struck a deal: men for coal.
Italy provided labour made desperate by lack of opportunity, while Belgium sent three million tonnes of cheap coal back to Italy each year. Of course, the Italians were sold a lie that they would receive good pay, decent food, and housing, and they were told Belgian working conditions were good. None of this was true. Workers came from across Europe, but Italians were the most numerous.
Life underground was gruelling, unhealthy and unsafe; above ground living conditions meant poor food and even worse accommodations. To make matters worse, guest workers were despised and treated like criminals by local communities. It is the story of this huge migrant labour force, intertwined with the disaster of 1956, that the heritage site of Bois du Cazier tells so eloquently.
I arrived on a sunny late September day and the friendly staff set me up with an English language audioguide. The story to which I would listen was that of an Italian brother and sister, narrated by two English people with Lancastrian accents. It was very good. On that fateful day, 275 men went underground at 7am, just over an hour later disaster struck. Only 13 would reach the surface alive.
At almost a kilometre underground an empty coal wagon got stuck in an elevator cage as a full wagon was loaded. Unaware of this, other miners started raising the lift. The wagon that was sticking out struck an oil pipe, a compressed-air pipe and two high-voltage electrical cables. It was a deadly combination, starting a fire which quickly engulfed the wooden infrastructure fuelled by oxygen from the air intake shaft.
Poisonous smoke began to fill the tunnels where the men were working. At the surface a cloud of smoke belched from the mineshaft. Panicked family and friends descended on the mine. Nothing could be done. There was no way to reach those trapped. It took 15 days to get the fire under control and for rescuers to reach the lowest levels of the mine. It took months to retrieve all of the dead.
The media as well as the great and the good descended on Bois du Cazier, and there are moving photos of those days in the museum. My Anglo-Italian audioguides disdainfully related the final indignity for families of the dead. After a year-long inquiry and despite safety regulations being regularly ignored, a trial absolved the owners and management of responsibility.
Only in 1961 did the mine manager, Adolphe Calicis, receive a six-month suspended jail sentence and a 2,000 franc fine. He is widely seen as a fall guy for the wealthy owners, especially as he risked his own life trying to save others. Bois du Cazier is a fascinating and tragic story, one that makes a trip to Charleroi worthwhile – and they even have their own beer.
It’s a very sad story and not at all uncommon, though usually not on that sort of scale. As someone who is mildly claustrophobic I cannot imagine how anyone could go down a mine once, never mind every day, apart from through dire necessity.
I can only agree. The deepest part was over 1km underground, just the thought of that is bad enough.
Mines are the perfect backdrop for tragedies. The north of France also has its share of such stories.
It was a truly harrowing tale to here narrated.