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Quite early in my career I was sent out to Pelsall Hall, near Walsall, where a mine had been flooded and two-and-thirty men were known to be in the workings. I was born and bred in the mining district, and was familiar with the heroism of the miners. They are not all heroes, and even those who are are not always heroic. But use breeds a curious indifference to danger.
The paper had gone to press early that night and the press was already clanking when I rode into Pinfold Street and sat down, all muddy and dishevelled as I was, to dictate my copy to a shorthand writer. What I had to say filled two large type columns and with the copy of the paper in my pocket, I rode back to Pelsall.
I have no right to speak of it here, except to say that it was an act of large-hearted generosity performed in a fashion altogether characteristic of the man, and that I shall never cease to be affectionately grateful for it. There were two instances of escape at the Pelsall Hall disaster which seem worth recording.
There was always the certainty that the inrush of water would be followed by an influx of poisonous gases. This, in fact, proved to be the case, and every man had been dead a week before the first body was recovered. I began my friendship with Archibald Forbes at Pelsall, and I began it in a rather curious fashion.
There was some very good work in it none the less; and an eminent critic told me that, though it was capital flesh and blood, it had no bones. It resulted years afterwards in 'Joseph's Coat, which is, if I may say so, less inchoate and formless than its dead and buried original. But it was not that exasperating novel which made the Pelsall Hall disaster memorable in my personal history.
I slept a few hours, and then rode back to Pelsall with a copy of the paper in my pocket. Forbes packed up his belongings an hour later and left the scene. I had an idea that I had made an enemy, and that Forbes would never forgive me for beating him.
One special correspondent turned up at Pelsall on a Sunday, just as the pumping apparatus, which had broken down, was on the point of being repaired, and when everybody concerned was working for the bare life. It had not then been finally established that hope was over, and everybody was inspired with an almost superhuman vigour.
At the Pelsall Hall colliery, which lay two or three miles from Walsall, there had been an inrush of water from some old deserted workings near at hand, and twenty-two miners were imprisoned. The water filled the shaft to a depth of sixty feet, and so the rescuers were really hopeless of being able to pump the mine clear before the prisoners had been reduced to a state of absolute starvation.
The Pelsall Hall Colliery disaster was the hinge on which the door of my fate was hung. I wrote an unspeakably bad novel which had that disaster for its central incident, and it was published from Saturday to Saturday in the Morning News, to the great detriment of that journal; and so long as the story ran, angry subscribers wrote to the editor to vilify it and its author.
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