Blood on the Coal

In mining parlance, a “bump” is an underground upheaval. As Ken Cuthbertson writes, a “Big Bump” is what produced the 1958 Nova Scotia mining disaster that stunned a company town and shocked the world. In his retelling of the tragic event, readers are intimately immersed in the nine-day-long crisis leading to the rescue of only some of the men who had been underground.

Bumps were familiar to Springhill, Nova Scotia, coal-mining families. In 1956 they experienced a smaller bump that nonetheless took the lives of thirty-nine men. Then the October 23, 1958, bump killed seventy-five miners in a tragedy whose story raced around the world through media reports that were sometimes disturbingly heartless.

Cuthbertson’s book Blood on the Coal tells about the miners who survived thanks to “the miracle at Springhill.” It’s a book about the courage and heartache experienced as families awaited news regarding the fate of the nineteen survivors from deep in the No. 2 mine where the incident occurred. It’s also about the bravery of the “draegermen and barefaced miners” who eventually rescued them.

“The Bump ripped the soul out of the town,” Cuthbertson writes. His book documents the geology, geography, and history behind the event, and his hour-by-hour script of that horrible week is time-stamped as he takes readers both underground to the injured survivors and topside, where we learn of people’s pained responses to the event.

Cuthbertson brings us to the coal face to meet the miners themselves, both those who survived and those who didn’t make it. We learn about their daily lives, inner thoughts, hopes, families, and social habits, even their biases and fears. He creates a breathless reading experience, through which we can almost feel the choking coal dust and deadly firedamp (gas) in the confined space of the mine.

We meet Maurice Ruddick, “the singing miner” and the hero of the trapped men. A father of twelve children, Ruddick was also subjected to prejudices faced by Afro-Canadians. “He kept them laughing and he kept them singing,” said one observer. A favourite tune was “Away Down in the Deeps,” which conveyed the men’s sense of resolve: “If we should die in the deeps, boys,/ We know where we’ll go,/ Heaven, boys, is away way above,/ and hell is right here below.”