HOY02 - Francis Hoyland 1825-1838
Joseph Hoyland and Mary Carr were married at Silkstone with Stainsborough All Saints Church on 2nd September 1817. By 1819 Joseph was a coal miner and their children's baptisms show this as his occupation until 1836. By the time their tenth child, George, was born in 1837 Joseph had left mining behind to become a game keeper at Pye Greave.
Francis Hoyland was baptised at Silkstone 2nd March 1825. He was the fourth of Joseph and Mary's 11 children. Like his coal miner father and older brothers, Francis went to work as a young boy at the local Huskar Pit. On 4th July 1838 disaster struck the pit when the dayhole at Moorend was flooded during a summer thunderstorm. Children working in the pit were trying to get out via the dayhole after they heard a thunder clap and mistook it for an explosion. As they tried to escape a nearby ditch flooded and water poured into the dayhole. 26 children aged between 7 and 17 were drowned. Francis Hoyland was among them, he was just 13. The community was devastated and the burials took place at Silkstone with Stainborough All Saints on 7th July. The news shocked the nation and there was a public outcry. Politician and reformer Anthony Ashley Cooper (later Lord Shaftesbury) called for an inquiry into the working conditions of women and children in Britain's mines which eventually led to changes in the law. Read more about it - Victoria's Children of the Dark by Alan Gallop, ISBN-10: 0752456989 recreates the events surrounding the 1838 Huskar Pit Disaster. |
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