The shafts of Haig Colliery were sunk between 1914 and 1918 - through the years of the First World War - as new access to the existing Wellington Pit at Whitehaven. The mine was named after Douglas Haig, the British commander whose name was then synonymous with the war. (Cumbria had a habit of doing this: nearby pits were named Ladysmith, for the South African battle, and Wellington, for the prime minister.) Production started in 1919; full production not until 1925. The underground workings spread west under the Irish Sea, eventually reaching more than four miles offshore - men hewed coal four miles out beyond the cliffs, with the seabed somewhere above their heads. Over almost seventy years of operation, Haig sent forty-eight million tonnes of coal to the surface.

The first disaster came on a Tuesday morning, just before nine. The day before, gas had been reported in the Six Quarters Seam. The deputy in charge, William Weightman, went down with a shot-firer to make a judgement call. Weightman approved the shot-firer to set off his explosive charge. It ignited the gas. The banksman at the top of No. 4 shaft noticed a cloud of dust rising, and the Mines Rescue brigade were called. Thirty-nine men were killed. Their bodies were recovered by 10 September. Identifying them was difficult: damage to the men's faces was so severe that one had to be identified by his belt and trousers. Each of those thirty-nine men was somebody's son, brother, husband, father - and somebody at the pit head had to find the words to tell their families when they came to ask.

Coal mining in this era was constant grief. After the 1922 explosion, the mine kept producing. On 13 December 1927 another explosion killed four men; one of them, Harold Horrocks, could not be brought out before the workings had to be sealed for safety. Eight weeks later, with the linked Wellington Mine's 800 men back at work, the 1,100 men at Haig were still locked out. A team of twenty-four went underground on 9 February 1928 to assess the damage and to try to bring Horrocks home. They worked in shifts through the day and into the night, surfacing for food and to refill their breathing apparatus. After eleven p.m., the three explosions hit. The canaries the second rescue team carried died almost at once. The roof had collapsed completely where the worst blast had been. The men in the initial party - and Harold Horrocks - were never recovered.

Three years later, just after a quarter past eight on a Thursday evening, the third great explosion ripped through Haig. Of the 169 men working underground, forty-five were in the same area where the 1928 explosion had happened. Twenty-seven were killed. Between 1922 and 1931, then, seventy-nine men had died in three explosions in this single mine - and the families in Whitehaven and the surrounding villages had carried more concentrated grief in those nine years than most communities ever know. The cause of the 1928 explosions was never definitively established. The sealed-off section made forensic investigation impossible. The cause of 1922 was a single decision by a single man, made with imperfect information. The cause of 1931 was the same kind of gas, in the same kind of seam, in the same kind of mine.

By the 1984 miners' strike, Haig was the only deep mine still working in Cumbria. The men there had been told, just as the strike began, that eighty per cent of them would lose their jobs. They knew the pit was uneconomic. They voted to work through the strike to protect their redundancy terms - a pragmatic choice that brought flying pickets down from Northumberland and elsewhere. The colliery closed in March 1986. One hundred and eighty jobs were lost. The shafts were capped. The pit head gear above one of the shafts was preserved; for years it served as the Haig Colliery Mining Museum. In 2014, plans were announced for a new underground mine on the same coalfield - Woodhouse Colliery, projected to ship coking coal by rail to Scunthorpe and Port Talbot. Whatever its commercial fate, the cliff-edge village of Whitehaven still keeps its dead. Thirteen of them are still beneath the floor of the Irish Sea.