Phil Mountain, GIS Project Manager, Caerphilly County Borough
GeoPlace is the joint venture between the Ordnance Survey and local government that manages Britain’s definitive address database and associated spatial information. Their annual Exemplar Awards recognise innovation, creativity, best practice, hard work and achievement.
While sitting in the audience during previous award ceremonies admiring the ingenuity on show, I'd never considered submitting anything on our behalf just thinking: “That's a good idea, wish I'd come up with something like that.”.
What changed this time and prompted me to enter was the nature of a project I’d just been involved in, it wasn’t a particularly large piece of work but it was a bit unusual so it might pique the judges’ curiosity. It did and we won their 2012 Citizen Award.
A bit of background: on the 14th October 1913, four hundred and thirty nine miners and one rescuer died in an explosion at the Universal Colliery, Senghenydd. Thirty of the miners were below the age of eighteen, two hundred and five women were widowed, and five hundred and forty-two children were left fatherless. This was Britain’s most devastating mining accident. Following the official inquiry, the mine owners’ culpability was recognised and they were fined £24 - five-pence-ha'penny for each life lost.
Earlier this year, the communities in the Aber Valley asked Caerphilly County Borough Council to create a website with a section devoted to the 1913 disaster to help them commemorate the centenary of the explosion.
The community hoped that, with the support of the National Assembly, this campaign would also provide the impetus for the establishment of a Welsh National Mining Memorial at the site of the Universal to honour the many, many thousands of individuals who perished keeping our industries running, our homes warm and our ships afloat.
At the top of the website content list were photographs and documents not seen elsewhere or hidden in archives. As the council’s map ‘expert’, it was left to me to come up with historic maps, aerial photographs and underground plans.
I also wanted to create some original content and this is where the idea of matching the victims’ addresses to our Local Land & Property Gazetteer emerged. It seemed novel, nothing like it appeared to have been attempted before and, anyway, every website benefits from having a map.
The names and addresses of the victims were listed in the official inquest and inquiry documents and were available in a digital but unstructured format. Using simple database tools, the addresses were tidied up and matched to the Council's LLPG. The LLPG match also revealed that a number of addresses recorded during the original inquest process were incorrect and had lain unnoticed for a century: a miner living at '30 Woodland Terrace' in a street of 22 houses instead of number 13; one at '42 Kingsley Terrace' which has only ever had 27 properties; another at number '50 Cenydd Terrace' when the numbering only reaches 37. Simple transcription errors like '104 High Street' instead of '104 Commercial Street', 'Church Street' instead of 'Church Road, and several others. These anomalies were dealt with where possible using the on‑line version of the 1911 Census. Now equipped with the UPRN and map reference, it was possible to visually represent where the miners had lived at the time of the disaster. When these were plotted and converted from BNG to WGS84, they could then be used to create an interactive Google map which was incorporated into the website. (http://your.caerphilly.gov.uk/abervalleyheritage/1913-pit-disaster/mapping-tragedy).
Mapping the homes of the victims draws attention to the scale of the disaster. The striking impression is the density of distress, house after house, street after street and perhaps unexpected was the distance some men travelled to work - from as far as Cardiff docklands.
There wasn’t anything groundbreaking here. There weren't any particular technical difficulties; there were only four hundred or so addresses to match, nothing like the tens of thousands of records we normally georeference. The interesting thing from a data point of view, I think though, is the historical aspect. We're used to matching our LLPGs to contemporary databases but there’s also scope for doing the same to any old historic property data, which we may have lying around. BBC4 recently showed a series based on Charles Booth's late nineteenth century street‑by‑street, house‑by‑house poverty maps of London (http://booth.lse.ac.uk/) which proved how entertaining and useful old spatial data can be. This type of social history is very popular but also has value and intelligence (the London Blitz map http://www.bombsight.org is another fantastic example).
The website was launched by the First Minister, Carwyn Jones, on 28th June 2012 and for the first time, the community now has a method of broadcasting their story and publicising the memorial campaign. Within the Council, the useful upshot is that it again highlights how crucial and useful the Gazetteer is to any project which involves geography and precise location information.
For this small community, like many others in Wales, these memories still have resonance. The pit winding gear continued to loom over the village until 1963 when they were finally demolished; the shafts weren't filled and capped until 1979 - generation after generation was reminded everyday of the tragedy their families had suffered. So far, the Aber Valley Heritage Group has raised £100,000 towards the memorial.
From a personal standpoint, I was delighted to be involved. I remember my grandmother telling me how her father, who himself was seriously injured in an underground mining accident, had walked over the mountains from his pit three valleys away to help with recovery work at the Universal.
As a member of the first in five generations not to share the hazardous life of the collier, something my forebears would probably be delighted in; it’s been a pleasure to play a very minor part in helping those august men and women of the Aber Valley achieve the recognition they deserve.
Phil Mountain, GIS Project Manager, Caerphilly County Borough
