Story
Thomas Freeman was a farm labourer who born in Newton Purcell, Oxfordshire in 1855. He was the son of an agricultural labourer, Joseph Freeman (1820-1883) and Sarah Grant (1820-1885), who had married in Sarah’s home county of Warwickshire on 5th November 1839, and then moved back to Oxfordshire, where Thomas’s grandfather also lived with them: William Freeman (1787-1864), who had also been a farm labourer. The years 1853 to 1862 were known as the golden age of English agriculture, but the end of the American Civil War in 1865 opened up the American prairies to agriculture, and improving transport links between American and England allowed for grain and produce to be imported into England in increasing volume, and this caused a great depression in British farming. Thomas had worked on farms since he was a boy, but was forced by reasons of economy to move North in search of work. In 1872 he moved to Aberford, and continued to work as an agricultural labourer. In 1878, he had an illegitimate son, and in 1879 married Mary Johnson (1858-1933), pictured below. He had eleven children with Mary between 1878 and 1902, ten of whom lived into adulthood. Unable to support his growing family as a farm labourer, Thomas opted to start work at Peckfield Colliery, and walked to work from Ratten Row, Aberford.
Thomas was in the lower seam of the pit, in the Black Bed, on the day of the disaster. Although he was 41 years-old, he was working with the young lads under the supervision of Robert Henry Nevins, as he was new to coal mining. After the explosion, he would have been plunged into darkness, knocked unconscious for about an hour by afterdamp gas, forced to crawl up a stone ventillation drift since the lift was inoperable, and the 11 survivors from the Black Bed were barely able to make their way to the Beeston Bed shaft, as they were exhausted and sick from the effects of afterdamp gas. Thomas escaped the mine around noon with three other miners from Aberford: Thomas Nutton, William Camply and Joe Wilson. He never returned to coal mining after the disaster, and went back to working as an agricultural labourer in Aberford and Lotherton, before working as a labourer in the Limestone Quarry. Thomas passed away in Aberford on 24th August 1928, aged 73.
30th April 1896. The Peckfield Colliery Disaster at Micklefield 