In the heart of industrial East London is a tranquil spot that harks back to an earlier industrial heritage. Three Mills Island, hemmed in by the River Lea, is home to the mills that give it its name – now home to a variety of companies, including a film and television studio.

Although many come to photograph the striking mills, the site is also home to a striking memorial, featuring two hands – the helping hands. This is dedicated to the victims of an industrial accident on the site back in 1901. The accident saw four men die: George Frederick Elliott, 35; Godfrey Maull Nicholson, aged 29; Thomas Alfred Pickett, 26; and Robert Underhill, who was only 21. Nicholson was the managing director of the Three Mills Distillery, based on the island, and together with his workmen, he had decided to ‘dip’ a well that was on the distillery’s land near the Lea. It was described as being in an area where the air smelled bad and the smoke of the nearby chemical factories was so toxic that it had caused trees to wither. Nevertheless, Nicholson wanted to see how deep the water in it was, and so one day in July 1901, one of the workmen, Thomas Pickett, ventured down the well’s ladder with a rod to ascertain the depth. Suddenly, he fell to the bottom. Nicholson went to help him, but then he, too, suddenly fell. One by one they fell as they tried to help the one who had gone before: and then both Elliott and Underhill were at the bottom as well. Two fire engines were called for; the engines pumped out the ‘foul air’ that was found to be in the well, while a fireman in a smoke helmet ventured down. He found the dead bodies of all four men.

This was a shocking industrial accident, in that the actual act the men were engaged in seemed so mundane; how could so many die simply climbing down a ladder into a well during their daily work? But the toxic air was a result of the industries in the local area, known about but its effects not understood by all. The men had no idea that poisonous fumes in the well would leave them unconscious, or so quickly; in trying to help each other, they increased the number of fatalities.

Memorial park
Not only is there a memorial to these men at the site of the well, but there is another at Postman’s Park, off Little Britain in the City of London. This well-known site contains a series of plaques, each one dedicated to someone who has died in an act of self-sacrifice. But several contain details of those who died in the course of their work, such as the plaque to Daniel Pemberton, a foreman for the London and South-Western Railway who, in January 1903, was working on the line at Twickenham when an express train unexpectedly came along it. He pushed his colleague, Thomas Harwood, off the track, but was unable to save himself.

For our working forebears, there were many risks and dangers in their daily jobs that could lead to accidents. Industrial incidents could be caused by accidents, negligence, incompetence – or simply a lack of awareness or knowledge about the risks of a job. Added to this a lack of formal training, and, up to a certain point, the employment of the young and poorly qualified, together with long hours and poor conditions, it’s easy to see why so many accidents in the line of work could occur.

Mining accidents
Perhaps the industry most associated with work-related accidents is that of mining; pit collapses and other incidents involving miners have long attracted substantial attention. The Oaks Colliery in Barnsley was the site of one major disaster in 1866, when firedamp – a mix of methane and hydrogen found in some coal seams – exploded; it killed nearly 400 people. No government inspectors had checked the colliery in years. Decades later, in 1913, the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, near Caerphilly, saw 439 deaths in a similar disaster, thought to have occurred when a spark from signalling equipment ignited firedamp.

However, a whole range of industries historically have seen workers injured or killed while at work; indeed, it could be argued that any work could result in accidents, whether due to worker misadventure, company mismanagement or health and safety failures. The deaths of the Three Mills Distillery workers and their boss show how not just factories and work buildings, but also the wider area in which a business was situated could have both known and unknown dangers. In the 20th century, there have even been larger-scale industrial disasters, such as the RAF Fauld explosion in 1944. This was probably caused by a worker using the wrong tool to remove a detonator from a bomb, and resulted in an explosion that caused many fatalities.

Although some company bosses may have been complacent about the risks facing their employees, or at best ignorant as to what they were and how to avoid them, in other quarters it was recognised that there were too many industrial accidents and that something needed to be done about it. In 1903, a Home Office committee that had been appointed to look at how industrial accidents were notified recommended a standard system of reporting non-fatal accidents in mines and factories, recognising that accidents could result in injury or near misses and these needed to be reported as well as those accidents that resulted in deaths.

This did not, of course, prevent those accidents from happening in the first place – they simply put in methods of reporting them once they had occurred. It’s clear that industrial accidents continued to be a problem. In August 1913, 255 people were reported as having been killed in the course of their employment in that month alone, including 42 in the railway service, and 96 in mines. These figures were dwarfed by those killed in factories and workshops, which totalled 103 – these were accidents reported under the Factories and Workshop Act. Some workers became ill due to lead poisoning in their workplaces, and others due to anthrax; three workers died due to the lead poisoning seen as a particular issue for house painters and plumbers. My husband’s grandfather died aged 34 of a cancer caused by chemicals at his workplace during World War Two; although not ‘accidents’ as we might understand them, these were industrial incidents, fatalities and health issues caused directly by an individual’s work.

Need for compensation
One particularly sad work-related accident occurred just nine months before the fatality statistics of August 1913 were published. Harry Avis, from Withyham near Crowborough in Sussex, was a bricklayer by trade. In 1906, he had an accident that led to him losing the sight in his left eye. A cartridge had exploded while he was working. Then, in December 1912 – in an awful coincidence – he was working with a cartridge-filling machine when a second cartridge exploded, and he was blinded in his other eye. A neighbour saw him edging his way out of the building where he had been working, his face covered in blood. He had to be guided back to his home, and then the neighbour left him alone for a minute while he sent for Harry’s wife and father. By the time the father turned up at the house, Harry had shot himself dead, unable to comprehend a life with no sight.

Harry’s death, at the age of 31, resulted in a debate about how difficult it was for dependents of men like Harry to gain compensation. The Avis family – Harry’s 27-year-old wife and four-year-old son – was financially as well as emotionally impacted by his suicide. Yet it was hard for the widows and children of such victims of industrial accidents to get any redress. Thomas Gavan-Duffy, who was General Secretary of the Cumberland Iron Ore Miners’ Association, which would later amalgamate with the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, investigated nine deaths that occurred in 1912, and found that in eight cases, the employers denied liability. The final case only resulted in compensation being paid because a trade union fought the case on behalf of the dependents, after it was rejected by three different firms of solicitors, one of whom had stated that the family ‘had not one ghost of a chance of succeeding’.

Legal obstacles
This successful case stemmed from a worker in an iron ore mine who was struck across the head by an iron bogey while he was working one day. He was off sick for three weeks, received compensation, but then returned to work, despite being obviously unfit to. He had to leave work seven separate times in a year, each time trying to return to work, and then, again suffering from depression, he hanged himself. These cases were difficult to get compensation for because solicitors for the companies involved argued that suicide was not the ‘natural or probable’ consequence of the original accident, whereas the trade unions argued that they were.

Today, although our awareness of health and safety has improved and been recognised in legislation, accidents still occur. Our industries may have changed since the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is still impossible, it seems, to make them 100 per cent safe – a centuries-old problem. {