On this date in 1918 a firedamp explosion at the Minnie Pit Mine at Halmer End, near Newcastle-under-Lyme, killed 155 miners and one rescuer, 44 were under age 16. It was England’s worst wartime mining disaster.
The 14 October 1913 explosion at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, near Caerphilly, Glamorgan, Wales, that killed 439 miners and a rescuer is the worst mining accident in the United Kingdom.
The Coalmining History Resource Centre, “the UK’s largest and most comprehensive website concerning the history of coal mining”, includes a searchable database of over 164,000 recorded accidents and deaths.
Over 1,500 were killed, in what is believed to be the worst mining disaster in history, on April 26, 1942, at the Benxihu (Honkeiko) coal mine in Liaoning Province, China.
Meanwhile in Canada: From 1866 to 1987, 1,321 fatalities were reported in Cape Breton mines, including 65 in an explosion at New Waterford (25 July 1917), and 16 in Sydney Mines (6 December 1938) when a cable broke, sending a riding rake plummeting. The last explosion (Glace Bay, 24 February 1979) took 12 lives. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/coal-mining-disasters