page_title: Miners (poem)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Miners (poem) / Background
context_page_description: "Miners" is a poem by Wilfred Owen. He wrote the poem in Scarborough in January 1918, a few weeks after leaving Craiglockhart War Hospital where he had been recovering from shell-shock. Owen wrote the poem in direct response to the Minnie Pit Disaster in which 156 miners died.
context_section_description: After his discharge from Craiglockhart and a short spell of leave, Owen rejoined his army unit (the 3/5th battalion the Manchester Regiment) in Scarborough. While his men were in stationed at Burniston Road Barracks a mile north-west of the town, Owen and other officers were billeted in the Clarence Gardens (now the Clifton) Hotel; Owen was the mess secretary. Owen had a unique room in the hotel: he occupied the five-windowed turret on the 5th floor, directly overlooking the sea.
  
  He wrote Miners in under an hour in response to the Minnie Pit Disaster of 12 January 1918 in which 156 men and boys lost their lives as a result of a firedamp explosion, including 40 pit-lads under 16. Owen was unusually well-acquainted (for someone with a grammar school education) with working-class miner types. Aged nineteen, he had met a Northumberland pit-lad who made a particular impression on him at a nonconformist convention in Keswick in 1912. Also, many of the men in his platoon had worked down the Lancashire pits before the war: in 1916, Owen had described his men as
  "hard-handed, hard-headed miners, dogged, loutish, ugly. (But I would trust them to advance under fire and to hold their trench;) blond, coarse, ungainly, strong, 'unfatiguable', unlovely, Lancashire soldiers, Saxons to the bone.
   In addition Owen was a keen geologist who had collected rocks and minerals since his youth, and in Miners he uses phrases like "smothered ferns" and "frond-forests", redolent of the imprints of fossil plants in coal.
caption: Fern fossil in coal
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