At Least We Knew Where We Were.

These artifacts all date from around 1973; the Porsche 911 may be even older.
The memorial is above the point underground where six of the seven dead men are believed to lie to this day.
Lofthouse Colliery is long gone, there isn't even a slag heap to see, but to get some idea of the scale of the industry, the memorial is miles from Lofthouse, in Kirkhamgate.
At the time, the news followed the desperate attempts at rescue, long after they must be dead, and everybody hoped.
They were brave men, doing a difficult and dangerous job, and they died.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the nuggets of coal were being gathered into bright metal for consumption and export.
The Porsche 911 survives today.
The mining industry has disappeared.
What might this mean?
Life and death struggles matter less in the world of commerce than pretty baubles.

What might this mean?
The wrong people have money, and the wrong values matter.

To bring back one of those men(six had families), I'd hope that every owner of every Porsche in the country would offer it for scrap. Because it is a toy, and toys like that are idle pleasures.

But if it was not voluntary, the sacrifice would be greater than just one man or seven.

And a world without such toys, is a world without any reason to pay men to go down for coal in the first place.