Life story (verified from the parish register, marriage certificate, GRO indexes and census addresses supplied)
Ernest Marsden was born in Leeds in late 1902, son of Edward Marsden and Mary Alice Marsden of 45 Edmund Street.
He was baptised at St Edmund’s, Leeds, on 5 November (register page 9, no. 81; West Yorkshire Archive Service P68/12/9). His father was then a boot-finisher; by 1924 Edward was described as a blacksmith. The family remained in the Edmund Street neighbourhood of east Leeds.
On 2 August 1924, at the Parish Church of Leeds, Ernest, bachelor, miner, aged 21, of New Row, Mill Street, Leeds, married Florence Joy, spinster, aged 17, of Edmund Street, daughter of William Joy, labourer. The ceremony was after banns; witnesses were Thomas Marsden (almost certainly a brother) and Eleanor Hamilton. The civil registration is Leeds, Jul–Sep 1924, vol. 9b, p. 946.
By his early twenties he was already working underground. In 1937 he was a collier for T. and R. W. Bower Ltd at Allerton Main. Those collieries worked the Beeston and Silkstone seams and in that year employed more than a thousand men below and on the surface across Primrose, Silkstone and Victoria.
He was 34 when the roof fell on 5 March 1937. He left a widow, Florence.
No children are named in the surviving civil and parish documents examined. The ages on the marriage certificate (21 in August 1924) and the death index (34 in March 1937) agree with a birth in late 1902; the mining-database birth year “abt 1903” is therefore a rounding, not a contradiction.
Accident
On Friday 5 March 1937 Ernest Marsden, collier, aged 34, was killed underground at Allerton Main Collieries, Woodlesford, about six miles east-south-east of Leeds.
The pits — Primrose Hill, Victoria and Silkstone — were then owned by T. and R. W. Bower Ltd (associated with Pease & Partners; registered office Darlington).
A fall from a natural slip had left an overhang of stone. That overhang had been timbered and stood for a week.
As Marsden passed the place, adjacent roof came away and killed him at once.
Inspector’s account (UK Coal Mining Accidents index; wording of the contemporary official description)
There had been a fall from a natural slip leaving stone overhanging which had been supported by timber for a week. He was passing the place when some adjacent roof fell and killed him instantly.
Death was registered in the Tadcaster district in the March quarter of 1937 (GRO: Marsden, Ernest, 34, Tadcaster, 9c 1293). Healeyhero’s Yorkshire fatalities list records the same date, age, colliery and cause.
No full coroner’s notebook or newspaper inquest report has been located in open collections. Single fatalities of this kind were routinely returned as accidental death after the inspector’s description above.
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