Statistics on the National Miners' Monument
Introduction
Due to the standardised format of the engravings, the data on the stone tablets of the National Miners’ Monument is ideally suited for the calculation of some basic statistics. Each entry of a deceased miner typically includes six pieces of information: the full surname, the initial of the first name, the year of death, the age at the time of death, the place of residence, and the canton corresponding to the place of residence. This information is available for nearly all miners. For instance, only five entries lack age information. Details about the place of residence are missing for seven of the miners who lived in Luxembourg at the time of their accident.¹ The year of death is missing for just one individual. These minimal gaps in the data are negligible for the purposes of the calculations presented here.
At its inauguration in 1957, the memorial comprised 18 stone tablets, containing information about a total of 1,467 workers. After 1976, an additional tablet was added, bringing 20 more names to the memorial. In 2001, a final stone tablet with 21 entries was incorporated into the monument. The two tablets added the names of miners who had either died in accidents after the monument’s inauguration or whose deaths had previously been overlooked. All in all, the monument now features 20 stone tablets with 1,508 entries.
¹ Determining the place of residence appears to have been much more difficult in the case of workers living in Belgium and Germany.
Age
The workers listed on the monument range in age from 13 to 78 years. A total of 13 individuals can be found who had not yet reached the age of 16 at the time of their death. This is particularly striking because, since 6 December 1876, a law in Luxembourg prohibited youths under the age of 16 from working underground in mines, pits, and quarries.² Although the law did not completely prohibit the employment of young people in mines, it imposed strict limitations on the types of work they were permitted to do. All of the accidents involving minors under the age of 16 listed on the memorial occurred after 1882, more than six years after the law was passed. The last of these involved 15-year-old J. Bourkel, who lost his life in 1952 (stone tablet XIX, position 1). The oldest person listed, 78-year-old J. Muller, died in an accident in 1916, in the middle of the First World War (stone tablet VIII, position 66). It is highly likely that had it not been for the war, Muller would not have been forced to work in a mine at such an advanced age.
From a statistical point of view, these extremely young and very old victims are exceptions. More than 95 per cent of the miners listed on the memorial were between the ages of 16 and 60 at the time of their death. The average age of the deceased is 35.95 years. However, this figure is slightly misleading. A look at the age distribution of the accident victims shows that the accident rate does not follow a standard distribution around the age of thirty-six (Graph 1).
The likelihood of a fatal accident was higher among miners between the ages of 18 and 36. After the age of forty, the risk steadily declined. This can likely be attributed, at least in part, to the division of labour in the mines. Younger men were stronger and typically performed tasks that were physically more demanding and more dangerous. However, they were also less experienced in managing potential and real hazards. In contrast, older workers tended to be more experienced and took on more responsible roles that were physically less taxing and carried lower risks.
² Das gleiche Gesetz verbot Frauen und Mädchen solche Arbeiten grundsätzlich.
Place of residence 1 – Countries and cantons
Unfortunately, the data on the stone tablets does not provide information about the miners’ place of birth, country of origin, or nationality. Only information about their place of residence at the time of death can be found on the tablets. At the national level, only the Grand Duchy and its three neighbouring countries – Germany, Belgium and France – come into consideration. The vast majority of the deceased were living in Luxembourg at the time of their death (Table 1). Only 108 of the 1,508 individuals were residing abroad. Among the neighbouring countries, France is the most represented with 59 entries. In contrast, only 15 of the deceased lived in Germany. The reason for this is that mining in Luxembourg was concentrated in the Minette region in the south-west of the country, in the immediate vicinity of the French and Belgian borders.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of victims who were living in Luxembourg at the time of their death resided in the canton Esch an der Alzette. 1,244 of the 1,508 workers listed, or about 82.49 per cent, lived in the southernmost canton of the country at the time of their accident, which is also where the majority of the mines were located (Graph 2). Only 41 of the deceased lived in Capellen, the canton with the second-highest number of recorded miners. A look at the ‘Register of Mining Victims compiled by Emile Gelhausen’ of the municipality of Kayl suggests that a significant number of the deceased originally came from the Ösling region. Unfortunately, the data in the register, at least in its original form, offers only limited utility for statistical analysis.
However, it would be incorrect to assume that all the miners listed on the monument worked in the Minette region. In Stolzemburg, in the canton Vianden, for example, a copper mine existed for many years. Obermartelingen, in the canton Redingen, was home to a slate mine. It is highly likely that some, if not all, of the deceased listed under Redingen and Vianden worked in these mines. Similar assumptions can reasonably be made about the workers listed under other cantons.
Place of residence 2 – Municipalities and localities
A statistical analysis of the distribution of the deceased across the individual municipalities and localities of Luxembourg only makes sense for the canton Esch an der Alzette. Nearly 300 of the workers residing in the canton were living in Esch an der Alzette itself at the time of their death (Graph 3). Only Rümelingen comes close to this figure, with 288 entries. It is not surprising that nearly half of the miners living in the canton were resident in Esch or Rümelingen at the time of their death. These are the two municipalities in the south of the country that experienced the greatest population growth from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. New miners settled close to their workplaces and in areas where larger communities of miners had already formed. Bettemburg, for example, which had a larger population than Rümelingen until the 1880s, was more commonly considered a railway town, with many railway workers settling there. In contrast, Rümelingen’s coat of arms still depicts a miner carrying a pickaxe and lamp.
In general, more caution is advised when interpreting statistics based on municipal data from the monument, as compared to cantonal data. One reason for this is that Luxembourg’s political map has changed since the monument’s completion in 1957. Municipal mergers have led to the amalgamation of some previously independent localities. In addition, the original methods of data processing appear unclear in some cases. For example, deaths from Hellingen, a district of the municipality of Frisingen, were recorded separately (Table 2). At the same time, deaths from Lallingen, a district of the municipality of Esch an der Alzette, seem to have simply been added to those from Esch.
Fatal accidents per year
If one runs through the miners on the monument in order, the first person encountered is F. Niedercorn from Linger (stone tablet I, position 1). Of all the miners recorded, his death lies furthest back in the past. He was killed in an accident in 1864, around five years before the founding of the Luxembourg Mining Administration. The most recent fatal accident recorded is the one of by M. Muzzin, who lived in Belgium (stone tablet XIX, position 20). Muzzin succumbed to his injuries in 1976, more than 111 years after Niedercorn and almost 20 years after the original construction of the memorial was completed.
Based on a total of 1,508 entries, the average number of fatal work-related accidents per year during the investigation period was 13.33. However, the accidents are not evenly distributed across this period (Graph 4). In fact, the annual accident rates are highest during the roughly 55-year period from the mid-1880s to the late 1930s. Between 1883 and 1939, there were only two years in which fewer than 10 fatal accidents were recorded (1932 and 1935). The highest number of accidents in a single year occurred in 1916. In total, the memorial records 44 workers who died that year.
The annual accident rates depend on a range of factors. Firstly, there is the total number of miners. The more miners there were at work, the more could potentially fall victim to an accident. While Luxembourg’s mines employed around 2,300 miners in 1870, this number rose to almost 4,000 over the next 15 years. The Grand Duchy reached its peak in 1906 with a total of 6,900 miners. From that year onwards, the total number of employees in mines declined continuously until the last mine was closed in 1981.
However, irregular and sometimes abrupt fluctuations in the data analysis indicate that the accident rate was not exclusively dependent on the total number of employed miners. It can be assumed that government measures, such as the establishment of a mining administration in 1869 and the introduction of safety delegates in the mines, played a significant role in reducing accident rates. In the long term, these measures fostered a different understanding of occupational safety among workers and contributed to a shift in the relationship between employees and employers.
The way data is collected also plays a crucial role in shaping such statistics. In 2024, several institutions, such as the Inspection du travail et des mines (ITM) (trans.: Inspectorate of Labour and Mines), the Association d’assurance accident (AAA) (trans.: Accident Insurance Association) and the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (STATEC), document occupational accidents in great detail. However, this was not always the case. When Jos Dupong began collecting data for a monument in 1938, he faced a difficult challenge. Much like historians today, Dupong found that the further he looked back in time, the harder it became to find the information he was seeking. Nevertheless, the pastor was able to gather data on isolated accidents that had occurred more than half a century earlier.
It is also worth noting that the influence of both world wars is evident on Chart 4. During the First World War (1914-1918), the average annual rate of fatal accidents in mines of the Grand Duchy was 32.6. This is roughly comparable to the average rate for the five years leading up to the conflict (29.4 fatal accidents per year). After the war, the rate dropped rapidly. Between 1919 and 1923, the average fell to 18.4, a decrease of more than ten fatal accidents per year. It wasn’t until 1925 that the rate began to rise again noticeably.
A similar trend can be observed during the period surrounding the Second World War. From 1935 to 1939, that is, before the occupation of Luxembourg, the average number of fatal accidents per year was 13.6. During the occupation (1940-1944), this rate dropped to 8.2. In the five years following the war (1945-1949), it decreased further to 3.2 fatal accidents per year. It was not until 1951 that the rate surpassed five accidents per year again for the first time.
It is likely that the figures in these cases primarily reflect the economic situation of the Grand Duchy. After the end of the First World War, Luxembourg had to undergo significant economic restructuring. After leaving the German Customs Union, it took until July 1921 to form a new economic union with Belgium. This economic instability also impacted the mining sector. It took until the mid-1920s for the industry to recover from the turmoil of the war. In comparison, the Second World War caused even greater destruction to the country’s infrastructure. In 1937, the total production of Luxembourg’s mining industry stood at 7,763,200 tonnes. By 1945 it had fallen to a mere 1,405,877 tonnes. As was the case in the wake of the First World War, it took several years for the industry to regain its footing. Meanwhile, the mechanisation of the mining sector continued, allowing fewer and fewer workers to extract increasingly larger amounts of rock. Luxembourg’s mining industry reached its peak production in 1957, with a total of 7,843,172 tonnes. At that time, only 2,422 miners were still working in the sector, a snap decline from the 4,593 there had been twenty years earlier.
Conclusion
While the systematic listing of data on the stone tablets offers several advantages for statistical analyses, it also presents some challenges. Perhaps the most significant issue is that data could no longer be changed once it had been engraved. Researchers now know that several of the entries on the tablets are incorrect. The two tablets added later were already efforts to supplement the primary list of miners who had died in accidents with additional records. Furthermore, only very basic information was recorded on the tablets – specifically, those details that could be gathered for almost all of the deceased. Additional statistical surveys, for example, focusing on the miners’ place of origin, nationality, or cause of death, could offer valuable insights. Records such as the “Register of Mining Victims compiled by Emile Gelhausen” open up new possibilities for further research in this area. Whether further additions and corrections will also prove statistically relevant remains to be seen in the future.