The explosion happened at 10 past eight in the morning, with 950 men underground. Only 12 years earlier, an accident at the same colliery had killed 81 miners. The inspectors had demanded upgrades to its safety, but the company ignored them.

In the meantime, the owner received a peerage. Now, on 14 October 1913, a spark from a loose electrical connection ignited first “firedamp” (methane gas), then coal dust, which drove a self-fuelling firestorm through the tunnels.

At the Universal Colliery, boys started work at 14 and families worked together. As the fire raced through the seams, one survivor heard a boy call: “Where’s my father? I want my father.” Carbon monoxide poisoning killed most of the 439 miners who perished at Senghenydd, near Caerphilly in the South Wales coalfield. One rescue worker also died.

William Lewis, first Baron Merthyr of Senghenydd, was fined £10 for breaches of safety regulations. Edward Shaw, the manager, incurred a heavier penalty: £24.

If the country came to a halt last October to mark the centenary of Britain’s worst mining disaster, then I did not notice it. In Senghenydd itself, they did add to the existing memorials with a ceremony – male-voice choir present and correct – and the unveiling of a bronze statue by Les Johnson.

The site, just six miles down the valley from Aberfan where in 1966 a spoil heap collapsed on a primary school to kill 144 children and adults, now commemorates all Welsh mining fatalities.

For all its horror, the catastrophe at the Universal Colliery, merely the costliest item on the endless butcher’s bill generated by the exploitation of this island’s subterranean resources, has almost dropped out of British memory. Within a year, in August 1914, an even greater trial had begun.

Turkey’s present is our very recent past. You might say the same of Colombia, India or China – where coal-mining fatalities dropped to a mere 1,000 or so last year, after decades of under-reported industrial slaughter.

 It was in China on 26 April 1942 that the greatest recorded loss of life in a single mining accident took place: 1,549 dead at Benxihu.

Post-industrial societies may share the shock and stress that accompany the dash to seize the treasures of the earth as if enduring some nightmare flashback. This week’s glimpses of the grief, the anger and the resistance of pit communities in the face of disaster bind the Aegean hinterland of the early 21st century to the coalfields that covered so much of Britain until a short generation ago.

As recently as September 2011, four miners died when a tunnel flooded at Gleision Colliery in the Tawe valley north of Swansea.

On the face of it, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s initial response to the Soma pit disaster looked and sounded like a callous insult. The Turkish premier made a blithe comparison of the losses to historic accidents around the world – as if the deep-mine technology had not advanced since 1860.

These things happen when you dig for coal, the PM shruggingly implied. Then came the pictures of Erdogan’s slickly suited aide kicking a bereaved protester on the ground while surrounded by grieving relatives. Don’t waste your outrage, but ponder what that dreadful image says about the vicious arrogance of Erdogan’s regime.

Also (it appears) triggered by an electrical fault, the underground explosion at Soma on Tuesday likewise killed most of its victims through carbon monoxide poisoning.

As at the Universal Collier, previous accidents in Soma mines had apparently failed to raise sufficient concerns about safety. And if we accept the highest current estimate of the missing on top of 300-odd confirmed losses, the final toll might nearly match the dead of Senghenydd.

As for Erdogan’s flint-hearted litany of past anguish, the canny strongman may have grasped a discomfiting truth. Mining communities themselves may harbour long memories and a gift for solidarity that reaches across frontiers.

Yet, in time, the ground will tend to close over their huge sacrifices, just as the grass sprouts and the flowers bloom over disused shafts and long-forgotten seams.

A strategic calculator even in extremis, Erdogan might at some level have reckoned that the future may think no more of Soma than it does of the Oaks near Barnsley, where 361 miners died in 1866. In the cold lens of history, will this tragedy shrink to the size of collateral damage in the drive to modernity?

Today, however, mines can no longer bury their deadly secrets so swiftly. A media spotlight shines brighter than it ever did when the disposable poor died in their thousands deep in the bowels of the earth. And the rituals of memory have developed alongside the means of recording and reminiscence.

The last catastrophe on a Soma scale to strike a British pit came in 1934, when 266 miners died at Gresford near Wrexham in North Wales. As in Turkey this week, that loss felt like a sombre national event. For once, the formal-dress solemnity of John Reith’s BBC suited the mood.

The subsequent inquiry witnessed a clash of legal titans, with Stafford Cripps (later the postwar Labour Chancellor) acting for the miners against Hartley Shawcross, who would become the chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg.

What had not changed was the assumption of employers’ impunity. In the courts, Gresford led to one trifling conviction for record-keeping failures. The disaster prompted the miner-musician Robert Saint to compose his “miners’ hymn”, ever since a brass-band favourite and reliable unlocker of tear ducts. The Dennis “district” within Gresford remains a mass grave: only 11 bodies ever emerged from it.

The memory of Gresford stays alive in music. Elsewhere, the risk and dread of mining can soften into nostalgia or even entertainment. Yesterday’s killing machine may morph into tomorrow’s National Trust destination.

That is not hyperbole: Levant near Land’s End, once the headquarters of a thriving and long-lived tin and copper mine, now hosts day-trippers on Cornish holidays. But in 1919, 31 miners died there when the “man engine” that linked workings and surface broke apart and fell. Among them (I have just found out) was one John Tonkin of Boscean, who left a widow and seven children.

Mining needs its culture of commemoration precisely because the life of mines themselves, and of the communities that work them, can be so limited. Miners have always migrated, in search of the next rich seam.

In its report of the Levant calamity, a local paper remarked that “hundreds of Cornishmen in foreign and colonial mining camps will read with unspeakable sorrow of this calamity in the village of Pendeen to old comrades”.

Deposits ran thin; old comrades departed. The Levant itself never flourished after the 1919 accident. These days, in the tourist-supported afterlife, it sits snugly within a Unesco World Heritage Site.

In other British mining regions, the strains of “Gresford” waft not even over the abandoned winding-gear of 20 years ago but across country parks and out-of-town retail hubs where visitors might never know that they stand over the entrails of some historic pit.

If UK Coal proceeds with its plan to shut Kellingley and Thoresby, that will leave Hatfield Main in South Yorkshire as the country’s sole surviving deep mine. Our problem – not yet on the horizon for the coalfields of Turkey, Colombia or China – is that the memory that supplants industry is still doubtful and divisive. For our coal age came to a messy end.

The 12-month strike of 1984-85 pitted a ruthless state with a hidden agenda to dismantle the industry against a blustering and blundering union leadership. Both the dispute and the culture it was meant to preserve faded away in acrimony and ambiguity.

We never enjoyed a clean break. In the aftermath, sentimentality about the forsaken pit villages spread in some quarters. A good-riddance scorn for a dirty, dangerous business took root in others. It’s perfectly possible to hold both those views at the same time. Indeed, many people do.

Consider the uneasy blend of comedy and elegy with which stage and screen have greeted the downfall of King Coal, in Billy Elliot or Brassed Off. Should we cheer or mourn the end of this reign – or both at once? These bittersweet memorials can touch the heights, as in Lee Hall’s magnificent play about the miner-artists of Ashington, The Pitmen Painters.

At this month’s Cannes Film Festival, the Directors’ Fortnight will close with Pride: a suitably ambivalent all-star film about gay activists’ support for the 1984 strike and their battle for acceptance in the Welsh coalfield.

So much unfinished business clings to our mining past. It lingers like the crippling dust in emphysemic lungs.

Look at the grief and rage – and the pride – of Soma today and you gaze not at some exotic scene of carnage but into a mirror of our not so distant past. South-east of the stricken mine lie the ruins of the city of Hierapolis, with its recently excavated “Gate of Hell”.

This sanctuary of Pluto – god of the underworld and lord of all mines – guards the entry into a cave infamous 2,000 years ago for its toxic vapours. The ancient Greeks of Asia Minor knew that Pluto bestowed both wealth and death. He still does.