Just to clarify...

It was written by Ewan McColl and won a prize or two by Canadian arts institutes.

McColl was on record as stating that hearing about the disaster so soon after it happened struck him as showing the speed of modern news reporting and media. (He was in Paris when he heard about it.)

He had been wanting to write a song about the Creswell Colliery disaster in 1950, (I come from Creswell and noted his interest when interviewing him many years later,) but had not gotten around to it. This song adapted some of his earlier ideas and was quickly written. It was written around the time of his radio ballads but as the mining radio ballad "The Big Hewer" was concerned with pits in the North East of England, the song never became part of the set, standing alone as a song. He and Peggy Seeger performed it regularly throughout the rest of his performing days.