2 January 1914 with Richard Redmayne, the Chief Inspector of Mines, as the commissioner; he was assisted by two assessors, Evan Williams, the chairman of the South Wales and Monmouthshire Coal Owners Association, and Robert Smillie, the president of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. The inquiry ran for three days before being adjourned to allow for the coroner's inquest to run at Senghenydd. It reopened on 27 January and ran until 21 February. Over the 13 days it heard evidence, 21,837 questions were put to 50 witnesses. The coroner's inquest, chaired by David Rees, lasted for 5 days from 5 January 1914. A total of 9,000 questions were put to 50 witnesses, and the jury returned verdicts of accidental death. The inquiry report failed to identify a definite cause, but it was considered that the most likely cause was a spark from the signalling gear. It would have ignited the firedamp, exacerbated and fuelled by coal dust in the air. The report was critical of many aspects of the management's practices, and considered it had breached the mining regulations in respect of measuring and maintaining the air quality in the workings, and in the removal of coal dust from the tracks and walkways. The report pointed out that because the management had not implemented the changes needed to the ventilation fans as demanded by the Coal Mines Act 1911, the fans were unable to reverse the direction of the airflow, which would have blown the smoke out through the Lancaster shaft; Redmayne and his colleagues held differing opinions on the advisability of reversing or stopping the airflow. The historian John H Brown, in his examination of the disaster, states that had the airflow been reversed, firedamp or afterdamp could have been extracted from some sectors into the blaze, causing another explosion. Further criticism was directed toward the emergency procedures. The lack of respirators at the mine was deemed to have cost lives. The lack of an adequate water supply for fire fighting was criticised, and Redmayne wrote: "I should have thought, in view of the fact that the colliery was such a gassy one, and it had already been devastated by an explosion, that the management would have made arrangements for a supply of water adequate to meet an emergency of the kind that actually occurred." Shaw's actions were described by Lieven as those that "gained him a degree