The Disaster
WOOD PIT. Haydock, Lancashire. 7th. June, 1878.

The only good news to reach the village that day was that Queen Victoria had heard of the disaster and instructed the Home Secretary to send a telegram to Mr Hall. The telegram read:-
“Her Majesty, has, through the Home Secretary, made inquiries and expressed Her sympathy with the sufferers of the calamity.”

The telegram was posted outside the colliery offices and the text of the message was soon passed round the village by word of mouth.

The roads of the parish were lined with women and men dressed in lack standing in silent tribute to the victims as they made their last journey. the Newcastle Chronicle reported that :-
“The Lancashire workman is always anxious that due respect should be rendered to the remains of the dead, and the clergy and the philanthropists of the district have continually protested against the ceremonial indulged in on such occasions but with little result in causing it’s discontinuance.”

The majority of the funerals were conducted in true local style with a gathering of friends and relations. Not even very heavy thunderstorms could prevent the living giving the dead a ‘reet gud send off’. The funeral of William Wilcock aged sixty one, was typical and took place on the Tuesday afternoon. the oak coffin was laced in a plumed hearse drawn by two black horses and the mourners were carried in five coaches the three miles Ashton for the interment at St. Thomas’. Many coaches and carts passed about the village carrying men and women dressed in black and a sombre and hectic day it must have been with eleven being buried at St. Thomas’ and two at Ashton St. Oswald’s. At each service some two or three hundred joined in the hymns with their heads uncovered to the pouring rain, but there was little wailing. The Newcastle Chronicle reporter puts this down to the fact that:- ‘"iners are undemonstrative and it appears ‘soft’ to show signs of grief but their self restraint is marvellous but it could well have been the effect of mass, numbing shock in the minds of all those present at the services.’"

Thomas Skidmore, who was a member of the Haydock Colliery Brass Band, was buried at St. James’, Haydock and the band played the Dead March from Saul. As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, one of the band stepped forward and placed Thomas’s instrument on top of the coffin to be buried with him.

At the colliery the teams had passed the gob and were making their way towards the workings with caution as there was still a lot of gas present. The engineers present had a hurried consultation and it was deemed too dangerous to proceed as it would take only one faulty lamp to cause another xplosion. It was resolved at the meeting that the mine should, for the time being evacuated. this was done, leaving one or two volunteers below who would monitor the gas.

Above ground, the engineers decided to add yet another steam jet to the ones already working and it was decided to add a fan. The extra steam jet was fitted during the night and Mr Barnes of the Atherton Collieries, who was a former manager of Wood pit. He was put in charge of procuring a suitable fan. He obtained a large centrifugal Schiele fan of the type that had been used in British mines since about 1860 from a Manchester manufacturer. it was brought to Wigan by train but in the meantime another fan had been found in a local colliery and the installation of this was well advanced when the fan arrived from Manchester. More steam m had to be raise to keep the extra jets working and all available boilers were fired to do this even the locomotives in the colliery yard were used to supply extra steam.

Reports of the men underground said that the air flow was increasing and the gas was being cleared from the workings and the parties went down the mine to continue the work of recovering the bodies. Mr. Chadwick had been taken ill and he did not return to the pit until the 21st. June when about one hundred and sixty bodies had been recovered and taken out of the mine but tragedy and danger were not very far away.

The process of identification was going on in front of Mr. Driffield at the Rams Head hotel and as the bodies came out of the mine the problems grew. Most of the bodies had been under large falls of roof for some time and identification was difficult.

The awful job of cleaning the victims and laying then out in the makeshift mortuary continued but the conditions were becoming dreadful. A strong solution of carbolic acid had to be used as a disinfectant and the smell of this mixed with the smell of death made the atmosphere heavy and stagnant. Many of the victims were burnt and blackened, limbs were missing and many had their hands stiffened and burnt in front of their faces as if in the last act, they were trying to protect themselves against the fire that they must have seen sweeping towards them.

The volunteers did their best to spare their friends and relation by doing the best they could in the circumstances, but the identification was often by some mark on the body of from the pile of clothing nearby.

One young woman told the police that she hoped to find her husband by a mark on his left hand that always stayed white, even when he returned from the pit. Some people, although grief stricken, were calm and composed as they looked at the bodies but others were overwhelmed by the gruesome sights of their dead loved ones. One woman, a baby clasped to her, fell onto the body of her husband and could not be pacified.

When the last body had been recovered, hundreds of men had spent thousands of hours in the work and the workings were sealed. The rescue work had cost the life of a rescue man and all that now remained was for the inquest to determine the cause of the explosion.