Bedford No. 2 was only two years old when it killed thirty-eight men. The colliery, sunk in 1884 at Bedford in Leigh, had been known as a fiery pit from the start. Firedamp, the methane-rich gas that seeps from coal seams, accumulated easily in its workings. The Crombouke seam was being mined on the retreating principle: drive headings out into the coal, work a face between them, then mine backward, pulling out the timber props as you went and letting the roof crash down into the waste, the goaf, behind. The technique was efficient, but it also broke open old rock and released whatever gas was trapped in it. Lancashire mines had been doing this work for generations. Every shift carried Davy lamps with their gauze-covered flames. Every shift trusted that the system would hold.

When the flame passed the gauze that morning, the explosion ripped through the workings. Of the 159 men and boys underground, the miners in distant parts of the pit were wound to the surface alive. The thirty-eight at or near the seat of the blast were not. Woolley himself, burned but conscious, somehow reached the bottom of the shaft. The pit manager W. Horrobin, the underlooker James Calland, and the owner's son Harry Speakman led the first rescue party down. They were turned back by afterdamp, the carbon-monoxide-laden air that fills a mine after a firedamp explosion. Calland later described it as so strong that men become dizzy and have to come up quickly. The Mines Inspector, Joseph Dickinson of Pendleton, was summoned by telegraph. By the time the bodies could be recovered, 48 children had been left without a father, and several Leigh families had lost more than one man in the same blast.

Leigh in 1886 was a town built on coal. The same families had worked the same pits for generations, and a disaster on this scale rippled through every street. The Lancashire and Cheshire Miners' Permanent Relief Society, to which the colliery subscribed, sent officials almost immediately. A committee of local dignitaries formed to raise money for the relief of widows, orphans and others placed in distress by the explosion, and an appeal went into The Times. The funerals filled Leigh Cemetery, where a monument to the dead still stands. The coroner's inquest waited until 23 September so that Woolley, recovering from his burns, could testify. He described turning his lamp and seeing the blue flame. He described continuing to work. He described his neighbour shaking the firing lamp.

The jury returned a verdict of accidental death caused by an explosion of firedamp. The coroner added that the fireman, the man whose job was to test the workings for gas before each shift, should have spent more time examining the seam; that lamps should be inspected more carefully; and that it was regretted the gas had not been reported when the prop-takers first saw it. None of this was new. Every Lancashire colliery disaster of the era ended with the same kind of finding. What did change was the lamps. The Bedford owners bought 150 Masault lamps and 50 improved Clanny lamps, both fitted with bonnets that shielded the gauze from drafts and reduced the chance of a flame passing through. The improvement was incremental, the cost trivial, the lesson old. The forty-eight fatherless children of August 1886 were the price of learning it again.

Bedford No. 2 closed long ago, like every other colliery in the Leigh field. The pit-head is gone, the headgear scrapped, the spoil tips greened over or built upon. The Leigh of the disaster, mile on mile of two-up two-down terraces blackened by mine smoke and cotton-mill chimneys, has been replaced by suburbs, retail parks and the A580 East Lancashire Road running west toward Liverpool. The monument in Leigh Cemetery records the names. Local historians at the Wigan Local History and Heritage Society still maintain photographs of Wood End Pit, as Bedford was sometimes called. The story of Friday 13 August 1886 sits in the longer record of Lancashire mining: the Pretoria Pit at Westhoughton in 1910, the Maypole at Abram in 1908, the dozens of smaller blasts that never reached the national press. The men who went down that morning were paid by the day. They expected to come back up the same way.