Peckfield Colliery had been working short hours for weeks. Three paid days, the rest unpaid - the rhythm of a coal economy that paid only when coal moved. On Thursday 30 April, no coal was scheduled to come up, which meant no wages. The 105 men who descended that morning were datallers, paid by the day for maintenance work, and miners who wanted to get ahead for the next paying shift. They were not greedy; they were trying to feed families. The colliery was considered safe by the men who worked it - seven fatal accidents in nineteen years was, by Victorian standards, an acceptable record. A Waddle fan at the top of the upcast shaft pulled air through the seams. The undermanager and five deputies carried safety lamps. The rest of the men worked by tallow candle, as their fathers had.

A slight fall in the roof in Goodall's gate cracked open a pocket of firedamp. A candle flame found it. Two miners and their pit ponies died at the instant of ignition. Four more died as they began to run. Then something worse happened: the explosion churned up coal dust from the floor and walls, and when that dust reached the air in the main intake, it ignited too - a roaring secondary flame that travelled the workings, killing horses and men and bringing roofs down behind it. The blast tore through the underground office, killing the underground manager William Radford, who had worked the pit for seventeen years. It blew through the stables and killed twelve of fourteen pit ponies; the two that survived had been standing in the middle, sheltered by the bodies of the others. The blast went up the shaft and threw the cage into the headgear. In Crossgates, Stanks, Garforth, Sherburn - villages within a six-mile radius - people stopped what they were doing and looked toward Micklefield.

Of the 105 men in the pit, 24 died in the explosions themselves. The other 39 died in the hours that followed, trapped by collapsed roofs and breathing what miners called afterdamp - the carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide that fills a pit after a fire and kills more reliably than flame. Rescuers later traced the dust on the floor and read the men's last walks like footprints in snow: this way, then back, then trying another path. Eleven men in the deeper Black Bed seam survived the blast but were knocked unconscious by afterdamp for an hour. When they woke, the teenage miners among them asked the deputy, Robert Henry Nevins, to pray for them. They climbed up a stone drift toward the Beeston Bed and were overcome again 600 yards from the shaft. They had to leave one of their party, Fred Atkinson, behind to keep moving. Atkinson was reached later. He lived.

The first rescuers - three night deputies who had just finished their shift - went down at 8:30 a.m. and were blocked by a wrought-iron steam pipe blown across the shaft. By 8:50, the Peckfield and Garforth managers had arrived and worked the cage past the obstruction. Doctors came from the surrounding villages: Griesbach, Abbott, Gaines, Radcliffe, Carr. They worked on rescuers brought up gasping from afterdamp, who then went back down. William Naylor Whitaker was brought out alive on Saturday afternoon and died that night in Leeds General Infirmary. The last bodies came up on 14 May, two weeks after the blast. Of the 63 dead, 38 were married men; they left 34 widows, 107 dependent children, and 14 elderly relatives. On Sunday 3 May, an estimated 25,000 people came to Micklefield for the burials. A man named J.C. Rhodes pinned a five-pound note to a sheet of paper at the pit head. Queen Victoria sent £50. Eventually the fund reached £20,625, and it gave help to colliery widows for decades, including to the families of Cadeby in 1912 and Senghenydd in 1913.

The inquest verdict on 20 May was that the explosion was accidental, that no blame attached to any person, that firedamp had met a naked light. The owners switched to Routledge Newcastle safety lamps, as recommended. The pit kept producing coal for decades more. Today the village of Micklefield carries three plaques: one at the church, for the 63 dead; one at the Bland's Arms public house, for the victims; one at the infants' school, for the orphans. The pit itself is gone, the headgear long dismantled. What remains is a Yorkshire village that grew up around a hole in the ground and a memorial discipline of remembering exactly what 63 deaths meant in dependent children and widowed mothers and unworked days.