ALL OUR YESTERDAYS Devastating fire left whole nation shocked

This weekend a special service will be held to mark 200 years since 17 girls perished in a tragic mill blaze in Colnebridge. The service will be at Kirkheaton Parish Church at 11am on Saturday where there is a memorial in the churchyard to those who lost their lives. Here local historian goes into detail about what happened that fateful night and its aftermath. when she spotted the red glow through a slit between the wooden beams of the mill floor.

Alerting her friend, the two of them ran to Sugden and informed him that a fire had broken out in the floor below. Sugden, apparently a brute of a fellow, ordered them both back to work. Sarah refused and managed to escape from the mill. Her mate, fearful of Sugden’s wrath, returned to the machinery and was never seen again.

Sugden, on descending to the lower floor, came across his worst nightmare – the mill was going up in flames on his watch. At that moment he dashed up the steps and alerted the others; chiefly Smith. When he went down and saw the extent of the fire he went back with the sole purpose of rescuing his 20-year-old daughter, Mary. Once she was safely outside, Smith returned to help a beleaguered Sugden who was battling the blaze.

At that point four others managed to scrambled to safety. They included Dolly Bolton, 35, Esther Brook, 18, Mary Hay, 12, and an 11-year-old boy who might have been related to Sugden.

Within a short space of time Sugden and Smith were driven back by the heat and flames and forced to abandon their futile attempts to save the building.

By this time 17 girls and one boy were trapped on the upper floors. Later, the two foremen would claim they tried to get the girls to approach the landing but, even if true, their actions would have been too late.

By nothing short of a miracle, one more person would escape alive. It was young Jim who had the mishap with the candle. He had fled to the top room in the hope of greater safety but was forced back down by the heat and smoke and ascended a bale shaft, but on reaching the final descent to the outer door Jim was confronted by a wall of flame engulfing the stairs. Defiantly, he curled himself into a ball and rolled down the burning steps.

Moments later the stairway collapsed and the fire cascaded into the upper spinning rooms with a ferocity so intense it wiped out the entire manufactory within minutes. Shortly afterwards, the roof and floors collapsed into the inferno. All this happened in the space of just 30 minutes.

At the first light of dawn the mill owner, Atkinson, had arrived on the scene and then began the awful task of recovering the children’s remains from the smouldering rubble. He probably marshalled his own workforce along with other volunteers to do this. Only 15 were found during the course of the day; as for the two others nothing was found. They were probably the youngest and smallest. None of the remains were identifiable.

The children are recorded as being buried on February 16, two days following the disaster.

The Wakefield and Halifax Journal reported on the funeral, stating that: “After the inquest 11 coffins were brought to the place into which the mutilated remains of all 15 were put and taken in three hearses to the place of interment in Kirkheaton churchyard where they were buried in one grave.

“The mournful procession, preceded by solemn music, passed the houses of everyone who had lost a child or a relative and at each it halted and a psalm was sung. In the church a solemn anthem adapted to the occasion was performed by the choir of Kirkheaton Church, assisted by others from the neighbourhood. The shrieks and lamentations of parents, brothers and sisters who attended the ashes of their lost relatives to the grave were truly awful and beggar all description.”

A memorial service attracted 4,000 people from around the district. Those who could not get inside the church surrounded the windows and walls.

Nine days after the disaster Sir Robert Peel the elder moved the second reading in the House of Commons of his Factories Bill declaring “it was his intention, if possible, to prevent a recurrence of such a misfortune as that which had lately taken place ... it was his wish to have no night work at all in the factories.”

In the aftermath of the Colnebridge disaster the mill was rebuilt on the same site, but it appears that as a result of the fire Atkinson’s business suffered badly and within two years he was declared bankrupt. The mill owner returned to the family concern at Bradley Mills, near the foot of Kilner Bank and lived at The Grove until his untimely death in 1838 at the age of 59.

The inquest at the time recorded a verdict of accidental death and no-one was ever charged or convicted for offences which had led to such a terrible loss of life.

Mill fire survivor Sarah Moody married William Wood. The couple settled down at Moor Top in Kirkheaton just opposite the Blacksmiths Arms.

Her great-great granddaughter, Kathy Butterworth, who lives at Crosland Moor, said her resilience in the face of a brutal overseer saved her life.

She relates Sarah’s own account of that fatal morning which was recorded by Huddersfield historian W R Croft in his book The history of the Factory Movement, or Oastler and His Times,

In what is a truly revealing statement, Sarah, who by then was an aging grandmother, described her defiance of foreman James Sugden and how, in the aftermath that same morning, she witnessed: “Mr Atkinson upbraiding the foreman in the mill yard in the forenoon of the day for trying to save the bales of cotton rather than the hands.”

In a world of obfuscation and cover-up, perhaps this one statement by a girl who was 11 at the time, underlines the truth behind the tragic Colne Bridge mill fire.