An extract of the report in the Leeds Mercury - Thursday 10 June 1869
TERRIBLE BOILER EXPLOSION AT BINGLEY. FOURTEEN PERSONS KILLED AND SEVERAL INJURED. A. FACTORY AND THREE COTTAGES DESTROYED.
The disaster occurred on the works of John Town and Son, bobbin turner which…consisted of a very substantially erected two-storey stone building, twelve yards in length by about nine yards in Breadth, the Walls of which were nearly two feet in thickness. They were for the most part filled with turning lathes and the supplementary machinery requisite for carrying on an extensive trade in supplying mills with spinning bobbins. Connected with the building on the mouth was a sawyers' wooden shed, about eight yards square, and at the north-west corner were three stone cottages, two of which were tenanted by the members of the firm and their families, the third being principally used as a store room. On the west side of the factory, and partially connected with the store-cottage, was the boiler house and engine. On the east side of the premises is the National School, in Park-road, the principal portion of which is separated from the present scene of ruin by a children's playground, about thirteen yards square. The block, which is now nothing but a heap of rubbish…the boiler burst with a terrific boom, killing on the spot no fewer than thirteen persons… The nature of the catastrophe was speedily known to the whole of the residents of Bingley and the neighbourhood, and there being many scores of children at the school built within the very shadow of the factory, gathered together from numerous cottage-homes, the terror-stricken relatives sobbed wildly to the spot, Which in the course of a very few minutes was encircled by hundreds of people, amongst whom was many a heart-broken mother…At the moment of the explosion the children of the infant school were romping merrily in the playground, but it was soon found that the frolics of several had been ruthlessly cut short by death, for the first bodies that were discovered were those of Matthew Henry Naylor and Percy Midgley, two boys aged six and four respectively. The searchers were led to the discovery by observing the caps and shoes and clogs of the children half-concealed amongst the ruins…The mutilated bodies were removed to the infant school, and the apartment, which only a short time before had echoed with the hum and prattle of childhood, was transformed into a dead-house, where the deceased, as they were successively recovered, were very carefully and tenderly, but sadly withal, washed and clad in their grave-clothes, by a number of neighbours.
Illustrated London News