THIS was the scene in West Lane, Keighley, on April 10, 1908, following a tragic fire at the printing works of Messrs Wadsworth and Co, which occupied the upper storey and attic of a building they shared with cabinet makers and joiners Alfred Lord and Co.

The circumstances, from an age less safety-concious than ours, make chilling reading.

The fire had started in a basement store room and quickly spread to a wooden staircase providing "the only means of ingress and exit".

On raising the alarm, John Wadsworth, head of the firm, had urged his employees – many of them girls – to join him in a dash down the burning stairs, but many had refused and congregated instead in the crane doorway seen slightly towards the left in this view.

Wadsworth got a ladder, but some jumped out and compositor James Walbank was fatally injured when he fell off the ladder.

The fire brigade was on the scene within ten minutes, but the building was soon an inferno. The body of compositor Thomas E Lightowler was found among the debris, and another two men and six women were injured, out of a work orce of 22.

The inquest returned an accidental verdict, recommending that Keighley Corporation should "adopt the bye-laws under the Factory and Workshops Act, 1901, dealing with factories where less than forty persons are employed."