extinguished and were badly decayed. Dr. Ramsay gave his opinion that if the bodies were returned to their homes for a normal wake and burial "putrid fever" might spread throughout the neighbourhood. Between 8 July and 19 September the business of recovering the dead and repairing the mine continued. Hodgson details the decayed and putrid state of some of the corpses. The recovery teams placed the bodies in coffins in the mine, there was a fear that the bodies might fall apart. Identification was a problem. Mothers and widows failed to identify most of the bodies "they were too much mangled and scorched to retain any of their features". Most were identified by clothes, tobacco-boxes, shoes and other items. Finally on Sunday 20 September 117 days after the explosion, the pit was inspected by candle light. The furnace below William Pit was relighted and the whole mine brought back into production. One body has never been found. Analysis The cause of the first explosion is not known for certain. The most probable cause was firedamp, there being no evidence of large amounts of coal dust in the air, the other significant risk. After the first explosion the trap doors used for ventilation and the internal wall in the vicinity of the underground crane were observed to be in a good state by the men who escaped. Indeed, even the lamp at the crane was still burning. When the mine was reopened the area was found to be damaged: "the stoppings and trap-doors were blown down, the roof fallen and as great marks of destruction as in any other part of the mine". The area was near John Pit, the down-cast shaft where fresh air was entering the mine at its greatest velocity. Hodgson realised that this was significant and supposed that "the atmospheric current ... intercepted the progress of the first explosion, and prevented it from igniting the fire damp here". Hodgson then proceeds to assume that the "choak-damp", perhaps here thinking of afterdamp rather than blackdamp, pressing upwards from the seat of the explosion forced a pocket of firedamp to where the coal was burning and set off the second explosion. However two paragraphs down he observes that the dust in the barrow-ways was burnt to a cinder. That coal dust raised by an initial explosion could be the cause of a further explosion was only starting to be