There were reports from other pits in Yorkshire and beyond of violence between the ‘locked-out’ men and the owners and the pit deputies. Police were being called in to maintain order.

On the 7th September at Ackton Hall there were rumours about coal being loaded onto wagons at the pit and being sent to the owner’s mill in Bradford. The crowd felt this was a betrayal by the pit manager and their mood began to change. Mr Holiday, the pit manager, Mr Jaques, the foreman, and the work gang loading the wagons were confronted, with the result that the work gang fled and some wagons were overturned.

Mr Holiday sought help from the police in Pontefract but there no officers available because they had all been sent to help police the St Leger race meeting at Doncaster. So he went to the Wakefield police for help where he happened to meet with Lord St Oswald, from Nostell Priory who wanted protection for his pit too. The Lord recommended to Deputy Chief Constable Gill that troops should be deployed.

After this point things start to get confusing. (For the full story please refer to the book 'Featherstone & Its 1893 Disturbance' by Tony Lumb and Brian Lewis.)

Holiday returned to Featherstone to find the crowd had dispersed leaving a few smashed windows and the overturned wagons. By the late afternoon 3 officers and 26 men from the 1st Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment arrived at Featherstone and marched to the pit. (This was ironic due to the fact that many of the miners working in the Featherstone pits had moved to the town from Staffordshire.)

A crowd of locals had gathered wanting to know from Mr Holiday what was going on but the situation seems to have been worsened by the arrival of some ‘flying pickets’ from outside the town who were intent on trouble.

While the troops kept out of the way Holiday and the town’s policeman, the well respected Sergeant Sparrow tried to calm the crowd who wanted the troops to leave and were threatening to force them out if they didn’t go.

At one point the troops left and marched back to the station, only to end up marching back to the pit and taking refuge in the Engine House which became the target of all manner of missiles from the crowd. At one point a stack of timber was set on fire and Pontefract fire brigade had to be called.

The crowd around the pit gates had swelled to several thousand as people from surrounding towns heard that something was going off in Featherstone and came to watch. During the evening the situation became more tense. Eventually the decision was taken to call in a local magistrate, Bernard Hartley JP, who, failing to get the crowd to disperse, read the Riot Act.

Reading the Riot Act was a significant action. Once read people had to disperse within one hour or suffer the consequences (potentially life imprisonment). However, it seems Hartley didn’t wait for a full hour and fearing that the situation was getting out of control ordered the troops to fire warning shots.

After an initial volley, the crowd didn’t move and jeered saying that the troops were firing blanks. This was not true, the troops had the most up-to-date Lee Enfield rifles and were using live ammunition.

The second volley caused injury to 8 people. Two men, James Gibbs (22) and James Duggan (25) were to die of their injuries. Neither man it seems had been involved in creating a disturbance, Gibbs had walked across the fields from nearby Loscoe to see what was going on.