Cockfield Fell (NZ120250)

Hooked around the northern reaches of the village of Cockfield, Co.Durham, are large expanses of open and largely redundant common land. It is not the prettiest place on the planet, nor is it, you would have thought, the most obvious haven of historical interest. But, whilst you may not want to take your family a-picnicking on the low-lying hills of Cockfield Fell, you may be surprised to learn that hereabouts forms one of the most important sites in the region when it comes to industrial heritage. And it is, in fact, the largest Scheduled Ancient Monument in England.

At 350 hectares (that’s 850+ acres in old money), Cockfield Fell has been described as “one of the most important early industrial landscapes in Britain”. There are traces of human activity here (in the shape of flint arrowheads) stretching back 10,000 years; and there is clear evidence of pre-Roman occupation, too, by way of at least four Iron Age settlement enclosures. A rectangular-shaped earthwork may, it is thought, be Roman; and there are plenty of Medieval remains to be found, too (field systems, quarrying, etc.).

Most interestingly, though, documents name Cockfield Fell as one of the earliest (the earliest?) known sites in the North-East for coal mining – the Bishop of Durham having issued a licence for such activity in 1303 – and a proper colliery was established in 1375 by William Vavasour. Consequently, a good deal of waste soon built up on the fell; and the general mess was greatly added to when whinstone quarries were subsequently dug around and about. The railways also made their mark, primarily with the Bishop Auckland-Barnard Castle line which once swept across the fell (1862-1962). In 1869 the moorland became a ‘regulated pasture’, which effectively turned it into a grazing area.

Its pock-marked appearance is clear to see on aerial photographs and satellite images. And it has been thus for many, many centuries – which probably explains why it was never enclosed during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Its unusual look and protected status thus gives this corner of the North-East a somewhat mysterious and eerie air, providing the curious visitor with a thirst for more information. If ever there was a place ripe for further archaeological examination it is Cockfield Fell…

Oddities of Howden-le-Wear (NZ160335)

Howden-le-Wear is only a little place. However, it has a healthy collection of strange bits and bobs…

1. The Australian Hotel – a pub with one of the most ‘out-of-place’ names in the North-East. It was established by local man William Walton on his return from an expedition to the Australian Goldfields in Victorian times. Apparently, he made his fortune out there (equating to around half a million pounds in today’s money), and set about spending it in the village. The story goes, though, that he wasted his money – drinking a good deal of it away – and died with next to nothing to his name. The title of the pub, however, stuck.
2. Hill 60 – a local pit heap from the coalmining era, named thus by soldiers returning from World War I. It was the fashion to name low-lying hills on the battlefields of northern France and Belgium (over which armies fought) according to their height above sea level. So, somewhere in northern Europe lies the original ‘Hill 60 (metres)’!
3. The Wurlitzer Organ – rescued from a theatre/cinema in Bradford by local enthusiasts and rehoused in the village’s New Victoria Centre (formerly the Trinity Methodist Chapel). Only a handful of these were ever made – and it is still occasionally put to use today.

Inkerman, Tow Law (NZ113398)

Prior to the 1840s there was next-to-nothing at the spot now known as Tow Law. Then, in 1844-45, an enterprising chap by the name of Charles Attwood decided to take advantage of the local reserves of iron ore and coal to set up an ironworks. And, though the ironworks only lasted 30-odd years, the related industrial activity continued unabated – well, until recent times, of course.

One of the village’s strangest claims to fame is the fact that the cannonballs used in the Crimean War of 1853-56 were made from Tow Law Iron (as well as, in fact, girders for the London Underground). This direct link between the conflict of the time and the village was reinforced when, in 1862, a new pit was sunk to the north of Tow Law and named ‘Inkerman Colliery’ – the Battle of Inkerman being one of the key clashes of the war and still very fresh in everyone’s minds. The OS map of 1861 shows that there was also an existing ‘Inkerman Inn’ at the site – having probably been renamed immediately after the 1854 battle. So, strictly speaking, the pit was named after the pub!

So, again, where once there had been pretty much nothing, a little community sprung up – with a rather odd-sounding name. At its height, more than 300 men were employed at the new colliery, so there would have been quite a throng at Inkerman at its peak. The railway fed into the location, and there were great banks of coke ovens to the north and east of the site. At one point, Tow Law’s Salvation Army was based there, albeit briefly.

In time, though, the demise of, firstly, the main iron works, then eventually coalmining in and around Tow Law took its toll. The fall from grace was spread across several decades: from the early exit of the former to the closure of the last deep mine – that of Inkerman, in fact – in 1969.

Whilst Tow Law remains very much on the map, there is nothing of note to be found at the settlement once known as Inkerman – though some of the old coke ovens were repaired for display recently.

Subterranean Balls: Gosforth (NZ254683)

What is so often overlooked in the history of coalmining is the great amount of time, risk and expense that went into the sinking of speculative new pits. There was never any guarantee of success, and such was the sense of relief and celebration that followed a successful ‘winning’ of a new colliery that quite often a subterranean ball would be held to mark the occasion.

With a refreshing disregard for modern-day health and safety concerns, these extraordinary events represent a fascinating cross-over between the classes of the day, when the well-to-do would descend into the bowels of the earth and mix with the pitmen and their families.

When coal was successfully struck at Gosforth Colliery in 1829 after a prolonged (and very difficult) sinking process lasting four years, the powers-that-be (namely, Charles John Brandling and his partners) launched forth into a typical underground get-together. From an unnamed source, thus:

The ball-room was situated at a depth of nearly 1,100 feet below the earth’s surface, and was in the shape of the letter L, the width being fifteen feet, the base twenty-two feet, and the perpendicular height forty-eight feet. Seats were placed round the sides of the ball-room, the floor was dried and flagged, and the whole place brilliantly illuminated with candles and lamps. The company began to assemble and descend in appropriate dresses about half-past nine in the morning, and continued to arrive till one in the afternoon. The men engaged in the work, their wives and daughters and sweethearts, several neighbours with their wives, the proprietors and agents with their wives, and sundry friends of both sexes who had courage to avail themselves of the privilege; all these gradually found their way to the bottom of the shaft. Immediately on their arrival there they proceeded to the extremity of the drift, to the face of the coal, where each person hewed a piece of coal as a memento of the visit, and then returned to the ball-room. As soon as a sufficient number of guests had assembled dancing commenced, and was continued without intermission till three o’clock in the afternoon. No distinction was made among the guests, and born and bred ladies joined in a general dance with born and bred pitmen’s daughters. All now returned in safety, and in nice, clean, and well-lined baskets, to the upper regions, delighted with the manner in which they had spent the day. It was estimated that between two and three hundred persons were present, and nearly one-half of them were females.

Gosforth Colliery was worked for a little over half a century, until it was abandoned in 1884.

Bell Pits of Street Gate (NZ210592)

A little to the east of Sunniside, scattered liberally over the junction of the A692 and Pennyfine Road, lies the small community known as Street Gate. Wood- and meadow-land lie strewn hereabouts, and in a patch of land betwixt the village and its larger neighbour to the west was recently found the remnants of two old bell-pits.

Bell-pits, as I am sure many of you will know, are relics of the earliest days of mining – coalmining, of course, in this case – dating back to the 14^th-17th centuries. Basically, a gang of prospectors would sink a simple shaft into the ground where they had reason to believe there was coal to be found, then they would gradually mine out a small underground room and hoist the black stuff to the surface by basket. When the bell-shaped pit assumed dangerous proportions, they would simply abandon it and move down-seam by sinking another shaft a few dozen yards away. They would back-fill the old pit with the earth taken from the new one.

In the centuries that followed mining techniques developed considerably, of course. But odd remnants of the bell-pit system remain dotted around the region – and two such shafts were unearthed here at Street Gate by the Woodland Trust during deep ploughing work when they were preparing to lay a wild flower meadow. Two circular ‘gaps’ in the underlying boulder clay were noticed (each about six metres across), and investigative work revealed them to be evidence of our most basic of early industrial activity.

Studies of old maps pinned the dates down to at least as early as the 1630s, but such activity would most likely have stretched back in the area to perhaps the 14^th century. Such was the significance of the discovery that it was decided to launch a campaign to mark the spot in some way, and in October 2007 the revamped site together with a plaque/plinth was officially unveiled amidst great pomp and ceremony.

The full story (with lots of pics) can be found here.

Why not come along to...

The National Family History Fair

NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE

Saturday 7th September 2013

The Trimdon Grange Explosion (NZ368357)

The Trimdon Grange explosion of 16^th February 1882 left 74 men and boys dead. Within hours, famous local song-smith, Tommy Armstrong, had penned the following to help raise funds for the dependants…

Let’s not think of tomorrow, lest we disappointed be,

Our joys may turn to sorrow, as we all may daily see;

Today we’re strong and healthy, but how soon there comes a change,

As we may see from the explosion that has been at Trimdon Grange.

Men and boys left home that morning for to earn their daily bread,

Little thought before the evening they’d be numbered with the dead;

Let us think of Mrs Burnett, once had sons and now has none –

With the Trimdon Grange explosion, Joseph, George and James are gone.

February left behind it what will never be forgot:

Weeping widows, helpless children, may be found in many a cot;

Little children, kind and loving, from their homes each day would run,

For to meet their fathers’ coming, as each hard day’s work was done.

Now they ask if father’s left them, and the mother hangs her head,

With a weeping widow’s feelings tells the child its father’s dead;

Homes that once were blessed with comfort, guided by a father’s care,

Now are solemn, sad and gloomy, since the father is not there.

God protect the lonely widow, help to raise each drooping head,

Be a father to the orphans, never let them cry for bread;

Death will pay us all a visit, they have only gone before,

We may meet the Trimdon victims where explosions are no more.

By Tommy Armstrong, 1882.

Get Carter Finale (NZ465400)

© Copyright Andrew Curtis and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Blackhall Beach.  The wasted shore, the aerial flight.  And Jack Carter finally gets his revenge in the climactic scene of the classic 1971 gangster flick, Get Carter.  Today, faint traces of former days of industry can be made out as per the above image, with the line of the aerial flight still discernible by way of the concrete channel running across the foreground.  The overhead conveyor once carried coal waste from nearby Blackhall Colliery over and out to sea – and provided Michael Caine with a handy means of disposing of the body of his final on-screen kill forty years ago. 

The black beach and its coaly waves are beginning to disappear, too, thankfully – though one can’t quite yet call it pretty.

More excellent ‘then and now’ shots here (and use the ‘back’ and ‘next’ button for more).

Mr Peter Lee (NZ420400)

Founded in 1948, the County Durham town of Peterlee is named after the famed miners’ leader of the same name, that is, Peter Lee.  But who was this man who had the unusual distinction of having a brand new settlement bear his name?

Lee was born in 1864 in Trimdon Grange, in the delightfully-named Duff Heap Row.  He was one of eight children and, naturally, found himself thrown down the Durham pits from an early age.  By the time he was 21 he had worked at 15 different collieries.

Despite having little schooling, his mother’s love of reading gave Lee a lifelong drive towards self-education – though he didn’t learn to read and write until his early 20s.  Seeking wider horizons, he emigrated to the USA in 1886, where he worked the mines of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.  He returned to County Durham in 1888, and became a delegate to the Miners’ Conference for Wingate Pit.  He married, too, in 1888, and continued to develop his various interests and career for the next few years.

A trip to South Africa in 1896 proved a turning point in his life.  He became a born-again Christian and, on his return to his homeland, added Methodist preaching to his spare-time obsessions.  From 1900, he found himself working at Wheatley Hill as a checkweighman, and moved onto the parish council – eventually becoming its chairman.  He was now responsible for much of the necessities of everyday life: sanitation, new roads, cemeteries, etc.; and as chairman, too, of the local Co-operative, he was becoming highly influential in local affairs.

He was elected chairman of the Durham County Water Board, then joined the County Council itself in 1909 – eventually becoming its chairman in 1919 (England's first Labour county council).  In the meantime, he continued to campaign vigourously for improvements to the welfare of miners, rising through the ranks of, firstly, local organisations, then the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (the forerunner of the National Union of Mineworkers) – becoming its president in 1932.

He died in 1935, having very much established himself as a local hero, and was interred in Wheatley Hill Cemetery.

Turning The Tide

What does a historian make of a project designed to wipe all traces of industrial activity from a stretch of coastline in an attempt to revert it to its former, natural beauty?  In the case of the Durham Heritage Coast, as it is now called, surely no one can complain.  For as recently as the early 1990s, the East Durham seaboard was an industrial wasteland, made famous by distinctly unglamorous appearances in such films as Get Carter and Alien 3.

A century of coal mining activity had scarred the coast beyond recognition, waste-dumping from the scattering of collieries betwix the Tyne and the Tees placing the beaches in some areas beneath ten metres of black slag and poisoning the water and its natural habitat for several miles out to sea.  Flora and fauna were devastated.  Come the closure of the pits in the years leading up to the early 1990s, locals had long since turned their backs on the disgusting mess and cared little for nature’s woes in the face of their own collective economic plight.

The mid-‘90s saw a sea-change, though.  With the availability of Lottery Fund cash, the local authorities rallied, and, with the help of a host of other organisations and vested interests, launched the ‘Turning The Tide’ (TTT) project in 1997 – and the clearance work began.  Astonishingly, within its five-year remit, TTT had utterly transformed the landscape: by 2002 the coastline was well on its way to an incredible recovery – a process now being continued by local groups, the Durham Heritage Coast Partnership and nature itself.

Today there are 15 miles of new coastal footpaths and more than 30 miles of cycleways criss-crossing a unique magnesian limestone landscape which is home to all manner of rare and beautiful plants, insects and animals – all suitably protected by law and freed from farming use.  For once, the wiping of our historic past has been welcomed by one and all – though it lives in on a scattering of information panels the length of the coastline.

The video, here, says and shows it all.

The Temporary Ghost Town (NZ397410)

Shotton Colliery was a nineteenth century ‘new town’, built a mile or so to the north-west of old Shotton village.  The pit was sunk and began operations in the early 1840s, struggled on for a few decades – never being very profitable (if at all) – before closing in the mid 1870s.

The 1881 census returns for the colliery town indicate that a huge number of houses were empty, which has led historians to believe that the place was akin to a ghost town.  When the pit closed, folk had no alternative but to up sticks and move in their search for work – a common enough exercise for your average pitman family.  The houses built during the 1840s and ‘50s were simply left behind as the workforce moved on.  As the 1880s and ‘90s progressed, the population grew even thinner, until only a handful of folk rattled around the empty streets.

However, in 1901 the pit was reopened, the houses re-fitted within weeks (it seems that no vandalism had taken place), and the town burst back into life.  By 1906, over a thousand men and boys were in employment, rising to almost 2,000 by 1913.  The coke ovens and brickworks were reopened, too.  It quite literally boomed.

In the 1950s, however, the decline began to set in again.  Prior to the colliery’s final closure in 1972, most of the old housing had been demolished – and today there is little sign that a pit ever existed there.

Further reading here.  Pictures here.

Haswell Colliery Disaster (NZ373423)

28^th Sept 1844 – One of the most destructive explosions which ever occurred in the Durham coal field took place at Haswell colliery, the property of Messrs Plummer, Taylor, and Co., when ninety-five human beings were deprived of life. The explosion occurred in the Hutton seam, almost immediately after a fall of stone from the roof, which had liberated a vast quantity of gas; and only four persons in the mine succeeded in escaping.  On the 30th, fifty-four bodies were interred side by side in South Hetton churchyard, thirty-one at Easington, and the remainder at more distant places. The pit had been seven years at work, and was considered a very safe one. A subscription was immediately set on foot for the relief of the sufferers, and the sum received amounted to £4,264.

[From Local Historian's Table Book of Remarkable Occurrences Connected with the Counties of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Northumberland and Durham by M.A. Richardson]

Ironically, the disaster struck a few weeks after the debilitating Miners’ Strike of 1844.  The colliery had opened in 1835 and closed in 1896.  Nothing of the colliery village remains – though a ruined fragment of the pithead itself still stands, accompanied by a modern-day memorial to the 95 dead.

Growth of a Pit Town (NZ388472)

So many of the North-East’s towns of today began life as tiny hamlets at the dawn of the nineteenth century, only to be transformed as pits were sunk and workers and their families came flooding in.  Utterly typical of this dramatic metamorphosis is that which occurred at Murton, Co.Durham…

Population

1801: 75

1811: 71

1821: 72

1831: 98

First pit sunk 1838

1841: 521

Coalmining begins 1843

1851: 1,387

1861: 2,104

1871: 3,017

1881: 4,710

1891: 5,052

1901: 6,514

Present: c.7,300

Another interesting comparison is the Tithe map of 1777:

... with the present-day layout here (which I can’t reproduce for reasons of copyright).

Astonishing.

And now all the pits, without exception, have gone.

[1777 map taken from www.murtonheritagesociety.co.uk]

‘Big E’: The Last Pit (NZ283917)

Ellington Colliery in Northumberland holds the distinction of being the last of the North-East’s deep coal pits to close, so ending the 800-year+ history of the industry in the region. When the ‘Big E’ finally shut up shop on 26th January 2005, it was also the last remaining British deep mine to extract coal from under the sea – a practice in which it solely specialised.

Ellington didn’t actually gain its colliery until 1909, when the Ashington Coal Company began operations there – with production starting in 1911. It slowly grew and grew, combining with nearby Lynemouth Colliery and reaching over 1,300 employees by the time of nationalisation in 1947. Despite the mechanisation of the post-war period, the workforce had swelled to well in excess of 2,000 by the otherwise troubled times of the mid 1980s.

It was a big pit, producing 45,000 tonnes of coal per week at one point, but began overstretching itself under the North Sea as time wore on – miners having to travel an astonishing 16km to reach the coalface. Flooding was always a problem, with as much as one million gallons being pumped out of the pit daily, and it was reported that at one time three tons of water were being raised for every ton of coal wound. Flooding effectively led to the closure of the pit when, in early 2005, water catastrophically burst from a new coal face that had promised to provide another five year’s work. Its operators had little choice but to close the colliery in its entirety and the last 340 jobs were lost, along with the Great North Coalfield itself.

A few years before its closure, the pit found international fame via its appearance in the 2000 film Billy Elliot, where it doubled for the long-gone Easington Colliery. And in 2009, 100 years after the pit was sunk, a bronze memorial was raised on the deserted site, in honour of both the 83 men who lost their lives there and the industry in general across the region.

 

Templar HQ (NZ265965)

 
Low Chibburn Preceptory, near Widdrington, is recognised as one of the region’s few surviving relics of the Knights Templar (or possibly Knights Hospitaller, depending on which historical source you use).  There is still a fair bit to see today, even though its lifespan covered a mere two centuries or so, c.1313-1540, thus…

© Copyright JohnDal and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

There are the remains of a chapel and house – the latter being the younger of the two, dating to the early 1500s.  The site was given to the Knights in order that they may raise revenue to help fund their sorties to the Holy Land during the Crusades.  Low Chibburn would have effectively acted as a small farm, with a chapel for worship and an accommodation block.  The plot was originally surrounded by a moat, but this has faded from view thanks to land movement due to coalmining in the 1950s.

© Copyright Antonia and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. (Artist's impression of how Low Chibburn may have appeared in the 1400s drawn by Terry Ball)