explosion – Anne Whitehead

30 January 202431 January 2024

Lamesley

I wrote in my last post about the mining explosion of 1757 that killed 16 men at the Ravensworth Ann Pit, which formerly occupied the site where The Angel of the North now stands. All 16 of the men were buried in the churchyard of St Andrews’ Church in Lamesley on 12 June 1757, and this weekend I walked to the village to see if there was any surviving trace of the burials.

The Angel of the North is in the parish of Lamesley and its silhouette was clearly visible behind the church, as I looked across from Lamesley Pastures. The Pastures are an area of farmland that has remained undisturbed by mining and that is now being managed by the Durham Wildlife Trust as a winter water meadow, using medieval methods of flooding the fields in winter to provide a habitat for wading birds such as curlew, lapwing, redshank, and snipe. Exmoor ponies grazed in the surrounding fields, which helps wildflowers to thrive.

The village also houses the ruins of Ravensworth Castle, former seat of the Liddell family. Barons of Newcastle, the Liddells occupied the estate for over 300 years, much of their fortune coming from coal mining on the land. Walking round the churchyard, I found tombs and gravestones dedicated to various members of the Liddell family. Although not buried in Lamesley, Alice Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland, was a relative of the Liddells of Ravensworth and the village pub, The Ravensworth Arms, is where Lewis Carroll is reputed to have written parts of the book.

Although I searched carefully among the graves, I could find no memorial to the mining accident of 1757, and neither did I see any individual graves for the men listed on the Durham Mining Museum website. It could be that, unlike the Liddells, the miners’ families could not afford to mark the burial site, or the stones might either have disappeared over the years or weathered to make the writing illegible. There was one communal grave in the cemetery, now planted with wildflowers, which marked an outbreak of cholera in 1848-9 that claimed the lives of 120 people in the neighbouring village of Wrekenton. In his paper, ‘On the Mode of Communication of Cholera’ (1855), Dr John Snow reported that the disease was particularly virulent among the mining communities. He wrote as follows:

The mining population of Great Britain have suffered more from cholera than persons in any other occupation; a circumstance which I believe can only be explained by the mode of communication of the malady. Pitmen are differently situated from every other class of workmen in many important particulars. There are no privies in the coal pits, or as I believe in other mines, the workmen stay so long in the mines that they are obliged to take a supply of food with them, which they eat invariably with unwashed hands and without a knife and fork.

Snow also reported that, once contracted, cholera spread among the mining community faster than in any other occupation, due to the working conditions underground.

Even though I could find no trace of the miners killed in the explosion, other headstones in the churchyard commemorated individual miners whose lives were lost in the surrounding collieries. William and Mary Richards of Ravensworth lost one son, William, aged 28, in 1841, when he was working at the Stoddart Pit of Marley Hill Colliery. A second son, George, died in 1845 after an accident in the same colliery that broke his back when he was coming up the shaft. Although George survived the initial impact, he died six weeks after the injury.

A second headstone also commemorates two lives lost from the same family, although the exact relation between the men is not clear. George Steel died at Newbottle Colliery in 1821, aged 28, and Charles Steel died at Springwell Colliery in 1840, aged 55.

Walking through the graveyard in Lamesley gave me a different perspective on The Angel. Not only was I seeing the sculpture itself from an unaccustomed viewpoint, but reading it in relation to the gravestones in the cemetery offered a new sense of it as a memorial to the coal industry. Coal mining employed many men across the region, and it also generated substantial profits. The Liddells as landowners had mined coal on their estate since the early seventeenth century, and their profits enabled them to demolish the original castle in 1808 and to commission the foremost architect of the day, John Nash, to build a grand house for them in the Gothic Revival style. How do the ruins of Ravensworth Castle relate to The Angel that now rises on the hill above them? How, too, do we position The Angel in relation to the largely agricultural landscape of Lamesley? Lamesley Pastures reminded me that farming also takes place in the shadow of The Angel, and that it is important to consider the diversity of employment in the surrounding area, both historically and in the present. Does The Angel risk projecting a monolithic history of the North, based in the decline of heavy industry, and occluding alternative stories and identities?

References

Northumberland Archives, ‘The 1848-9 Cholera Visitation’, 16 May 2017, https://www.northumberlandarchives.com/2017/05/16/the-1848-9-cholera-visitation

24 January 202430 January 2024

Ravensworth Ann Pit

sculpture of miner — Ray Lonsdale, ‘Marra’, Horden Village, 2015. Photo credit: Angie Scott.

In my previous post, I wrote about the explosion of 1757 that killed 16 men at the Ravensworth Ann Pit, the mine on which The Angel of the North stands. Fifteen men were killed by the blast, and one died later. A partial list of the who died is on the Durham Mining Museum’s website, alongside the details of a further 64 men who died as a result of accidents while working at the mine. Before 1850 there was no legal requirement to record fatal colliery accidents; while the Durham Mining Museum commemorates 20,900 on-site deaths at collieries in County Durham and Northumberland, the number of men and boys who died will therefore be much greater. This figure also does not include those men who died from mining-related illnesses such as emphysema and pneumoconiosis, or those who died in the days or months after being injured.

In his history of Birtley, Robert Hull documents that in 1741 George Humble of Birtley had opened a pit known as Birtley Colliery. Prior to this, the Bishop of Durham, George Winship, had leased the Birtley land to a series of tenants for coal mining and routes had been put in place to transport coal to the River Tyne, probably leading to the staiths at Felling. In 1731, there had been a dispute over working conditions, described as a ‘mutinous revolt’, but very little is known about this incident. Hull records a description of the Birtley mine in 1750, just a few years before the explosion nearby:

There were two pits visible and one covered by Humble’s Waggonway besides the Stappel pit which Humble spoke to where there was a vacuum at about 5 fathoms. Winship had a pit at Stappel, waste heaps prove this. By the widths of the shafts opened there must have been house ginns for no Jack Roll (a wooden windlass turned by hand) could draw the water at so wide a pit and he has no doubt that the Waggonway pit will be found in the Winship’s working pit. (p. 23)

Below, I list some of the miners who died in the mine explosion of 1757, using the information that is available on the Mining Museum webpage for the colliery. Even though this event has long passed out of living memory, it is fitting on a blog that is dedicated to the Angel of the North site as a memorial to commemorate the names that have been passed down. Although no women are named, it is hard not to imagine the impact on their lives in reading the names of those killed by the explosion, which in some cases claimed two generations of the same family.

The names of those miners who died from individual accidents at the Ravensworth Ann Pit can be found on the Durham Mining Museum webpage listed in the references below.

In Memoriam:

John Brown, address: Penny Fine. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

John Brown, son of John Brown, address: Penny Fine. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Ralph Brown, son of John Brown, address: Penny Fine. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

John Carr, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

John Cole, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Paul Gardiner, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Gardiner, address: Ravensworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Thomas Garfott, son of William Garfott, address: Kibblesworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Garfott, address: Kibblesworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Hewson, address: Street Gate. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Hewson, son of William Hewson, address: Street Gate. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Matthew Morrowley, address: Kibblesworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

James Richardson, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

A series of serious explosions in the coal mines of the north east led the Rector of Bishopwearmouth to search for a safer way of lighting coalmines than the open candles that miners routinely carried underground. Almost sixty years after the explosion at the Ravensworth Ann Pit, Humphrey Davy was commissioned to work intensively on the problem. After two months in the laboratories of the Royal Institution, Davy made the first prototypes of the miners’ safety lamp in 1815. In January 1816, the lamp was successfully tested at Hebburn Colliery and it was immediately put into production. The lamp significantly reduced deaths by explosion in the mines, but it also enabled mining at greater depths, which meant that coal mining remained a very dangerous occupation.

References

Durham Mining Museum, ‘Ravensworth Ann Colliery’, https://www.dmm.org/colliery/-003.htm

Robert Hull, Birtley: The Growth of an Industrial Community in the Nineteenth Century, with a foreword by Antony Gormley (Tudhoe, County Durham: Durham County Local History Society, 2023).

Royal Institution, ‘Humphry Davy’s miners’ safety lamp’, https://www.rigb.org/explore-science/explore/collection/humphrey-davys-miners-safety-lamp

23 January 202423 January 2024

Easington Colliery

When I first spoke to David about the Sounding the Angel project, he told me about a recording he had recently made at Easington Colliery in County Durham. He had been recording the wildlife in the ponds with underwater microphones, and had walked up to the reconstructed pit cage nearby, which marks where the miners would have descended into the mine for their underground shift. Using his contact microphones, David tested to see what noise this large metal structure might make. The sound that he heard through his headphones is similar to the vibrations that reverberate through the hollow form of The Angel, and David integrated them into the larger sound piece that he was making. You can hear ‘There Is Power In These Titans Yet’, David’s recording of the pit cage memorial, here.

Listening to David’s piece through headphones, the deep rumblings, surgings and flexings caused by the structure’s amplification of the wind are similar to the sounds that the contact microphones pick up at The Angel. David’s evocative title invites us to read the piece as a sonic statement of the energies and potential that still reside in former mining areas. As with his recordings of the aquatic life in ponds, David’s sounding of the pit cage shows us that community extends beyond the human, and his work gives us insights into a larger ecology that mostly goes unwitnessed. The recordings make visible that which lies below the surface, whether that is the unseen wildlife under the water, or sounds that travel through the earth. Each of these elements of David’s work resonate with the Sounding the Angel project, given the siting of Antony Gormley’s sculpture on the former pithead baths of Ravensworth Ann Colliery, also known as the Ann Pit.

Last weekend, I visited Easington Colliery to gain a better sense of the inter-relationship between the reconstructed pit cage and The Angel. To what extent can one be transposed onto another, and what distinguishes them apart? Approaching the pit cage from a pathway that leads from the road, way markers give visitors key facts about the history of the mine. Although the pit cage now stands in isolation, an extensive mine works had once surrounded it. The sculpture is only fully visible after climbing to the crest of the hill, framing a view of the sea beyond. From beneath the pit cage, I looked out over extensive views north to the Sunderland coastline, and south to Teesside. Although there were some other visitors, the sculpture did not have the same constant flow of people as The Angel.

Metal pit cage with backdrop of the sea — Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

The most significant difference from The Angel became apparent when I followed a muddy track past a children’s playground to the Easington Colliery Disaster Memorial. Here, a horizontal pithead wheel is enclosed in a circular wooden cage, and the spaces between the spokes of the wheel have been filled with coal. The memorial commemorates a significant mining accident that took place on 29 May 1951, when an explosion in the mine resulted in the deaths of 83 men, two of whom were rescue workers. The death toll was so high because the explosion occurred at the change of shift, which renders the pit cage memorial even more poignant. The ornamental metalwork that surrounds the Disaster Memorial inscribes the year of the explosion and the total number of men that were lost.

Metal flowers with inscribed plaque — Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

I have previously differentiated the grassroots memorial in the trees from roadside memorials, noting that the memorial at The Angel does not mark the site of a death. Comparison with the memorials at Easington Colliery offers a sharpened perspective on this statement. Paired with the Disaster Memorial nearby, the pit cage at Easington marks the site where the explosion occurred in 1951; the sculpture commemorates the 83 lives that were lost there. The form of the pit cage is also specific to the event of the explosion, commemorating the change of shift that had entangled so many men at a single site.

If I turn to the entry for the Ravensworth Ann Colliery on the website of the Durham Mining Museum, the single listing under ‘Disasters (5 or more killed)’ is an explosion that took 16 lives on 10th June 1757. This accident, although claiming over the 10 lives that qualify an event as a mining disaster, is on a smaller scale than at Easington and it is far outside of living memory. Under ‘Names of those killed at this colliery’, 80 men are listed, including the 16 men who died in the explosion. The remaining 64 men died as a result of individual accidents, most often killed by a fall of stone or being struck by a truck. These deaths have different causes and, while they lend weight and specificity to Antony Gormley’s intention to commemorate on the site those who died as a result of the mining industry, The Angel is not specific either to these men or to the Ravensworth Ann colliery. The form of The Angel does not explicitly reference the mine, and the sculpture’s title gestures to the broader demise of heavy industry across the region.

Reading the pit cage at Easington Colliery in relation to The Angel calls attention to the importance of history in understanding the resonance of the site as a memorial space. The pit cage memorial at Easington marks the site where the explosion occurred in 1951, and it commemorates the 83 lives that were lost. The Angel stands on a site that still carries the emotional weight of the 80 deaths listed by the Mining Museum as having occurred over the timeframe that the colliery was in operation. Nevertheless, Gormley’s sculpture does not commemorate either a single event or particular lives. The lack of specificity of The Angel lends itself to adoption as a grassroots memorial in a way that the Easington pit cage memorial does not – the sculpture marks the site out as a place of memorial significance, but it evokes a range of associations, meaning that visitors can more readily connect it to their own particular lives and losses.

References

‘Ravensworth Ann Colliery’, Durham Mining Museum, https://www.dmm.org/colliery/-003.htm