mining – Anne Whitehead

31 July 20241 August 2024

July

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

July sees two flowers in bloom at the Angel site that have commemorative significance relating to the two World Wars. The pink spires of the rosebay willowherb wave in the breeze, and this plant is closely associated with the bombed-out sites of World War Two, when it proliferated on the fire-scorched ground. Poppies are also in flower, and this plant has become synonymous with the national commemorations of the First World War.

Rosebay willowherb, otherwise known as fireweed, thrives on waste ground, and particularly on burned-over land, because fire and other disturbances cause its seeds to germinate. Considered a rare species in Britain in the eighteenth century, it took hold here during the Industrial Revolution, particularly along the railway lines, where the associated soil disturbance, combined with the wind dispersal of the seeds by passing trains, created the ideal conditions for it to flourish. Even today, the rosebay willowherb’s purplish-pink flowers are a ubiquitous sight from train windows, spreading along the route of the track.

The bombing campaigns of the Second World War, and especially the widespread fire damage, caused the rapid spread of rosebay willowherb across bomb-damaged sites, earning it the nickname of bombweed. The children’s novel Fireweed is set during the Blitz, and centres on the bomb sites where the plant grew profusely, while Cicely M. Barker’s 1948 book Flower Fairies of the Wayside includes the following verse for the Rosebay Willowherb Fairy:

When the earth is burnt and sad, I will come to make it glad. All forlorn and ruined places, all neglected empty spaces, I can cover – only think! – with a mass of rosy pink.

In 2002, the rosebay willowherb was chosen as the county flower of London, to mark its role in clothing in magnificent purple the bomb-scarred areas of the City, as it slowly recovered from the derelictions and deprivations of war.

The cyanotype of the rosebay willowherb above cannot capture its distinctive colour, but it does highlight the sculptural form of its tall spire. The site of the Angel of the North has not been fire damaged, but it is highly disturbed ground that has been landscaped from the waste land left behind by the former coal mine. The presence of the plant registers the industrial history of the site, and its reclamation from brownfield land.

This cyanotype of a poppy growing at the Angel enhances its ghostly fragility, as the thin outer petals allow the light to pass through, creating a semi-opaque halo effect. The image seems appropriate to the flower’s status as an icon of remembrance.

Poppies have long symbolised sleep and death: sleep because of the somnolent effects of the opium that can be extracted from them, and death because of the blood red of the flower. In ancient Greek and Roman culture, images of poppies inscribed on graves represented eternal sleep and poppies were commonly used as offerings to the dead. The common poppy became a symbol of remembrance for the First World War in Britain and the Commonwealth nations, because it thrived in the disturbed land of the European battlefields. The connection of the poppy with remembrance was reinforced by the famous poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ by the Canadian soldier and surgeon John McCrae, and artificial poppies were adopted to commemorate those who had died in war in the UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The ritual of wearing the poppy centres on Remembrance Day on November 11, and in New Zealand and Australia, soldiers are also commemorated on ANZAC Day, which falls on April 25.

The poppy as a token of remembrance resonates with the memorial site at the Angel, as well as with the memorial aspect of the sculpture itself, which commemorates those who lost their lives in the mining industry. Like the rosebay willowherb, the poppy flourishes on disturbed ground and it is this feature of the plants that has made them so closely associated with the bomb sites and battlegrounds of the twentieth century. Looking at the soil in which these plants grow, as well as at the flowers themselves, their presence at the Angel site acts as a marker, not of the catastrophic events of war, but rather of the long industrial and post-industrial usage of this land. It is plants such as these, which are tolerant of disruption and low fertility, that are able to proliferate in the conditions created by such activity.

3 July 20244 July 2024

Autumn

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the first part of the work, ‘Autumn’. You can listen to this section here.

Today’s post introduces the first section of our sound piece, ‘Sounding the Angel’. The work has been divided into four sections, reflecting the project’s movement through the year from autumn 2023 through to summer 2024. For each of the seasons, you can hear samples from the field recordings that David made on site at that time of the year. In this section, you can hear passing traffic, recordings of the vibrations passing through The Angel, and samples from an autumn dawn chorus from the trees. ‘Autumn’ captures the participants’ previous associations with the site, and what The Angel means to them.

The two participants have very different relationships with The Angel of the North. Our first participant, who commemorated his wife by scattering some of her ashes at The Angel, described how the sculpture had threaded through their lives together. He describes his wife as ‘a Gateshead lass born and bred’, and speaks of her as an ardent defender of the sculpture when it was first proposed. The couple met and courted when they worked at a factory in the Team Valley – a site which now lies in the shadow of The Angel. After their marriage, he and his wife were both active in supporting the mineworkers during the strikes in the 1980s, he as a trade union organiser and she as a treasurer. At his wife’s funeral, the colliery band made a special recorded performance of her favourite tune, and her extensive collection of signature scarves was given away to people attending the funeral, with two of them then being tied to the top of local banner at the next Miners’ Gala Day procession.

Our second participant is South African, and she recalls vividly her first sight of The Angel, travelling north with her husband from Reading, where they were then living, to visit his family. Looking up from the road map, it seemed to her that The Angel filled the whole front screen of the car, and she describes the event as a ‘special moment’. Such was the impact of The Angel on her that our participant took her parents to see it when they visited from South Africa, and the sculpture had the same effect on them – especially her father, who was energised as he went up the hill towards it. It was on a separate occasion that the participant first registered the memorial site in the trees. Her friend was visiting and she spotted the memorials in the trees. When the participant’s brother died later that same year, she had no grave to visit and no places nearby that they had visited together. Her thoughts then returned to the memorial site. Her friend was later diagnosed with cancer, and The Angel became associated with her, too, because they had visited together. The memorial site helped the participant to feel connected to her friend and her brother after their deaths.

Even though the stories are very different in terms of the participants’ connection to The Angel, notable similarities emerged. For both participants, The Angel is comforting because it is constantly visible – on the news, on postcards, on stickers, and even on the inside pages of a passport. The second participant remarks that, even in South Africa, her parents see The Angel sometimes on TV or on a picture. The participants both also speak of their fondness for The Angel, which is associated with particular parts of the sculpture. The first participant remembers his wife always commenting on the shapeliness of The Angel’s bum and calves whenever she passed. The second participant speaks of the family nickname for The Angel – the ‘rusty bird’ – and of her love for The Angel’s wings.

The most striking resonance across the stories lies in the participants ‘ connection with the mining history of the site. I have already outlined the deep personal history that links the first participant, and his wife, to mineworking in the local area. Accounting for why her father was so energised by the site, the second participant explains that he used to work in the gold mines in South Africa. The sculpture was meaningful to him because it was built over a mine, and he spoke about the foundations of the sculpture extending deep underground. He observed to his daughter that ‘there must be people who died in the mines’, and that ‘The Angel is a memorial over them too’.

It is clear from our two conversations that The Angel has multiple layers of personal significance for both project participants, and that its associations also extend to the people memorialised. The iconic nature of The Angel means that there are constant reminders of the site in everyday life. The Angel’s presence as a memorial to mining and mineworkers is significant for both participants, both of whom have family connections to the mining industry.

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

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

29 November 20236 December 2023

Writing

Angel of the North from the side and looking up — Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Yesterday I received an email from Liz Shaw, who had heard the Radio 4 broadcast about our project on the Today programme. Elizabeth is a member of the Watford Writers’ Group and had been set the task to write a piece that was inspired by an artwork. Based on my interview, Liz wrote a beautiful piece which constitutes its own eloquent and moving response to The Angel.

Liz has kindly given me permission to include her writing on the blog, and you can read it below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Angel of the North

My arms are not raised up high in anger or in defiance. They do not bend and curve to cherish and protect. Nor do they hang in despair or in defeat. They stretch out wide, wider than I am tall, parallel to the earth. My arms are winged and spread to catch the wind. I am genderless and ageless. My face is emotionless and featureless. I was created blind to your existence, deaf to your voices. I watch unheeding as your traffic and trains stream below me.

Born in a blast furnace, forged in steel, I am municipal, magnificent, agnostic, secular, classless.

And yet. And yet. You leave your hopes, fears and prayers at my feet. Slips of paper sealed and curled within my iron ribs. Nearby trees hang heavy with your memorials, charms, ribbons and fairy lights. I have become a road-side shrine, an altar, a minaret, a bridge of sighs, a wailing wall.

You conceived me, you built me, you know this. So why do you believe that I have power over your fate? Do you hope to see me spark to life and stride the fields like a modern-day Prometheus, take flight to intercede with the Gods on your behalf?

My feet are planted in a landscape once blighted by industry. I feel the souls of the colliers who mined the seams beneath me. I feel their heaving lungs and their black coal-ingrained scars. Your messages seep into me with their raw emotions of hope, grief, love and hate.

And now the sounds of my structure will be added to your voices. Your memories and stories will be forever entwined with the rush of the wind as it wails around me. The eerie groans of my metal body expanding and contracting with the summer heat and the winter ice will be added to birdsong and the sound of children playing at my feet. The gentle rustle of the leaves will blend with the tinkle of your votive offerings. A soundscape will be created of what I have come to mean to you.

Are you hoping to wear away at my cold rusting heart? If your wishes came true, if you were wealthy, loved, cured, avenged, then what? The deep scars of your life will fade in time as will your life itself. I cannot bring them back, the people who you mourn and grieve. They will not return from death.

Better to stand tall and strong with arms wide open to accept your future, to feel your feet firmly planted in history, to gaze ahead to the distant twinkling northern city lights.

Liz Shaw

November 2023