No bairns ever in the road - The Unsung Role of Women in Coalfield Communities

Coal shaped the North East in ways that go well beyond the pitheads and coal seams. Durham's mining communities were held together not just by the labour of men underground, but by the unsung work of the women above. Professor John Tomaney, former Chair of Trustees at the Durham Miner's Hall and Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at UCL, draws on the rich tradition of coalfield literature - from Sid Chaplin and Frederick Grice to George Hitchin and Margaret Hedley, to explore how grandmas became a firm and defining presence in pit village life.

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In its many histories, the Durham coalfield is a manly place. For two centuries, the coalfield was written about as if women were scarcely present. Yet, women played a crucial role in what Marxists call the “reproduction of labour power”. Caring for mining households was arduous labour. This work was never counted in the official statistics of economic output, productivity, and trade, but women’s work was critical to these indices. Women were largely omitted from the political history of the Durham coalfield. Even early feminist scholarship tended to assume that women had no social and political agency in coalfield communities. More recently though, there have been attempts to redress the balance, drawing attention, for instance, to the role of women in organising the meat boycott of 1872 (in the face of opposition from some husbands), the importance of organisations like the Cooperative Women’s Guild, and the contribution of political leaders such as Annie Errington of Sacriston. Margaret Hedley’s trilogy of imaginative family memoir, Women of the Durham Coalfield, tells the story of Hannah Hall and her descendants over more than a century, in a manner that is both empathetic and unsentimental. Since the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the emergence of women’s support groups, recorded by historians such as my colleague Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and others, there has been a new wave of interest in the women’s history of the coalfield.

Many stories remain untold, however, and there is still work to be done to retrieve the lives of women in mining communities. The Durham coalfield gave birth to a rich literature mainly written by men, in the form of poetry, memoirs, and novels, a close reading of which offers glimpses into the variety of roles performed by women. A recurring presence in this literature is the figure of the Grandma, acting as the lynchpin of family and community, spreading care and love. Of course, the travails of mothers figure in a world fraught with danger for their sons. In the 19th century, Joseph Skipsey, “The Pitman Poet”, wrote:

Mother wept, and father sigh’d;

With delight a-glow

Cried the lad, “To-morrow,” cried,

“To the pit I go.”

But the attention given to grandmothers is striking. (Grandfathers feature less centrally, perhaps unsurprisingly given the nature of their work and their greater opportunities for socialising outside the home.) The sharp gender division of labour between pit and home, the typically close-knit nature of communities, and the importance of the extended family seem to have shaped the role and impact of the Grandma in the lives of their grandchildren, at least as she is recorded in the literature of the Durham coalfield.

In “A Song for my Darling Alice”, originally published in 1971 and collected in A Tree with Rosy Apples, Sid Chaplin, the miner-novelist, writes a love letter to his Grandma. In the interwar period, Chaplin only saw his grandmother three times a year – Christmas, Easter, and in the summer – but she was the centre of his world. Offering a mix of affection and authority, for Chaplin, his Grandma presented a reproach to the “claim that Geordieland is a male-dominated society, where men still walk tall and women are poor cringing creatures” (68). She ruled the household but created a “child’s paradise”, albeit based on “sweated female labour” (68). For Alice, grandchildren were always welcome: “Loved bairns are blessings” (70). The time spent between a grandmother and her grandchildren was a precious gift. In the title story of The Bachelor Uncle and other stories (1980), a fatherless young boy lives with his grandparents. Grandma Martin “was Grandma to everybody in the village” (10), but her house is a comforting place for her grandson. Perhaps, untypically, a tender grandfather makes part of the picture. In “The Sea Rose”, collected in the same volume, a young boy takes a memorable trip to the coast with his Grandma (“Ah’ll take the bairn – it’ll be company for me and a treat for him” [35]). The story revolves around an unexpected meeting between his Grandma and a former male admirer from long ago, who gives her a rose, and the boy’s confused realisation that she was once a young woman.

George Hitchin’s memoir of growing up in Seaham in the interwar period, The Pit Yacker (1962), similarly places his Granny on a pedestal:

Granny was an institution. Customarily all her children and grandchildren came to see her every Sunday evening, and to gossip, play darts or dominoes, and squabble among themselves. In her matriarchal manner, Granny would hand out slabs of pease-pudding, slices of cold beef, reprimands and pettings in rapid succession. She was kind and passionately fond of children – especially me as I was quick to learn – but to her contemporaries she must have seemed, with her squat and powerful figure, the prototype of an armoured car (10).

Granny provided unconditional love and care for young George, who began life as a foundling and was adopted. Margaret Hedley’s memoir of her great-great-grandmother, Women of the Durham Coalfield in the 19th Century, depicts Hannah Hall as an exceptional woman who defied the gender conventions of her time, refusing to name the father of her child born out of wedlock, divorcing her second husband, and running her own business. Each was an exceptional action in Thornley at that time; in total, they were extraordinary. Her choices meant that she had strained relationships with her daughters at times, but she seemed to have delighted in the role of grandmother.

In Frederick Grice’s autobiographical novel, The Bonnie Pit Laddie (1960), set around the turn of the twentieth century in a fictional village that bears resemblance to Brandon, Dick Ullathorne’s grandmother is aloof and bitter. The daughter of a tradesman from the South who married a miner, she regrets her romantic choices, has little time for the intense communal life of her village, and is uninterested in the fateful strike that occurs. (“When she ventured out into the colliery streets, she still moved among them as a stranger, shrinking from the ugliness and mud” [116]). Her frostiness melts somewhat when Dick is concerned. Although hardly the affectionate Grandma eulogised by Chaplin and Hitchin, Dick’s grandmother takes him under her wing, passing on her love of literature and plotting a route out of pit work for her grandson. By the novel’s end, Dick is setting out on the road to education and social mobility. The concern and decisive action of his grandmother have shaped his life chances.

Chaplin and Hitchin were able to leave the pits, partly as a result of the availability of important, if narrow, routes into education in the form of the Spennymoor Settlement and Rock House in Seaham, respectively. Chaplin earned a living as a writer, eventually settling in Newcastle, while Hitchin became a college lecturer in Essex. Grice, most unusually, avoided the pit altogether, leaving Durham to read English at King’s College, London, before becoming a teacher. Both Chaplin and Hitchin deeply admired their grandmothers for the work they did. “The women worked harder than the men” (13), according to Hitchin. Women aged rapidly under the burdens of childbearing and onerous domestic work. But they seized what few pleasures their hard lives afforded and showered what little luxury there was on their grandchildren.

Grandmothers are represented as strong characters, forthright in their opinions and capable of physical confrontation. Hitchin’s Granny ruled the domestic arena without fear, once attacking young George’s father with a broom for helping himself, without authorisation, to a freshly made leek pudding. Hannah Hall was an uncompromising figure who went into battle with authority on several occasions. But, according to Margaret Hedley, she reproduced the prevailing division of labour in her own home. The paradoxical role of strong women in enforcing gender relations that feminist theory suggests were oppressing them is a recurring feature of the literature.

These themes are present in one of the best novels about the Durham coalfield, Gran at Coalgate, written by Winifred Cawley, which won The Guardian’s Children’s Book Prize in 1974. It is a story in which both the character of the grandmother is most fully developed, and the attendant contradictions of gender relations are apparent. Now largely forgotten, Cawley, who died in 2001, aged 86, was born and brought up in the North East. In the novel, set in 1926, Jane “Jinnie” Friend is an 11-year-old schoolgirl who suffers what, today, would be called a panic attack while anticipating her forthcoming scholarship exam, upon which her dreams of becoming a teacher rest. We learn that Jinnie lives with her brother and parents in the shadow of the Swan Hunter shipyard at Wallsend. The scene is set, with newspapers reporting that the miners are on the verge of a national strike to stop a reduction in their pay and lengthening of their working day. Her father is a shopkeeper and an ardent and judgmental Methodist, frequently opining on what is or is not “Sinful”. When the local doctor prescribes rest and recuperation for Jinnie, notwithstanding the misgivings of her father, who looks down upon miners, she is sent to stay with her maternal grandmother in a Durham pit village.

Her destination, “Coalgate”, is unmistakably Leadgate. A major clue is that the train passes the Eden pit, where her uncles work, just before it arrives in Coalgate. The impending strike, the union, the pit, mining work, however, all remain at the margins of the story, while domestic work and female socialising are foregrounded. Men are an intermittent presence in this world except for Mr Whitehead, who, “large and still in his big wooden chair, stared morosely into the fire, unmoved by the female busyness around him. There was Something Wrong with Mr. Whitehead from the War … Coalgate seemed to have more than its share of casualties either The Pit or The War” [88].) The book richly evokes an inter-war mining community through the eyes of a young but perceptive girl, marking it out from other literary depictions of Durham mining communities.

This is not a sentimental account, nor does it present the stereotype of the monocultural mining village. Conflicts along the axes of class, gender, generation, and religion are endemic in Coalgate. Notably, it is women, including Gran, who are ruthless in applying their moral code. Being “stuck up” is unforgivable. Fecklessness is condemned without favour by the women of Coalgate: “That man of yours that’s never done a hand’s turn for twenty years that I know of” (131). Scandalous Aunt Polly is both an opponent of the strike and an adulteress, is “a bad wife and bad mother”, according to Gran, and “No better than she ought to be” (135). But the novel portrays the everyday solidarities and conviviality of the village: “At Coalgate pit folk were never off each other’s doorsteps, Dad said” (57). Events are punctuated by moments of collective observance: at the end of the dance, they “stood straight and silent for The King” (160). As Gran’s family faces a crisis, neighbours rally with understated practical and emotional support in the knowledge that it will be reciprocated later.

Although told from Jinnie’s perspective, this is the story of Gran, who is the moral core of the narrative. Gran has firmly held opinions not just about Aunty Polly’s behaviour; she is a believer in nationalisation of the coal industry and a critic of the timidity of the miners” leaders. Not without flaws, Gran is a person who cares and tries to do the right thing, even if she is not always clear what that is. Children are the centre of her life; “no bairns ever in the road, not in this house. So don't you go saying it” (200). Gran gives Jinnie latitude, responsibility, and unconditional love. The openness and warmth of working class Coalgate, implicitly, are contrasted with the oppressive, austere, censorious life of Jinnie’s petty bourgeois parents.

The Grandma, then, is a notable and celebrated figure in the literature of the Durham coalfield, reaching fullest expression in Gran at Coalgate. Sources of strength and love, whatever their imperfections, grandmothers created a child-centred domain in which authority and care were mixed in extended family structures. Stories of unhappy or disinterested grandmothers no doubt exist, but they seem to have gone largely unrecorded in the main. Instead, in a world of hardship, struggle, and conflict, grandmothers nurtured the emotional security that all children need in their early years.

Grandmothers also played an important role in enforcing traditional gender roles and practices. Ruling the domestic world, they could offer harsh judgments of women who failed in their household duties and, despite exceptions like Hannah Hall, only rarely challenged the gender division of labour. More commonly, they endorsed and reproduced it. The worlds evoked by Cawley, Chaplin, Grice, Hedley, and Hitchin have gone. It is perhaps possible to see traces of this old world today in the many grandmothers who wait at school gates to collect children or are busy pushing swings in the park. The extended family survives tenaciously in many villages, despite the changing nature of post-mining communities. A notable contemporary difference, though, is the more prominent role of grandfathers in minding the grandbairns. Once you become a grandfather, you start to notice and acknowledge your fellows, perhaps exchanging a barely perceptible nod of the head or a few pleasantries. Perhaps one day, we will be featured in the future record of community life.

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John Tomaney is Pro-Provost (Regional Communities) and Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at University College London and former Chair of Trustees at Redhills – the Durham Miners’ Hall.

This essay was commissioned for 2025's North East History Compendium

Front photo: Sacriston Colliery in the 1980s by Des Kelly (used with permission of Andy Kelly)