Pit and Pulpit - Faith and Industry on the Northern Coalfields
Across the North East, the histories of church and coal are closely entwined. Long before the great industrial collieries transformed the landscape, ecclesiastical estates were already shaping the exploitation of the region's mineral wealth. In the centuries that followed parish churches, mission rooms and Methodist chapels became fixtures of the pit communities - most stood at the heart of village life while others found themselves trying to keep up with a rapidly changing industrial society. In this feature, Tim Lewthwaite explores this ancient but complicated relationship between faith, industry, community and landscape alongside its rich legacy across the coalfields.
On 26th October 2021 Storm Arwen battered the Northumbrian coast with gale force wind and rain. The winds enveloped Seaton Delaval Hall, meeting as gusts of turbulence and driving-snow upon the small Norman Church of Our Lady on the hall's southwest side. The ancient chapel was covered in a wall of ice, penetrating the fabric of the church with water and destroying internal plaster.
Even in good weather, the Church of Our Lady sits close to the flooded New Hartley mine shaft, exacerbating rising damp and adding to the structural difficulties of age. Such are the physical and environmental battles faced by church buildings in this ancient land of coast and coal. But it is to the coast and the coal that the churches owe their heritage. This great cradle of English Christianity produced monasteries with vast and productive estates; these became early exploiters and innovators of mineral extraction. The monks of Durham and Tynemouth exploited coal across the later medieval period, establishing ports and staithes for its export.
The Church of Our Lady is not a typical pit village chapel like its mostly nineteenth century neighbours. It was consecrated in 1102 by Bishop Flambard of Durham, and clearly incorporates an earlier Anglo-Saxon church. Although it sits quietly on the estate boundary of the National Trust's Seaton Delaval Hall, in 1891 it was returned to the Church of England as a parish church after spending 700 years as the Norman Delaval family’s manorial chapel. The medieval keep, ancient village, and later miners' and estate workers’ cottages surrounding the church have come and gone under the tides of invasion, clearances, mining, and new town relocations which define the Northumbrian coalfields. In this simple church and its curtilage, baptismal joy, mourning loss, festive jubilation, and spiritual succour were experienced from the Anglo-Saxon peasant through the humble collier up to today's parishioner, or even National Trust visitor.
The kirk and the colliery were engines of the North East’s culture and economy; driving, reshaping but also responding to changes in people and land-use. And they were not always natural neighbours. Here, I’d like to look at some coalfield communities on both sides of the Pennines – connected by saints, miners, and their common heritage – through the kaleidoscope of the relationship between church and mining community across time.
Holy Folk
In his 2007 essay The Church of England in the Durham Coalfield 1810-1920, scholar Rob Lee charted the dynamic relationship between mining communities and Durham Diocese across the period of pit expansion, which was in part driven by the Diocese itself. To the Established Church, Durham and Northumberland were the haliwerfolk – the Folk of The Holy One, a people shaped by the influence and spiritual stewardship of St Cuthbert, but especially his heirs: the mighty Prince-Bishops of Durham. The Reformation ended the ‘cult of St Cuthbert’ with the burning of his banner and the neglect of his shrine in Durham Cathedral, however, the power of the Prince Bishops – essentially theocratic subkings – did revert to the Crown until 1837; albeit this power was largely ceremonial by that point. County Durham drew its identity from its ecclesiastical origin.
In the period of pit expansion, in part driven by Durham diocese’s enthusiasm for leveraging its mineral rights, the established church was becoming an outsider. This was the ancient church; in the curtilage of its buildings the miners were often buried. However, industrial development led to a transformation in the geography and demography of Durham and south east Northumberland (where the Diocese had an exclave territory in Bedlingtonshire). “The ecclesiastical infrastructure of the diocese” writes Lee “simply could not cope with its demographic revolution” brought on by the pits, which (along with improving life-expectancies) increased the county’s population by 780 per cent across the century. Over twice the national average.
Take Usworth, a parish now part of Washington new town. Before the coal boom, my village of Springwell was the windswept common land of Usworth, an ancient borderland with the neighbouring townships dotted with quarrymens’ cottages. When a colliery joined the small quarries here in 1824, Springwell Village began to outgrow the medieval village of Usworth down the hill. A sizable Methodist church became a focal point in Springwell, joining the small Wesleyan chapels that dotted the pitmens’ rows across the Gateshead and Washington moors. No Anglican chapel was built, and while Holy Trinity Usworth was likely deemed as close enough, and a miners’ mission chapel was eventually established at the parish’s other pit village of Little Usworth, one can see Lee’s point that demographic and economic change of the industrial revolution were not immediately reflected in the Church’s pastoral mission.
For some economic historians, this geographic disparity was rooted in the landed interest. E.P. Thompson wrote on the socio-economic divide between the Church and emerging working class, and took things rhetorically a step further by saying the Church and gentry interest were “parsonic allies” – the Established Church “a pillar of the old order, often clashing with the emergent radicalism of… miners of the North, who sought autonomy from ecclesiastical control.”
North East Heritage Library’s Kieran shared a wonderful story from the 1870s that highlights some of the disconnect between the growing industrial working class and Anglican clergy in the nineteenth century. Rev Ellis, a vicar of landed influence upset by the view of “dirty pitmen”, closed a popular footpath along the River Wansbeck between Bothal and Sheepwash to build a mansion. The path closure displaced the route of local pitmen and schoolchildren, at a time of minimal labour and land access rights.
Two thousand people of Pegswood, Bothal, Sheepwash, and Longhirst descended on the path singing hymns accompanied by brass bands, to “demolish the barricades on the ancient path”. The event underscores an early mood of collective resistance, a precursor to later labour movement and campaigns for public rights of way.
Little Bethel
As such “emergent radicalism” clashed with “ecclesiastical control”, it is no surprise that only a few miles away in Bedlington, Wesleyan numbers swelled to an extent that by 1823 they needed a bigger church; they were apparently joined by supporters of the early co-operative movement in dismantling fencing erected by mine-owner “Squire Burdon of Hartford Hall” barring access to a green near the market square. Burdon caved, and here they built their new church, which was enlarged in 1893.
Orwell wrote that married to the landed gentry, the Church was “remote from [the coalminers’] struggles” of “extreme hardship and poverty”, and thus in the firing-line of the class’s sporadic boldness. The early Victorian Church of England was losing its monopoly on God. While much of folk-life was still lived within the traditions of the English church in coalfield communities, the Good Shepherd - a carpenter who ministered to the poor – was being encountered elsewhere.
Jack Lawson, perhaps better known as Lord Lawson of Beamish, was a Boldon Colliery coal hewer who eventually became MP for Chester-le-Street. Lawson was instrumental in preparing the civil defence of Durham and Northumberland, and in the later demobilisation and occupation of Germany, serving as Secretary of State for War in Labour’s post-war government. Lawson began his oratory and social justice career as a Methodist lay preacher, steeped in the community ecosystem of the pit villages. Like many young colliers at the time, he was a heavy drinker and gambler, but Lawson loved to read. It was the ‘Little Bethel’ – the Methodist Society chapel – that would not only direct the “rough and ready life” of the pitmen toward more wholesome enjoyment, but develop Jack’s talents that would pave the road to Parliament.
On the Durham coalfield, “one great force held the field in the matter of personal development – and that was the chapel”. The Methodist Revival of the eighteenth-century, he believed, “saturated the industrial masses with a passion for a better life”, and it visited the mining communities at a time of “economic, social, and moral chaos” caused by the “greatest economic cataclysm in human history” – the industrial revolution. Lawson writes beautifully how amongst the newfound music, literature, philosophy, and sociality of the Methodist chapel the miners “first found the language and art to express their antagonism to grim conditions and injustice”. The local co-op and trade union found their first supporters amongst the increasingly cultured, though mostly ‘uneducated’, Methodist leadership. Put simply: “Methodism took the ‘nobodies’ and made the most humble and hopeless a ‘somebody’”.
John Wesley, ‘co-founder’ of Methodism, spent a great deal of time in the North East amongst the early coal communities. It was not just Wesley’s preaching that endeared him to the emergent working class, but his direct support for those facing injustice. In 1744 Wesley wrote in his journal of his support for a John Nelson of Durham who had been conscripted for “no other crime than that of calling sinners to repentance” (presumably unsanctioned public preaching in the Methodist style). Wesley laments how Nelson’s poor treatment led to hospital, where he lost his arm to infection. Two days later “God signed his discharge, to his eternal home”.
Evangelicals like Wesley appealed to the sentiment expressed in Christ condemnation of the hypocrisy of religious elites. The Wesley brothers’ new Anglicanism may have begun in the rarefied corridors of Lincoln College Oxford as the Holy Club, but their egalitarian approach to churchmanship and preaching was a salve to what Lawson called the “unbelievable degradation and hopelessness” of Georgian England. This would evolve into the “spirit of camaraderie I have never seen equalled” of even the early twentieth century Durham Methodists.
“By Faith and Industry” – A Look West
Prior to hewing coal in Durham, Jack Lawson was, like me, a native of Whitehaven in Cumberland. His memoir A Man’s Life recounts his early childhood on the windswept, clifftop pit village of Kells, outside Whitehaven. It overlooks the Isle of Man and Galloway, and named for an Irish town, it may once have felt part of the ‘Celtic’ seaways of the Atlantic. Jack’s father was Irish, his mother a sturdy Cumbrian. My paternal grandmother Irene grew up “on Kells” the generation below Jack, and was of Manx, Irish, Scottish, and Northumbrian heritage.
These lineages show how West Cumbria was, when the sea was the highway, at the very centre of the British Isles. Scotland and Man were its next-door neighbours. Dublin and Belfast were Whitehaven’s primary trading partners. Yorkshire and Lancashire brought millers, miners, and preachers. Cornwall sent tin miners in droves. And Cumbria was always swapping coal miners with Northumbria – one such being Jack, who recalled moving to Boldon Colliery to find it inhabited by a “multitude of Cumbrians”. Irene’s grandfather was a miner from Lanchester, Durham.
This geography meant the region was a nexus of the early British church, attested by Cumbria’s fine Anglo-Celtic stone crosses. And so this other northern land of coast and coal, had its saints too. The Pennines brought Cuthbert, who was granted lands, visited Carlisle and his friend Saint Herbert on Derwentwater. The minister to the Picts, Saint Ninian, is said to have been educated at Carlisle before spreading Christianity in Scotland; and many scholars now think Saint Patrick was a native of the Carlisle region prior to his captivity in Ireland.
From Ireland arrived Bega, supposedly founding the priory at eponymously named St Bees. Like Lawson and myself, Bega apparently ended up in Northumbria, but her priory’s lands were made up of the cliffy and coal-rich lands around Whitehaven. This mining area including Kells was known as Preston Quarter – the Priest’s town – probably the glebe land for St Bees’ prior.
The regional flavour of saints left its mark on industrial Cumberland. When Catholicism was re-established on the lands of St Bega in the Preston Quarter, E. W. Pugin’s 1865 Catholic church was dedicated to her. Catholicism was substantial on the Cumbrian pitfields, especially in the iron ore town Cleator Moor – ‘Little Ireland’. While this town was flourishing in 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical on labour relations, which declared “on the authority of the Gospel” the Church was to bring all classes and sectors together to further “the interests of the workers”. Unsurprisingly, Cleator Moor was a hub for Cumberland’s early labour movement. The national context was Catholic Cardinal Manning and the Salvation Army’s William Booth helping end the London dockers strike by mediating in the interests of the dockers. Where were the Anglican bishops? In 1890, an Anglican mission chapel opened in a valley to the south of Cleator Moor dedicated to St Bega - the Church of England was returning to its saints, perhaps for more than just spiritual reasons.
Until its abolition in 2023, the council of Whitehaven and Cleator Moor’s borough boasted a coat of arms which captured the two cultural forces of the region: its motto By Faith and Industry, depicting an Anglo-Norse Cross and bishop’s crooks above a shield of coal picks, an anchor, and lightening bolts (for nuclear power). Ancient faith and modern industry.
‘Stir up the brethren, commend our church’
Back in Northumbria, the Diocese had resolved to change by the 1850s. It had to adapt to emerging patterns of settlement, and fundamentally, adapt the clergy to what we now understand as being the rise of the industrial working class. Several bishops had created new parishes with new churches to reflect the demographic transformation, but it required a concerted campaign of change.
In 1860, a public meeting in Newcastle resolved on a great Anglican mission among the “Pitmen, Miners, and Ironworkers” of the coalfields. Finally, one Durham clergyman’s wish to “stir up the brethren and commend our church” was being realised. By 1882, the Northumberland Archdeaconry became a diocese in its own right – the Diocese of Newcastle – rather than the northern hinterland of Durham Cathedral. Its 86 parishes in 1800 would become 262 by 1920, with dozens of new churches to minister to the new communities in that time. Many rural, but with several specifically across the pit villages. The Northumbrian dioceses, Lee tells us, also began recruiting clergy from the lower-middle and working classes; in the early nineteenth century, less than a quarter of Anglican clergy in Durham diocese were working or lower-middle class, by 1920 it was over half.
Here we can return to the genteel churches of Delaval and Usworth. In 1912, Rev Alexander Begg of Usworth said the clergy “no longer stand aloof from them [the miners] in comfortable isolation”. In Delaval, Lee pictures an ‘unidentified clergyman’ wielding a pick during the 1912 strike.
Durham Cathedral is now immersed in the area’s mining heritage. The great shrine of Northumbria’s patronal saints Cuthbert and Bede, share a home with a touching memorial to the miners, and the Cathedral is of course central to the annual Durham Miners Gala, where the banners assemble to be blessed and new or restored ones dedicated. The Gala liturgy prays “we remember before God the Durham miners, we give thanks that we are bound together in our common heritage.”, and from the Book of Job: “Miners put an end to darkness”. Colliery brass bands and colourful Anglican processions lead the congregation out to the festivities.
With the end of coal mining in the North East, the 1990s and early 2000s saw a great deal of regional soul searching. The 90s saw deindustrialisation and riots. In 2004, the region rejected a regional assembly, striking English devolution stone dead for near two decades; and 2008 saw a failed European City of Culture bid from Newcastle-Gateshead. While Millennium investment (such as The Sage and Baltic gallery) and later Levelling Up funding with the Great Exhibition of The North and a recently reopened coalfield railway line has brought cultural vigour, the sensations of being “mazed and dazed” that Lawson describes of the early workers to industrialisation feel familiar for we who experienced its reverse.
Rob Lee begins his study with a famous scene in Billy Elliot, when Billy tells an upper-class fellow ballet auditioner he’s from Durham, the boy is baffled Billy has never seen Durham Cathedral. A few years after the film, renowned theologian and then Bishop of Durham Tom Wright gave a series of Easter sermons in Easington Colliery, where Billy Elliot was filmed. Wright spoke about the grim reality for many in the town not just in the strike and closure years, but more so at time of the film’s release. For Wright, the story of Easter is resurrection in the face of decay and the Church, including its built heritage, can tell that hopeful story.
The coal mines are gone, but most of the churches (eventually) built to serve them are still here. With post-industrial hindsight, the Anglican church’s sluggish response to the mineral-industrial revolution it helped create might be seen as a careful missional strategy during rapid change, as many nonconformist or revivalist chapels did not outlast initial enthusiasm. We spoke of Pegswood, there the Methodist chapel was taken on by the CofE in 1995 as St Margaret’s Church. Church of The Good Shepherd in the former pit village of Burradon displays not only the miners’ banner, but the closed British Legion and WI banners too. Its pews were taken from the closed Methodist church. Back in Cumbria, the Colliery Mission nonconformist chapel where my grandmother Irene worshipped from the 1930s closed in during Covid19, its miners’ banner recently rehomed to, you guessed it, the Anglican parish church of St James. When miners’ welfare halls, legions, and labour clubs closed, the Anglican church was and is often the last civic institution deemed appropriate for the care of civic memory.
We began with the ancient church of Delaval. If its stones could talk, the changes they have witnessed we cannot fathom. Let’s end on another coalfield church with an ancient and much-changed inheritance: St Mary’s Horton near Blyth. It once served a medieval community, now gone leaving it standing alone on the hill overlooking Blyth and Bedlington. It then served the mining community of East Hartford a few fields away. With such dislocated positioning, this beautiful church might be expected to have gone the way of many other places of worship diligently recorded by North East Heritage Library – demolition or conversion. But I am told there is significant growth, and the parish now thinking of new heating and facilities.
Tim is a heritage enthusiast currently working in church buildings support for the Diocese of Newcastle. Currently post as @northerncurio on X
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