It’s taken me a while to get round to writing this review of a momentous poetry gathering, but I couldn’t let it go unrecorded. On the last weekend in March around 40 poets and audience gathered at Woodhorn mining museum near Ashington in Northumberland to hear poetry about the coal industry – its history, hardships, industrial relations and tragedies, and its legacy.

The occasion was to promote the Fig Tree Coal Mining Anthology, published by poet Tim Fellows, pictured left, of Chesterfield’s Crooked Spire Press, to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike. It had already been launched in Doncaster and in Garforth near Leeds, but Tim was keen to have a separate event in Northumberland, which was a key mining area. Woodhorn mining museum, on the site of a colliery that retains many of its original buildings, with occasional rail tracks embedded in floors, seemed the ideal place.

Woodhorn was one of the many collieries in and around Ashington, which was once dubbed “the largest pit village in the world”. As well as Tim himself, there were many other poets at the museum reading with family links to the industry - and one poet who used to work underground.

Alan McKenzie, pictured right, a member of Morpeth Poetry Group, delivered his poem in traditional rhyming couplets, in a dialect he described as a mixture of Northumbrian and Pitmatic, the latter a language peculiar to colliers working in Co Durham and around Ashington. We understood him well enough, and loved the sound of it. He recalled the coal seam as “not as black as folk might think / The dust makes it kind of grey.”

Other readings were from guest poets Ian Parks and Joe Williams, from others with poems in the anthology, and also poets in the north-east with coal-mining poems who were keen to add their voices to the event.

Ali Rowland, who now lives in the Northumberland coastal town of Amble, was a 16-year-old in Sheffield when the 84-85 strike began, doing her bit to help the cause: “I had heard the miners’ wives laughing / at us, soft city-types, behind our backs / saying we knew ‘nowt’ of pit village life / … but we were solid behind them / all, we knew right from wrong.”

Former teacher Dave Medd, originally from Hull, came to work at a school in Ashington in 1990, and stayed there for 17 years, after falling in love with “the community, the place, and its history”.

John Chambers, from a little pit village in South Yorkshire - a place “hard to get away from” – has a poem in the anthology, a memory of his grandfather and the uneaten ‘bait’ in his ‘snap’ tin, titled ‘Jam Butty’. Allan Sutherland performed with a visual aid, a barometer presented to his father for designing a colliery banner. There are many union banners at Woodhorn museum.

Lauren McCarthy’s father worked down the pit, and she was born during the ‘51 weeks’ of the 84-85 strike. John Robertson, another member of Morpeth Poetry Group, delivered an enthralling dialect poem about striking miners including his father putting out fishing lines from nearby beaches in a desperate attempt to put food on the table. Penny Blackburn considered another group of industrial workers in ‘Night shift at the quarry’. Claire Lynn, pictured right,  delivered an anthology poem about post-strike shopping through the eyes of a miner’s wife, ‘A Small Jar of Coffee and a Packet of Teacakes’, that said so much in just five lines.

Philip Hood lives at Ellington, where Northumberland’s last colliery survived until 2006. He is also a volunteer at Woodhorn museum, and a devoted admirer of the Pitmen Painters, the Ashington group of Northumberland miners who famously got together in the 1930s to learn about art, and whose evocative work depicting life underground is displayed at Woodhorn. Both of his poems celebrate their record of life in a mining community.

Christine Partridge is an artist-poet – “I’m not really from anywhere, I’m from Britain” – who has been visiting a disused mine for around six years, a place where badgers and foxes and “lots of nettles” have moved in. She has documented the changes she has seen.

North-east poets Elaine Cusack and Harry Gallagher spoke of mining disasters. Elaine focused on Hartley pit in Northumberland, where in 1862 a total of 204 men and children died, trapped underground when the beam of the pit’s pumping engine broke and fell down the mine shaft. It prompted a change in the law. Her poem referred to the disaster memorial, “that horrible, beautiful obelisk” with its “identical surnames”. The Wallsend colliery explosion of 1835 in Harry Gallagher’s poem claimed the lives of 102 men and boys.

Julie Brown’s dad worked at Woodhorn pit “long before I was born”. Her poem about the 84-85 strike identified the “the grocer’s daughter, a liar and a thief” as the villain of the piece, who “unpicked the stitches of every coal seam”. Her view of the-then prime minister at the time of the strike, Margaret Thatcher, was not unique at the Woodhorn reading, let us say.

Guest poet Ian Parks had a poem about how they marked Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in the former pit village of Goldthorpe in South Yorkshire, by making an effigy and setting fire to it: “They pushed her in a rusting pram past empty pubs … then wept with joy, the children danced …” He has written a number of poems about the strike, “through the prism of my father’s experience”, including the infamous battle between police and miners at ‘Orgreave’, where his parent came home with “a bloody nose, to show he’d not been slacking in the fight”.

Fellow headliner Joe Williams - nephew of Julie Brown - was born in Ashington and spent his early childhood there. His family moved away in 1985, when he was nine. Although he confessed that he had not been back for a while, he is now preparing a collection of poems about “a town of shadows”, of “pit wheels” and “coal rows”. One of his poems referred to the fact that Ashington colliery brass band played in a long-ago advert for Hovis bread. Another is based on a joke about the Ashington accent that confuses “poem” with “perm”. Another just lists closed collieries, and the number of fatalities at each one. He also has a football poem about Ashington’s three famous sons – Newcastle United’s Jackie Milburn, who worked at Woodhorn colliery, and the Charlton brothers, World Cup winners Bobby and Jackie, the offspring of Milburn’s cousin Cissie.

Tim Fellows introduced the afternoon by reading his anthology poem ‘My Egg’, about breakfasts for the strike pickets: “Beans and tomatoes were free, but you had to bring your own egg.” Afterwards he said on social media that it had been “a fantastic afternoon … the poetry was such high quality, with a variety of voices including a former miner, sons and daughters of miners, fantastic dialect poetry, and a really strong message about the importance of community and the way it's been fragmented. And the architect of that fragmentation was not spared. ‘She who must not be named’ was named and shamed. There was very little love in the room for the former prime minister and grocer's daughter.”

Woodhorn volunteer and poet, Philip Hood, added: “This was such a wonderful affirmative afternoon about the power of community, the importance of an industry which literally fuelled a whole nation, the ongoing need for social justice against unfair political pressure and above all how well all of those elements can be so best expressed in poetry of amazing quality - a privilege to have played a part, but most of all, to have simply heard it.”

Coal-mining in this country was arduous, dangerous, and around the world is still contributing to climate change. But the way in which it was ended in the UK was less to do with environmental factors than with political revenge on people Margaret Thatcher dubbed “the enemy within” – a quote that is highlighted in the museum’s displays.

Perhaps I should mention that I also have a poem in the anthology, ‘The tribe’, based on the remarkable permanent exhibition at Woodhorn of photographs by the late Mik Critchlow. The poem’s final couplet concludes: “You can’t bring it back; / the camaraderie, the crack.” And I’m sure that’s true. But in the reading room at Woodhorn museum on that Saturday afternoon, just across the way from the ‘Coal Town’ Critchlow exhibition, we came quite close to it.

 

NB Crooked Spire Press has issued a submissions call for poems to mark this year’s centenary of the General Strike, for a special issue of its online webzine The Fig Tree. More details