Dale Robinson was a miner at Ellington colliery in Northumberland. It was known as The Big E, extended out under the North Sea, and was the last pit to close in the area, as late as 2005. He worked there from 1977 to 1986, and said he only started writing a year ago: “I’ve been digging up these feelings from inside. It’s lovely to share all these things with everybody.”  

Dale was speaking at Woodhorn mining museum, near Ashington, at the launch of a quarterly open-mic event titled Coal Town Poetry, where poets turned up to celebrate, mourn, and mull over coal’s history and heritage, and the places it left behind. The event was inspired by the success of an anthology launch earlier in the year at the museum to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike. 

As his parents listened in the audience, Dale, pictured right, recounted how he was recruited at Ellington at the age of 16, and that his “marra Keith” from all those years ago was also there to hear his words today. He became emotional as he read lines like “coal had no future. Who knew? Not us” and “I played my part. I was a miner, right from the start.” 

He read a second, remarkable poem, ‘Ghost Train’, packed with arresting images about “all the gear left behind” at Ellington, underground and, indeed, under the sea, to moulder away when the pit closed, including a train that took men out to work under the waves: “That train has permanently left this station.”  

Later he told me that he left Ellington pit “to chase my dream of becoming a professional superbike racer … didn’t get to where I hoped, but travelled the world and had some decent results (and crashes) whilst trying very hard”. He started his own Harley-Davidson shop, and  eventually managed a London-based motorcycle group with several stores in the south. With his wife he launched a luxury house building company, before being hit by a financial slowdown. “I’m now head of a Californian motorcycle company and manage the UK dealer network for them, so still involved in motorcycles, which is a passion of mine.”

Dale added: “I find it relaxing to compose and my mind can’t relax until I have it in the bag … The mining poems bring back so many memories from my family who for generations have been miners. My mum had hoped I would have broken the link and was disappointed when I went underground. But to see her face on Saturday afternoon when I was speaking about my experiences was wonderful, she felt it.”  

A second former miner of greater vintage, Andy Rutherford, pictured left, told how he was first invited underground in 1943, at the age of seven, to see what it was like. Ten years later, at the age of 17, he started work at Backworth colliery in North Tyneside. He stayed in the industry until the late 1970s, when he left because “I saw the writing on the wall”. His poem, ‘From drift mines and bell pits’, told the history of the mining industry, “from its inception to its demise in the 1980s and 90s”. Lines like “jam sandwich for bait, and glennies [safety lamps] for light” were delivered in a ringing, confident voice, and, like Dale’s, received a deserved ovation.  

Other poets read poems that resounded with love and pride about their miner fathers. Clare McAndrew’s dad was one of the last winding enginemen at Woodhorn colliery, where the museum now stands amid signs of old railway tracks and much of the surviving surface buildings and equipment. Clare said she was “of the age” to remember two strikes, in the 1970s as well as the 80s, and food parcels, donated, as her mother said with a wink, “from Russia with love”. As a young girl she had coloured in the lettering on a placard, and one of her poems ended: “The miners were not ruffians, but had manners, and were mild.” 

John Robertson, son of a miner, insisted that “there were never any good old days”. There was always “trouble” in his pit village, and the ever-present worry that one day their dad might not come back from work. He grew up in a period of strikes, his father had bouts of TB, and they lived in the shadow of the Broomhill pit heap, its “silhouette like some scabby face”. Nowadays the Druridge Bay area close to the coast is a country park: “Years ago it was very different.” He delivered his poems about ‘The Strike’ and the pit heap in almost a roar of urgent, authentic dialect. 

What of the communities left behind by the demise of coal? Lauren McCarthy, pictured right, was born in Ashington around the time of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, but only learned about it from her father years later during Covid. He went down the pit at 15, worked at Ellington colliery for over 20 years, and left in 1989 to pursue a career as a carer. 

She conceded that her home town - once known as ‘the biggest pit village in the world’, but now dismissed with the nickname ‘Ashghanistan’ - has, or certainly had, a bad reputation. But after returning from university, and now raising a family there, she has looked at it in a new light: “I don’t say it’s down … it’s up and coming.” Her poem ‘Forgotten’ combines her love of the bridge over the nearby river Wansbeck, “a spine of girders binding me to place”, with her acknowledgement that her home is “a land not dead, just forgotten”. 

Frankie Mulholland, from nearby Lynemouth, said the pit closures did not have a “ripple effect” on local communities, but a “tidal wave”. She read a poem about Queen Victoria reportedly having the blinds pulled down as she passed through Newcastle on the royal train - “feverish at the blackness of industry”- and another, ‘Ammonite’, about the treasures to be found among dug-out coal. 

Amble-based Ali Rowland read a poem called ‘Two Lives’, comparing the life of a woman walking past a National Coal Board recruitment poster with that of Margaret Thatcher -”she claimed to speak from one housewife to another”. Her poem is based on a photograph in a permanent exhibition at Woodhorn museum by the late Mik Critchlow. The exhibition is called Coal Town, from which this poetry event takes its name. Ali’s poem is included in an  ezine she’s just published called Always Banging on About Politics. 

Mark Gregory read a poem based on a 1960s BBC documentary about the Durham coalfield, and another about Yorkshire’s Kellingley colliery. Rosemary Thompson, whose partner worked down the pit but left after two colleagues were killed in separate mining accidents, talked of the inhalation of coal dust as a “new form of Black Death”. She celebrated energy-generating wind turbines - “near us, we have a windmill feast” that “sounds like waves on a shingle beach”.

What Cathy Greenhalgh, from Lancashire, likes about the north-east is that “coal people are like cotton people”. There was a reference to the “Dogger marshes” - the long-lost Doggerland engulfed by the North Sea -  in her sea-coaling, shoreline poem. 

Open-mic is as it says on the tin, and poems that weren’t about coal still received a good reception. Roy Matthew Heath, from Hull, whose grandfather was a miner and “made a promise that none of his children would go down the pit”, had an evocative poem about the ‘Mud of the Humber’ that referenced his city’s long-gone fishing fleet. 

Elaine Cusack, whose grandfather was a miner in Gateshead, delivered a poem about a long-gone Northumberland asylum, now a housing estate and a pub, and an ‘erasure’ poem which involved taking most of the words from Wonderwall by Oasis - this year’s National Poetry Day theme is Wonder - and finding a new kind of meaning from what was left. Poems by Penny Blackburn and Fi Betts were also well received, as was a Geordie dialect poem by Steve Flanagan about nose-picking! 

Philip Hood summed up the dilemma of southerners like himself - and me: “As an incomer, there’s a terrible sin called appropriation … you write about things that you don’t really know about.” But that hasn’t stopped him from volunteering at Woodhorn museum, and writing about the famous Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters, whose work is displayed there. 

As for me, I contributed a couple of poems at the start, about Ashington’s football club, and its passenger railway, restored 60 years after being axed by Beeching. 

Perhaps, as local Lauren McCarthy believes, things are looking up at last. And if Coal Town Poetry can help in any way towards a communal restoration of pride … all I can say is that it was an honour and privilege to compere such an enthusiastic gathering of poets. Our next event is on Saturday 12 December at Woodhorn museum, which has staunchly supported this venture, when our guest will be Blyth and Ashington MP, and former miner, Ian Lavery.  

 

       Poets and audience at Woodhorn museum

 

 

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