NEVER COULD I bring myself to sing a mining song, a lad from the Cheviot hills who had worked many a harvest and lambing season. What did I know of mines and the life of a miner? Mining songs were not for me.

Folk song brought me to Birtley, and I became a regular at the Elliott’s club in County Durham for a couple of years before coming to Yorkshire, but still no mining song could pass my lips.

But something has worked within me, perhaps because I learned of the working conditions of miners, the dangers, their community life and not least their fierce independence despite their harsh treatment.

Oakey Evictions at the strike

Eviction by the owners

The mining song, Oakey Evictions describes the bitterness when families were put on the street at the evictions by the coalmine owners:

...... the maisters,
And I think they should think shame,
Deprivin’ wives and families
of a comfortable hyem.

and I can’t help feeling the bitterness of miners when the owners brought in miners from outside to break the strike:

Across the way they’ll stretch a line,
To catch the throat and break the spine,
Of a dirty blackleg miner.

But the turning point came - when I could feel a mining song. At the end of Pete Elliott’s funeral service Colin Ross played Rap-at-er-Bank on the Northumbrian pipes. We all rose, and spontaneously joined in singing those powerful words as we slowly filed out from the crematorium.

Symbolic song: Rap ’Er T’ Bank

End of the working life of a miner; End of the mining industry.

This song for me not only describes the end of a miner’s working life, but had come to symbolise the death of the mining industry.

Me father used to call the turn,
When the lang back-shift was ower,
Gannin’ out bye, you’d hear him cry,
’D’ye knaa it’s after fower?’

THE MINERS RAPPED WITH THEIR PICKS on the metal shaft to signal they were ready for the cage to be wound up to the surface.

At first I couldn’t understand “gannin’ out-bye” because in the Cheviots that means to go out on the moors, away from the homestead.

But in the mines “gannin’ out-bye” means coming back ‘out’ of the mine to go home. The language of the shepherd in the mine must have come from farm laborours coming to do pitwork.

And then the awful day arrived,
The last shift for me father,
A fall of stones and brocken bones,
But still above the clatter, he cried

Rap ’er t’Bank, me canny lads
Wind her reet slow, thats clever,
This poor old lad has taken bad,
Ill be back here never!

But mining has its dangers, and shocking it is to our ears that children worked in the mines, women too, and the eye-witness accounts of accidents in 19th Century pits, and pits they were - full of danger.