Easington Colliery - Past and Present.

Easington Colliery Pit Disaster 1951 (when I was 14).

In 1936 I was born at Easington Colliery in County Durham. It was my home base until 1963, although between 1954 and 1956 I was pulled away to undertake my National Service in the RAF, mainly in Basra in Iraq. After then settling back in Easington I later became an adult student being away from home during term times between 1960 and 1963. I then married and although my wife Ann came from nearby Shotton Colliery, we moved to Yorkshire then Derbyshire. But my parents continued to live at Easington until their deaths in 1993 and 1999 with my wife, myself and then our two children regularly visiting them.

The Easington I remember was a vibrant community, living a coherent if often harsh communal life based fully on the operation of its coal mine. For apart from quarrying and farming, little had existed in the area until the pit was first sunk in 1899. Then the initial progress was slow as much of the coal to be extracted came from under the sea. It took until 1910 before coal was finally extracted and the community then expanded and developed.

Life drew almost entirely from Easington's mining operations. When teachers, shop-assistants, railway workers, doctors and others moved into the area they did this essentially to service the mining community. Communal facilities grew mainly to meet the needs of miners and their families. There came to be a Miners' Welfare, a Workingmen's Club, Pubs, a wide range of Churches and Chapels, Colliery Houses, Age Miners Homes and Council Houses, a Welfare Park with its main football ground opened by Ramsay McDonald when he was the local MP and Prime Minister, annual cricket contests for made-up local teams and at one time three cinemas with long queues especially at the Rialto on a Sunday evening and for children's programmes at the Hippodrome on a Saturday morning.

The social bond was added to by important helpful social responses to the harshness of pit life. On top of numerous mining injuries, 192 men and boys where killed in the pit starting with a sinker in 1900 and ending with a power loader in 1991. With 83 being killed in the pit disaster in 1951. My father only surviving because he was in a different seam from the explosion.

Yet in spite of the tough nature of mining life; miners, their families and others providing commercial and social needs helped to build important social bonds. Here is an important article which I have just come across which shows the serious social decline which has hit the Easington Colliery community since the pit was closed in 1993 - https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2018-05-08/25-years-on-pit-villages-worst-fears-realised/

And whilst coal mines can't function for ever, action needed (and still needs) to be taken to ensure that the communities they helped to build are preserved, re-built and improved. For there are alternative avenues to coal mining.