Every family has a story, or two, to tell

In the course of his 70 years, Lee lived in 72 houses, dug in 39 coal seams, worked in 27 pits, and twice upped sticks completely from the Durham coalfield to travel amid foreign mining communities.

He also made a remarkable personal journey, from illeducated brawling drunkard to the first Labour leader of a local authority in Britain.

But throughout his roamings, he remained faithful to his socialist beliefs and his desire to improve the lot of his fellow miner.

His family tree, and life story, is on display next Saturday at Wheatley Hill History Club’s open day.

It shows that his grandfather was killed in a pitshaft in Lancashire, and that his father – known as “Lanky” either because of his Lancashire origins or because he was, like Peter, a six-footer – was a “big hewer”, one of an almost legendary breed of strong pitmen who dug more coal than the others.

Tom “Lanky” Lee was a nomad, flitting back and forth over the Pennines. He may have moved in search of better pay; or the father-of-nine may have moved because he was fiercely against vaccination and so he changed address before the authorities could pin down his babies and jab a needle into them.

Tom’s wife, Hannah, also from Lancashire, was a different kettle of fish. Her grandfather was a schoolmaster, her father a mill foreman, and she was welleducated for a pitwife.

Together, Tom and Hannah had Peter, born in 1864 in the insalubrious-sounding Duff Heap Row, Fivehouses, in Trimdon Grange.

At the age of nine, Peter had finished education and was working as a piecer in a Lancashire cotton mill. At the age of ten, he went underground for the first time with his father at the newly-sunk Littletown colliery, Sherburn Hill.

“Si this is thi forst day, son,”

said a miner as the cage dropped him for his debut in the darkness. “Thoo’s gannin’ intiv a funny place. It’s queer work, pit work.”

AGED 12, Peter witnessed his first fatality, at Pittington, when a lad was crushed beneath a truck; aged 15, he broke his leg down Haswell pit; aged 18, he was fined five shillings by Castle Eden magistrates for brawling; aged 20, he enrolled for nightschool; aged 22, he jacked it all in and went to America.

A late 1920s caricature of Peter Lee

He had an uncle in Pennsylvania and he spent a year working underground in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky.

But disillusioned that pitmen’s conditions were no better in the new world, he returned to his old coalfield in Wingate.

On Leap Year’s Day 1888, he married Alice Thompson, a dressmaker from Thornley.

“My wife took a big risk when she first threw in her lot with me,” he later said. “You should have seen me then – a man in the rough with no education, and a drunkard.”

One day, swigging in the Colliers Arms, in Wingate, he decided there must be more to life than beer and fags, and so gave up smoking, swearingand drinking, and concentrated on his studies.

It didn’t stop him fighting – in 1892, he dislocated his elbow in a punch-up – but it did get him noticed. He was elected as a union official and asked by his fellows to be their checkweighman – the person who, independent of mineowner and miners, worked out how much coal each miner was to be paid for producing.

Despite his growing reputation, something went wrong in Wingate. There was a dispute.

His integrity was questioned.

So, for a second time, he jacked it all in. He went to mine gold in South Africa, leaving Alice with their four young children (his infant, Edwin, died while he was away).

His gold turned to coal and he spent 18 months hewing in the Transvaal, earning enough to journey home via Pompeii, Rome and Paris.

He settled in Wheatley Hill – settled being the right word as he stayed in the village for a record 19 years.

He became a colliery checkweighman, a Primitive Methodist ranter and chairman of the parish council. He concentrated on tackling the inadequate housing of the miners, getting a proper water supply, sewerage system and street lighting. In 1909, he was one of the first Labour representatives to be elected to Durham County Council, and in 1919, when Labour surprised itself by winning the council election, he was the obvious candidate to lead the council.

It was, though, a full-time, unpaid position. Peter, 55, couldn’t afford to take it.

His Labour colleagues proposed that the leader’s post should attract expenses; coalowner Sir Arthur Francis Pease, of Hummersknott, Darlington, regarded Peter so highly that he proposed the expenses should be considerable.

Peter took the job – and only 50 per cent of the expenses.

Mr and Mrs Peter Lee in 1896, when he was in South Africa

His 13 years in the chair coincided with the toughest of economic times. But he improved housing conditions in the county so that infant mortality and death rates fell.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was Burnhope Reservoir, at the top of Weardale , where work commenced in 1931 to provide the colliery communities with clean water.

Another of his achievements is in Wheatley Hill.

When he’d become parish council chairman in 1903, the village dead had had to be carried to Thornley. Peter helped create a local cemetery, which opened in 1907, and where, two years before his death in 1935, he asked to be buried.

He died in his 72nd house in the shadow of Durham Cathedral.

Labour leader Clement Attlee said of him: “He typified the courage, integrity and humanity of the mining community which he served so well.”