Excruciating death of the "chief burner" at a Durham colliery

The drawers – the men who operated the coke ovens in New Copley Colliery – had filled a railway wagon with coke that had not cooled down.

At 11am, Robert Taylor, 31, the "chief burner", realised that the wagon was about to burst into flames and so jumped onto the tracks to open the bottom doors of the wagon.

“As soon as this was done the hot coke rushed out around his legs and the lower part of his body, so that he could not get out again,” said the inspector’s report. “Help was close at hand, but… he was so severely burnt by this time that he eventually succumbed to the injuries that he received.

“It was deceased’s anxiety to save the wagon that caused him to rush and let down the bottom boards, and not to think of the result to himself. The drawers were to blame for filling the coke up in such a hot condition, and I hope this unfortunate accident will be a warning to them not to do such a dangerous thing again.”

This fabulous picture of Cockfield station appears on the cover of the new North Eastern Railway Association booklet which is available for free download from their website (ner.org.uk). It tells the story of the people who lived, died, and used the station in the first decade of the 20th Century.

READ MORE ABOUT TRACKING THE STORY OF COCKFIELD'S STATION

The station opened in 1853 on the line from Bishop Auckland to Barnard Castle. The photographer is looking through the station towards Barney, and on the left, the tracks lead into the yard of New Copley Colliery which was sunk in 1867 and employed about 250 men at the start of the 20th Century.

The chimneys in the background are all connected to the colliery’s coke ovens – that there is no smoke coming from them suggests that the picture was taken shortly after 1910 when the ovens closed.

Picture courtesy of the North Eastern Railway Association

East Howle in 1966, shortly before the whole village was demolished

STAYING with miming matters, the pit at East Howle, near Ferryhill, closed in 1904 following a horrific incident in which 66 pit ponies were scalded to death underground, but its attached community lived on until it was completely cleared in the late 1960s.

The village of East Howle was in two distinct parts with the Byers Green branch of the Clarence Railway running through the middle of it.

On the railway’s north side were four long terraces, containing a total of 90 houses, which, we think, were called Railway, Station and Pit streets. They would have been built in 1872 when the colliery was sunk.

At the west end of them was a Primitive Methodist Chapel and at the eastern end was a Christian Lay Church.

In isolation across the colliery tracks to the east of the terraces was the East Howle Hotel – the only building to have survived the demolition and now a private residence in the post-industrial countryside.

To the south of the Clarence Railway was another group of terraces, each with seven houses, which were built a little later.

“l lived in Grant Street, East Howle, in 1960 with my family,” says Alan Blenkiron, following last week’s article. “It was on the south side of the railway, where there were about eight short streets going over to Dunns shop at the bottom of the bank.

“l can only remember the names of two of those terraces – Grant and Mason. This part of East Howle seems to be totally forgotten. Can anyone name the others?”