Black Diamond anniversary

SIXTY years to the day since the underground explosion that ripped away 83 lives, Easington Colliery will solemnly, sombrely remember on Sunday.

The memorial garden will be rededicated by the Bishop of Jarrow, a service of remembrance held in the Church of the Ascension, a sixth miners’ lamp – one for each passing decade – blessed around the rows of pitmen’s graves.

In the Welfare Hall there’ll be an exhibition of banners, in the evening a concert that will include a song newly written in the miners’ memory.

Lest we forget? “I think that Easington is still very aware of it all, you come across it all the time,” says Chris Pearson, the Anglican priestin- charge.

“It’s very much a living memory, not history. I think it’s the tragedy of it that lingers on, linking the community to the mining age. There is no indication in Easington Colliery that it will ever be forgotten.”

The blast happened 900ft below ground at 4.20am, fore shift and back shift changing over in the Duck Bill area of the Five Quarter seam, the men perhaps discussing their fancy for the following day’s Derby.

Sparks from cutting machinery had ignited firedamp, bringing down 120 yards of roof and sending a fireball searing through 16,000 yards of workings. Entombed beneath rubble lay men from Alnwick Street and Attlee Street, from Bevan Street and Butler Street, seven alone from Oak Road.

The dread alarm sounded over the dawning village, wives and mothers throwing coats over their night clothes to hurry to the pit head, every roused collier dashing, desperate, to see how he might help.

Save for 18-year-old Matthew Williams, carried unconscious to the surface, but who was to die a few hours later, their mates were beyond help. “Hope recedes for stricken pit,”

said the headline in the following day’s Northern Echo. The day afterwards, Thursday, the knell tolled.

“There is now no hope of the 62 miners entombed underground at Easington Colliery being rescued alive…”

It was the worst disaster to hit the Durham coalfield for 42 years, since 168 men perished at West Stanley.

TWO and a half thousand miners worked at Easington, one of the biggest and most productive pits in the region. Working in two-hour shifts – the longest time that was safe because of the risk of being overcome – men from 12 rescue brigades tried in vain to reach their comrades.

“A miner described conditions underground as looking like an atomic bomb had dropped,” the Echo reported.

“While rescuers toiled underground, the people of Easington Colliery stood praying above.”

Among the missing were John and Billy Kelly, father and son, the younger Kelly called into work just hours before. Jock, his greyhound, joined the crowds at the pit head, ears cocked as if awaiting news.

Tommy Parkin, the first man to move into the nearby Peterlee new town – given a silver key by local MP Emanuel Shinwell – was also unaccounted for.

Shinwell, the Minister of Defence, had cancelled all engagements to hurry back north. The Bishop of Durham came from Auckland Castle.

Also among the crowd was Frank E Franks, the music hall entertainer, who had come to live in Easington.

By 9.45 on the Wednesday evening, Durham NUM president Sam Watson was telling the crowd that he would be failing in his duty if he did not suggest that hope of rescue was beginning to fade.

“Involuntarily the crowd gasped and Salvation Army girls hurried to be of aid to wives with young children in their arms who could no longer contain their grief.”

As darkness fell, the Durham divisional chairman of the NCB talked of needing a miracle. The vigil went on for three days, the last body not found until June 14.

Easington Colliery never got its miracle.

TOM Noble lived to tell the tale.

The night previously he’d had a few drinks in the Black Diamond, concluded that he’d had a bad pint – the euphemism survives, too – announced when his brother came knocking in the early hours of May 29 that he was too sick to work.

Hours later, Bob Noble was dead.

London-based songwriter and musician Graeme Wheatley, Tom’s grandson, has composed the memorial song – also called Black Diamond – with Geoff Grange.

The Blue Bishops, travelling and performing free, will sing it at the Welfare Hall on Sunday evening. It will also be played over the weekend on BBC Radio 2, while the band also has a gig at Hogans, in Victoria Road, Darlington, tomorrow night.

Tom Noble proved a brilliant granddad, took young Graeme hunting for pirates’ treasure on the black beaches, for bears in Crimdon Dene – “oddly enough, I never saw any” – and walking and climbing in the Lakes.

They remained close. On Graeme’s last visit, he recalls, he just walked in through the back door – “my granddad’s back door had never been locked since the day the house was built” – and instantly resumed the relationship.

“We had a little chat while he smoked his Woodbines, he asked if I was behaving myself – I was 30 years old, old habits die hard – and then let me take him up to the Black Diamond, where he’d been that night all those years ago.”

Tom disappeared inside. Graeme looked at the lump of coal where the sign might have been, gazed around his old home, decided that the story should be written down.

His granddad never heard it. “It’s a shame because when he’d had a few he quite fancied himself as Bing Crosby. I’m sure he’d have sung along.”

He arrived back in Easington on Tuesday, walked the Avenue of Remembrances where 83 oak trees represent the dead, gazed once more at the memorial. “The memorial is spotless. No one would dare to disrespect the memory of the heroes who died,” says Graeme.

The pit closed in 1993. Easington’s quieter, some would say eerier, now.

No sign of the colliery remains.

“I don’t think my granddad felt guilty about what happened, but he certainly felt lucky,” says Graeme.

“God knows it was a horrible job and he confronted death every time he went down there.

“It was just a reminder of how close life and death were in the collieries. My granddad dodged the bullet.”