There
are signs of ancient times all around us in and around Easington
District. At Warden Law, alongside the Seaton to Houghton road, there
are two tumuli or prehistoric burial mounds, each surmounted with a
crown of trees, an eerie sight in the moonlight. Between them runs
Salter’s Lane, an ancient highway, the A19 of its day, which carries
on to Haswell, Wingate and Teesside. There are other tumuli in
Easington district and the Castle Eden Vase and other prehistoric
artefacts confirm that man has been here for many thousands of years.
Fertile soil and the ready availability of fish and shellfish must
have made this land an attractive proposition to early humans.
Much later Easington district was
incorporated in the Roman Empire along with the rest of England but
there are no visible signs in the district of this long lost
civilisation. As the Romans departed in the 5th. Century AD new
invaders took their place and the whole of the county of Durham
eventually became part of the Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, whose
capital was York. Many of the place names in Easington District are of
Saxon origin - Seaton (‘township-by-the-sea’), Seaham
(‘hamlet-by-the-sea’), Murton (‘moor-town’), Cold Hesledon and
Hesleden (‘hazel-dene’), Easington (Essyngtana, place of Essa’s
people) and Haswell (‘hazel-well’).
Eventually the monarch of the
southern Saxon kingdom of Wessex, Athelstan (grandson of Alfred the
Great), established himself as the King of All England in the early
part of the 10th. Century. By then there was a new and extremely
dangerous external enemy with a habit of turning up in some numbers
anywhere along the coast to cause mischief and destruction. These were
the Northmen and Easington district was in the frontline of the
defence against them. The oldest structure in Easington District today
is St. Mary the Virgin church at Old Seaham, which may date back to as
early as AD 800. If this date is even more or less correct then the
church and village were sited in a very dangerous and vulnerable
position for those troubled times. The later siting of Easington
parish church high on a hill overlooking the German Ocean may well
have been a precaution against a surprise attack by Vikings.
Sheer distance from London meant that
the far north of England, frontline against the Scandinavians and
later the Scots, was usually remote and detatched from the affairs,
personalities and events which shaped the nation’s history. Few of our
sovereigns came this way or knew much about the North, preferring to
delegate authority to the Prince-Bishops of Durham. One definite
exception was the Conqueror himself, who rampaged through the county
in his infamous ‘Northern Expedition’ to avenge a Saxon rebellion
against him. He laid waste the northern shires to such an extent that
there was no point in including them in his later Domesday Book. The
population of County Durham took generations to recover from this
genocide. The Conqueror’s grandson King Stephen (1135-54) was a
usurper who dragged the country into a dynastic civil war over the
throne. The Scots took advantage of the 20 year anarchy in England to
seize the whole of the north of the country. They were soon driven off
by Stephen’s energetic and undisputed successor Henry II (1154-89).
Henry’s son of infamous memory, King John (1199-1216), passed through
our county in his seemingly endless wars with the baronage.
Seventy years and more passed before
the next royal visitor to the county, King Edward I (1272-1307),
grandson of John, a man with a mission to unite all of the island of
Great Britain. He simply passed through on his way to massacring the
population of Berwick and temporarily imposing his will on the south
of Scotland. His inept son Edward II (1307-27) was defeated by the
Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314 and obliged to flee south for his life.
For the next decade Scots armies terrorised the northern counties. On
at least two occasions they penetrated as far south as Hartlepool,
ruining the village of Dalton-le-Dale and many others in their
passage. The son of the Bruce, David II, took advantage of Edward
III’s war with France to try to repeat the performance in 1337. Once
more East Durham was ruined but the King of Scots was eventually
brought to book in the battle of Neville’s Cross and became a prisoner
of the English Crown. There was to be no further serious trouble from
rampaging Scots for 300 years and East Durham once more reverted to
the role of backwater in the affairs of the nation.
Salter’s Lane and the Great North
Road at Durham were the slender threads which connected Easington
district with the commerce, ideas and technology of the outside world
but the highways also regularly brought pestilence to counterbalance
those advantages. At the end of the 1340s Britain was decimated by an
epidemic of bubonic plague which originated in the Far East. Perhaps
as many as a third of the population of Europe may have died in this
and later outbreaks of what was called ‘The Black Death’. Easington
district was particularly badly affected and the survivors had to trek
west to buy food from the dalesfolk whose isolation from other humans
had saved them. Food and money were left on special ‘Plague Stones’,
some of which still survive in Weardale and elsewhere.
The ‘Rising of the North’ in 1569 was
intended to remove the Protestant Elizabeth Tudor from the throne and
replace her with her imprisoned heir the Catholic Mary Stewart, former
Queen of Scots. It was crushed and its principals fled into permanent
exile, leaving the commoners to their fate. Elizabeth demanded a quota
of executions from each participating district and for this reason two
Easington men were selected and publicly hanged on the village green.
At some later point in the reign of Elizabeth all of the churches and
clergymen of Easington district became Protestant. Eventually most of
the population, wanting only a quiet life, also saw sense and
transferred their religious allegiance from Rome to London.
The childless Elizabeth was succeeded
by her distant Protestant cousin James VI of Scotland (only child of
the Queen of Scots) in 1603 and the two countries were united in a
personal union. This seemed to have brought a sensible end to the
perpetual Scottish threat to the northern counties of England but it
was to prove an illusion. James’s successor Charles I soon involved
himself in a conflict with both Parliament and Presbyterian Scots
which led to a three-way civil war. As so many times had happened
before the Scots took advantage of English disunity to occupy
Northumberland and Durham. Royalist, Scottish and Parliamentary armies
chased each other round and round the northeast of England for several
years and Easington district was ruined once more. Even in the 1650s,
long after the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the
Commonwealth, Dalton-le-Dale was without a parish priest and there is
a huge gap in the parish registers. He had either died and not been
replaced in the turmoil or he had simply fled. Charles II was restored
in 1660 and normality soon resumed at Dalton-le-Dale and elsewhere.
The northeast was not directly involved either in the Glorious
Revolution of 1688-89 or the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 for Charles
Edward Stuart chose to invade England from Scotland via the north-west
route through Carlisle and Lancaster. He retreated the same way to
meet disaster at Culloden in 1746.
Down the centuries after the Conquest
the various manors, estates and labouring serfs within Easington
district changed hands many times, sometimes by outright purchase,
other times by inheritance or marriage. As the countless generations
of labourers tended the fields they cannot have guessed that the
greatest harvest of all lay far beneath their feet. Other than the
churches none of the mediaeval structures in the district have
survived to the present day, though there are ruins at Dalden Towers
(near Dalton-le-Dale) and at Ludworth which lies just outside the
modern boundaries of the district. Ancient churches stand at Old
Seaham (c. AD 800 ?), Dalton-le-Dale (c. AD 1150 ?) and Easington (c.
AD 1100 ?). Another (c. AD 1134 ??) stood derelict at Monk Hesleden
but was mysteriously and inexplicably demolished by the Council one
day in 1968. At Castle Eden there is an 18th. Century church
constructed by the local landowners, the Burdon family. No new
churches or chapels were erected until the first coalminers arrived to
transform and populate the empty district in the early 1830s.
In 1801 the total population of
County Durham was just 150,000. Over a third of these people lived in
the ancient towns of Hartlepool (1,047), Barnard Castle (2,966),
Stockton (4,009), Darlington (4,670), Durham (about 7,500), Gateshead
(8,597), South Shields (with Westoe about 11,000) and Sunderland
(about 18,000). Even that great metropolis of the far North,
Newcastle, just across the Tyne in Northumberland, had only 30,000
inhabitants at the beginning of the 19th. century, little more than
Greater Seaham has today.
The rest of the county of Durham, not
just the high ground as now, was as empty as some parts of western
Ireland are today. The tiny communities which together made up what we
now call Easington District had just 2,310 souls in the year 1801,
about the same as modern-day Wingate. Almost the smallest of these
minute and ancient agricultural communities was the scattered
‘constabulary’ of Dawdon (22 people in two farmhouses) in
Dalton-le-Dale parish, destined to become the collosus of the district
(as Seaham Harbour) until being itself eclipsed by the new town of
Peterlee in the 1960s.
The eastern half of the Durham
coalfield, upon which Easington District is situated, is concealed by
many hundreds of feet of Permian magnesian limestone. The powerful
steam engines required to drain deep mines did not exist until the
early 1820s. As the third decade of the nineteenth century dawned
technological advances had been made which made it possible at last to
investigate just what lay under the rolling limestone hills of East
Durham. At Rainton, four miles west of Seaham, coal is just below the
ground. A few hundred yards away to the east at Hetton, at the start
of the limestone escarpment, the coal is several hundred feet below
the surface. It was there on December 19 1820 that the new machinery
was put to the test.
Deep mining was an entirely new,
dangerous and expensive business, far beyond the financial means of
most coal owners, and necessitated the creation of a large company for
the purpose, the Hetton Colliery Company. Whilst digging proceeded the
famous engineer and pioneer of steam engines, George Stephenson, began
construction of a railway from the pithead at Hetton to Sunderland in
March 1821. The new line, the first in the world to be designed to
use locomotives, was some 8 miles in length and ran to the Hetton
Company's own staiths on the river Wear, where coal could be loaded
directly on to large vessels, thus missing out a number of middlemen
at Penshaw and on the river. The excellent publicity received launched
the Stephensons on to even greater things, as the world knows. More
importantly for the history of County Durham, coal was found
at the Hetton Lyons Blossom Pit sinking, at 650 and 900 feet, in seams
six and a half feet thick! By 1832 Hetton Lyons and its two sister
pits Eppleton and Elemore were annually producing 318,000 tons of coal
worth £174,000, and the combine was the largest mine in England.
Hetton Colliery and its railway proved that 900 feet of limestone,
water and quicksand and a large hill (Warden Law) blocking the way to
Sunderland were not insurmountable obstacles to the exploitation of
the rich reserves of coal and that achievement did not go unnoticed.
Before long others, such as Lord Londonderry, Lord Lambton (1st. Earl
of Durham), Lord Howden and Colonel Thomas Braddyll of Haswell, would
enter the arena and the tapping of the deeply concealed Durham
coalfield began in earnest. Their target was the tranquil idyll of
Easington District.
Below you will find the population
figures for Easington District in the first four censuses of the 19th.
century. The large and sudden increase in the population of Dawdon in
1831 was due to the foundation of the town and port of Seaham Harbour
three years before. The rise of the population at South Hetton and
Haswell in the same census was caused by the sinking of the first two
collieries in Easington District. Once these had begun production
(1833 & 1835 respectively) and proved they were viable the stampede
into East Durham was on. By 1841 Thornley and Wingate collieries were
also in production and four other pits were being sunk (Murton,
Shotton, Castle Eden and South Wingate). By the time of the 1851
census Seaton and Seaham collieries (later amalgamated as ‘Seaham’ in
1864) were being sunk. All of the then existing 8 collieries in
Easington were on the western edge of the district for the technology
did not yet exist to contemplate even deeper mines on the coast.
No new collieries were sunk in the
decade 1851-61. In fact the district experienced its first pit closure
with the collapse of South Wingate Colliery in 1857. In 1869 the
sinking of Wheatley Hill commenced and this was followed a year later
by two other new ventures at nearby Deaf Hill and Hutton Henry.
Wheatley Hill was severely handicapped by under-capitalisation and
went bankrupt at least twice before the turn of the century but
eventually proved itself. Shotton Colliery closed in 1877 and became a
ghost village for the next 23 years until it was reopened by the new
Horden Coal Company in 1900. Castle Eden Colliery folded in 1893,
Haswell in 1896 and Hutton Henry in 1897. The 20th. Century saw the
opening of the coastal super-pits at Dawdon, Easington, Horden,
Blackhall and Vane Tempest and the creation of new mining communities
in East Durham.
TOP
Apart from these fixed habitations
there is evidence of transients living on the East Durham beaches and
sometimes occupying the numerous caves along the rugged coastline. The
Portsmouth Telegraph of October 14 1799 reported thus:
Woman from the Seashore
‘On Thursday se(ven)’nnight a woman
was brought to the Lunatic Hospital near Newcastle who has lived
upwards of three years among the rocks on the sea-shore near Seaham.
From whence, or in what manner she first came there is unknown, but
she speaks in the Scottish dialect and talks of Loch Stewart and
AberGordon in a rambling manner. She is about thirty-five years of
age, inoffensive and cheerful, and during her residence among the
rocks was fantastically dressed in the rags which chance or the wrecks
threw in her way; she always kept a good fire of wood or coal, which
the sea threw up, and it is supposed lived upon shellfish & c. What is
remarkable, a beard has grown upon the lower part of her chin, nearly
an inch long, and bushy like the whiskers of a man.’
Until the mid 1840s County Durham was
divided into the following wards:
1. (NW and North), Chester (le-Street)
Ward, (included Bedlingtonshire, Norhamshire and Islandshire, now
parts of Northumberland).
2. (East), Easington Ward
3. (South East), Stockton Ward
4. (South West), Darlington Ward
Two settlements were considered large
enough and important enough to run their own affairs - Durham City and
Sunderland Town. For historical reasons connected to the Palatinate
(abolished 1836) County Durham included not only three areas of
Northumberland but also several other small enclaves in other
neighbouring counties, such as Craike, near Easingwold in Yorkshire.
Easington Ward was clearly
much larger than Easington District is now and included such
far-apart places as Bishopwearmouth Panns, Penshaw, South Biddick,
Lambton, West Rainton, Pittington, Sherburn, Coxhoe, Kelloe and
Trimdon. Virtually a quarter of the county. The population of the
entire old Easington Ward in 1841 was about 24,000.
October 1 1844 was the date the new Act of Reorganisation took effect
(Act of 7 & 8 Victoria. C.61), rationalising the ancient boundaries of
the counties and removing many of the strange and archaic anomalies
(such as Bedlingtonshire and Craike) that had existed. Thereafter the
new district of Easington assumed more or less its present
shape and size (Greater Seaham, Murton, Cold Hesledon, Hawthorn,
Easington Village, Thorpe, Castle Eden, Monk Hesleden, Nesbitt, Hulam,
Sheraton, Hutton Henry, Wingate, Deaf Hill, Wheatley Hill, Thornley,
Shotton, Haswell and South Hetton). The population of the new
district in the census of 1841 was only 15,491. In 1801 the same
area had just 2,310 people.
Chapter
2, The Collieries
Easington District Collieries in
Chronological Order
|
Colliery |
Duration |
Known
owners before Nationalisation in 1947 |
Major
Disasters |
|
1. South
Hetton |
1833-1982 |
South
Hetton Coal Company |
|
|
2.
Haswell |
1831,
1835-96 |
Haswell &
Shotton CC |
28/09/1844
(95) |
|
3.
Thornley |
1835-1970 |
John Gully
& Partners |
05/08/1841
(9) |
|
4.
Wingate Grange |
1837/40-1962 |
Lord Howden
& Partners |
1906 (26) |
|
5.
Murton (initially known as Dalton New Winning) |
1838,
1840-1991 |
South
Hetton CC |
15/08/1848
(14)
21/12/1937
(4)
26/06/1942
(13) |
|
6. South
Wingate (also known as Hart Bushes Colliery or Rodridge
Colliery) |
1840 (?) -
1857 |
Milbank ?? |
|
|
7.
Castle Eden (also known as the Maria Pit or Hesleden Pit) |
1840-93,
1900- ? (as a pumping station only) |
Wilkinson,
then
Horden CC |
|
|
8.
Shotton |
1840-77,
1900-72 |
Haswell &
Shotton CC,
Horden CC |
|
|
9.
Seaton/Seaham
(‘The
Nack’ pit) |
1844/49-1983
Merged as
‘Seaham’ in 1864. ‘Amalgamated’ with Vane Tempest 1983 |
North
Hetton & Grange CC and Londonderry Colls. to 1864, then
Londonderry alone |
1852 (6)
(Seaton)
1864 (2)
(Seaton)
1871 (26)
(Combine)
1880 (164)
(Combine) |
|
10.
Wheatley Hill |
1869-77,
1878-84, 1890-1968 |
Hartlepool
CC to 1884, and then Weardale Steel, Coke & Coal Company |
|
|
11.
Hutton Henry |
1869 (?) -
1897 |
Milbank ?? |
|
|
12. Deaf
Hill |
1870 (?)
-1967 |
Trimdon
Coal Co. |
|
|
13.
Seaham Dawdon |
1899-1991 |
Londonderry |
|
|
14.
Easington |
1899-1993 |
Easington
CC |
1951 (81 +
2 rescuers) |
|
15.
Horden |
1900-87 |
Horden CC |
|
|
16.
Blackhall |
1913-81 |
Horden CC
(??) |
|
|
17.
Seaham Vane Tempest |
1923-93 |
Londonderry |
|
|
18.
Hawthorn Shaft |
1959-93 |
NCB |
|
NB: Hawthorn Shaft was not a colliery in
the strict sense of the word. Coal was transported there underground
from Elemore, Eppleton and Murton collieries and then raised to the
surface for onward shipment by rail. The closure of the three feeders
meant the end for Hawthorn Shaft too.
NB:
Castle Eden Colliery closed for good in 1893. The site was reopened in
1900 but only as a pumping station to assist the drainage of the new
coastal super-pit at Horden and the newly reopened Shotton Colliery.
Collieries and Censuses
|
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Collieries or connection
with
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‘Dormitory’ for Seaham &
Murton collieries
|
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Dawdon 1899-1991, Vane
Tempest 1923-93
|
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Seaton/Seaham 1844/49 - 1983
(merged 1864)
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‘Dormitory’ for
Seaton/Seaham after 1850
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‘Dormitory’ for Murton
Colliery after c.1885
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