Last updated 13:38, Thursday, 08 May 2008

They always appear in photographs or grainy old films as a group of men walking solidly towards the cameras. They wear old jackets and waistcoats and mufflers, their heavy boots are caked with sludge and their flat caps are planted firmly on their heads, sometimes at a jaunty angle and their faces are grimed with coal dust.

Flat out: ’Older boys would work like beasts of burden pushing and pulling over-loaded wagons of coal up inclines towards the shafts’

The Great Northern Miners by Ken and Jean Smith. Tyne Bridge Publishing. £12.95

These are the miners, as we now remember them, returning after a long shift, 10 or 12 hours in the damp darkness underground.

In the north east, the coalfields of Northumberland and Durham, their mark is everywhere. The old spoil heaps, where they have not been bulldozed, grassed-over, are now benign, no longer the disfiguring mountains of yesteryear; the winding-gear, occasionally left standing as a tribute to the industry that dominated everyone’s life; the crammed, cramped terraces in their regular streets and the scatter of sheds on the allotments. And the memorials, so many of them, spread throughout the coalfields to the men who were killed.

In Easington 83 died; 38 men and boys were killed near Newcastle in the Montagu Pit disaster of 1925. A dark picture shows the crowd assembled below a carapace of black umbrellas standing in front of the still smoking chimney as they await the funeral of the men that have died. One hundred and sixty eight men perished in the explosion at the West Stanley Colliery near Durham in 1909. Their memorial is a pit wheel that has been stilled forever.

If death was ever-present for the miners cutting and heaving coal beneath the green fields of Northumberland and Durham, the work itself was never easy. A hewer would lie on his side wielding a pick-axe against the stubborn rock face.

A trapper was defined as “a little boy whose employment consists in opening and shutting a trapdoor when required” albeit he remained in the eerie stillness of that dark place.

Other, older boys would work like beasts of burden pushing and pulling over-loaded wagons of coal up inclines towards the shafts, or they would load and struggle to manoeuvre massive baskets of coal called corves.

The coal had been worked since Roman times. The 19th and early 20th century was marked by disputes between the men and the coal-owners, men like the third Marquess of Londonderry whose statue still stands in Durham Market Square.

But the miners had their champions too. There was Tommy Hepburn, who, because, he fought for miners’ education, was victimised and forced into poverty after the 1832 strike. He is still remembered today in an annual service at Heworth.

Peter Lee became a coal hewer when he was in his teens but rose to be chairman of Durham County Council in 1919 and did much to improve the quality of life for the people of the Wheatley Hill area. His was a remarkable achievement for a working man and the new town of Peterlee is fittingly named after him.

Another champion was the poet, Joseph Skipsey. His father was shot by a constable when he tried to defuse a disturbance between the police and strikers. The family were reduced to abject poverty, living on nettle broth and the odd slice of bread. Joseph became a trapper at the age of seven, spending up to 16 hours a day in the darkness of Percy Main Colliery.

The resolution and determination of generations of miners was displayed in the fine banners they wove to celebrate their unions and communities. Despite great hardship, they were proud people who created their own distinctive culture.

This well-produced book is a celebration of their history. It takes us from those early days of naked flames lighting the dark tunnels to the high-tech cutting equipment of the 1980s, through the great lock-out of 1926 to the final great strike of the 1980s.

Old engravings and watercolours reveal the desperate working conditions of the 19th century and a fine array of photographs tells something of the physical courage and endurance of the miners. The book is a fine tribute to an indomitable community of people.

The Great Northern Miners is available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and from www.bookscumbria.com