In this episode, we look at the mining heritage of north east England, the Felling Colliery and pit disaster; the four-poster bed tomb of three small children, and the mystery of the other couple commemorated on the memorial.
What You’ll Hear
- 0:58: The mining industry in the north of England
- 1:49: The Felling Colliery
- 2:23: The pit disaster
- 2:55: The four-poster bed memorial
- 4:15: The mystery of who’s in the grave
Listen to the Episode
You’re unlikely to find Felling Pit in a guidebook of the sights and sites of the North East, not least because there’s really not much to see. However, for a country, and particularly a region, which was once thriving because of the mining industry, I think it’s important to mark that part of our history.
I chose Felling Pit to represent that old industry because it’s the nearest one to where I live in Gateshead. It’s also notable for being the site of one of the worst of the colliery disasters which were sadly common.
Many of the families in the local communities of Felling and Gateshead will have had ancestors who worked down there. Most of mine were in the shipyards, an equally dangerous and challenging workplace.
The Dangers of Mines
When we think about mining now, it’s easy to consider it outmoded, and perhaps, for those of us old enough, to remember the miners’ strikes of the mid-eighties (I don’t, for the record!) and the devastating impact the mine closures have had on towns and villages around the UK. They were, though, an important part of life up until fairly recently.
Felling Pit, or Colliery, opened in 1779 and closed in 1931 and was originally owned by the Brandling family. It was also known as ‘Brandling Main’ and had three main pits. According to the Durham Mining Museum website, it employed over 1,000 men and boys at its peak (1914), with the majority of them belowground.
At the time the mine was sunk, Felling was actually part of County Durham, and the pit is therefore one of the oldest in that area. It reached a depth of 127 fathoms, which is 762 feet or 228.6 metres.
There were five explosions at Felling Pit, with the first and most significant occurring in 1812, with the loss of 92 lives. These victims are listed on a memorial at St Mary’s Church, Heworth (with the exception of one, whose body was never found), where the children in the bed are also at rest.
Rather gruesomely, the site also has a list of unnamed victims who were killed through accidents such as crushing, falling out of the cage or down the shaft.
It should be noted that after the Felling Pit disaster, public concern about the dangers of the work led to the invention of the Geordie safety lamp (by local legend George Stephenson) and then the Davy lamp.
Churchyard Memorials
St Mary’s Church has several interesting memorials, and one of the best-known is a memorial to three small children. I first encountered it when I was about five, when my great-grandmother took me to see it, an experience familiar to many people who lived within a few miles of the churchyard.
Not far from the church doors is a tomb, with an elaborate relief of three small children tucked under the covers of a four-poster bed. My great-grandmother intended it to serve as a dire warning of what might happen if I ever took a lighted candle to bed with me.
Protesting that the only time I went anywhere near a candle was on a birthday cake was futile. And also ironic, because as it turns out, the children immortalised here didn’t burn to death either.
So, while the children definitely died (you’d hope so, otherwise it would be pretty weird to erect a tomb!), the reason for the bed was to show that they ‘were at rest.’ Who doesn’t love a genteel euphemism?
And we know they didn’t die in a fire, because their dates of death cover six years in the early 1700s.
Nevertheless, it stands as a loving tribute to a father’s grief at the loss of his infant children.
Still, the truth never gets in the way of a good story, with at least two supernatural claims attached to the tomb – that if you get too close, you hear the children screaming (more likely impressionable toddlers terrorised by elderly relatives into believing they’ll meet the same fate). The other is that if you dance around it three times at midnight the children will join in.
However, things get confusing when you look a little more closely at the inscriptions. The bed is a memorial to three Haddon children – William, George and an unnamed (or indecipherable) sister. Joseph Haddon was apparently a stonemason, so probably made the monument himself.
On the other side, though, is a dedication to a John Makepeace and his wife Jane, who died some hundred years later. Why was this? Is John a descendent down the female line? Digging about, I couldn’t find any explanation for this, including on the church’s own website. I’m hopeful that someone will have an answer for this – if you know, please get in touch!
As an interesting aside, the elaborately-patterned cover draped over the children is designed to mimic the Durham Quilt, which is made from one piece of material. The pattern is applied with stitching. They differ from other quilts because the inner wadding is made from cotton. The earliest quilt dates to around 1708, in Cumbria, so not long before the tomb was erected.
This episode was inspired by a blog post I wrote for my Time Pieces History Project on the same topic, and one about the Haddon and Makepeace tomb, which you can read here.
Leave a Reply