Last Women of the Durham Coalfield (eBook)

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THE DESTINY OF
WORKING-CLASS GIRLS

There was never any doubt that Bella Jopling would marry a pitman. Daughters born into coal mining families in the early 1900s were destined to marry men from that industry, and it was only in exceptional circumstances that it didn’t happen. It was the expectation of families in the coal industry and always had been. In turn, coal miners liked to marry girls brought up in the mining community because they knew what to expect. The price of coal dominated their lives. Coal owners were obsessive about sending cheap coals for export and a low selling price meant they would have to make economies elsewhere, which was usually at the expense of the miner and his family. Mining families knew how much the coal sold for and realised that profits were more important to the owners than their workforce. It was just one more of the drawbacks of life in a mining village, added to poor-quality housing, a lack of interest from landlords, who were the private coal owners, low rates of pay, poor working conditions for the men and long strenuous hours for the women. In addition, a wife had to be ready and willing to support her husband at times of industrial unrest. Marrying a girl who wasn’t used to the coal industry was asking for domestic trouble as far as the miners were concerned.

Bella’s family had a long association with the Durham coalfield that could be traced accurately back to the early to mid-eighteenth century in the old coal areas of Ryton, Washington and Chester-le-Street, and even though there were more opportunities for girls benefitting from a compulsory education by the time they left school in 1916, most mining families would still expect their daughters to marry a coal miner. A girl’s training to reach this eventual goal began from a very early age, was overseen by her mother, and covered every aspect of household management. Bella was the first of her parents’ children to be born in the twentieth century – January 1902 – a time of great hope for the Durham miners, who had been exploited for generations. After years of struggle to unionise, the Durham Miners Association had been in operation since the 1870s, and although change was slow, the miners felt it was bound to be sure. The mining families of the Durham coalfield certainly believed that the twentieth century would bring about improvements to their lives, both at the pit and at home.

Bella was born and brought up in the smallest of the colliery villages belonging to the Weardale Steel, Coal and Coke Company at Ludworth, County Durham. Since the early days of its pit in the 1830s, this village had received terrible reviews for its housing, sanitary conditions (or lack of them), water provision and sewage disposal. This negativity had been a feature of life in Ludworth during the lifetime of Bella’s grandparents and parents, and was much worse during her time growing up there at the turn of the twentieth century. From time to time sympathetic outsiders visited the County Durham colliery villages – William Morris in the 1880s, Sidney and Beatrice Webb in the 1920s, J.B. Priestley in the 1930s and Mark Benney in the 1940s. Despite their visits being many years apart, all described the conditions as bleak and dreadful, and while there is no record of any of them visiting Ludworth, it was not much different from other villages and much worse than most. Even at the time Bella was growing up, road and transport links to Ludworth were almost non-existent, and to visit the neighbouring village of Thornley it was necessary to walk along the railway line. Only a cart track linked the village with its other near-neighbour, Shadforth; however the people who lived there, like Bella, had a different set of values and they didn’t see it as an outsider would. Bella loved being part of the village and its close-knit community where everybody knew everybody else, and didn’t seem to notice the drabness of her surroundings.

Bella’s parents were respectable people, brought up to follow Victorian traditions, and both had lived in Ludworth for most of their lives and were well thought of. Her granda, Will Jopling, had owned a property in North View and ran a general dealer’s shop from his front room. Her great grandparents, Jack and Annie Jameson, were the licensees of the top house – the Ludworth Inn – at one time, and while this might not be seen as a mark of respectability by some people, it was a sign that they could make a success of running to business in a very small village with fierce competition from a further two public houses.

On her mother’s side, Bella’s grandma, Hannah wasn’t talked about much, but Bella knew she had been a dressmaker and later ran a hardware shop from the front room of her privately rented house in Margaret Street, Ludworth. From what little she knew of her grandmother, it seems that she and Bella’s mother had had a falling out, but Bella wasn’t aware of the circumstances. She did know that her granda had gone to Australia looking for work and that her mother, Susan, was born while he was away and didn’t meet him until she was 7 years old. Susan used to tell her daughters of the children her mother lost to TB and of the tough time she had while her da was away, when it was necessary for her to work on a farm and carry out dressmaking tasks in order to make ends meet while bringing up her children, but still finding the time to help with fundraising during the building of the Primitive Methodist Chapel at Ludworth. These were the parts of her mother’s life that Susan was prepared to share, but she was very vague about the rest. Susan was very good at being vague. One thing that was often mentioned about Hannah, however, was her dislike of anything to do with alcohol and all it stood for in the colliery village. This was an attitude carried on by Bella’s mother, Susan, and subsequently her daughters, including Bella herself.

Bella’s sisters had been like little mothers to her as she was growing up, as they were 14 and 11 when she was born, and she had a very happy childhood in the small mining community where neighbours became extended family. From an early age, children in the colliery villages learned to live with death – the deaths of elderly people that they knew well, deaths caused by accidents at the pit, deaths of children from illnesses that could not be cured and accidents inside and outside the home. However, Bella’s first direct experience of death in the family came in 1914 when she was 12. Her niece, Marion, the second eldest daughter of her sister Rachel, died of whooping cough. Bella was devastated. She couldn’t understand why a lovely, previously healthy 2-year-old should die from a bad cough. She saw the effect it had on Rachel, her husband Bob and also on Marion’s sister Nora, only 6. She never forgot little Marion’s funeral at St Cuthbert’s Church, Shadforth. Bella witnessed first-hand how her family supported her sister Rachel at this awful time and this was a further indicator, if she needed one, of how important family was.

Even at the time Bella started school in 1907, education for girls was still seen as unnecessary by some coal mining families, who felt their daughters’ time would be better spent learning from their mothers how to run a household in readiness for marriage to a coal miner. However, the school at Ludworth was well-attended and Bella received an adequate education for a girl of her generation and class.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the small colliery village saw some of its menfolk going off to fight, and those who stayed behind in protected occupations continued to work at the pit. Whatever happened to the men always affected the women. If there was a strike at the pit, the women had to carry on feeding their families with less money and therefore less food. If a man was injured at the pit, his wife became his nurse and carer, a task taken on alongside her already heavy workload. If her man was killed at the pit, she had to find alternative accommodation within two weeks, with perhaps no money to pay her rent. So, when some men went away to fight in the war, the priorities of the women changed. A wife didn’t have to work around her husband’s shifts at the pit and make food and baths for him coming and going, and she received wages more regularly from the armed forces than she did from the coal owners. However, the fear for her husband’s mortality was always on her mind, whether he was at the pit or fighting in a war.

The Jopling family unit joined forces in 1914 when Bella’s sister Hannah became very ill after giving birth to son Norman in June that year. The illness became so bad that Hannah spent spells throughout the coming months in the Royal Victoria Infirmary at Newcastle. Bella, her mother, and sister Rachel rallied round to help Hannah’s husband, Jack. They looked after the elder child, Leslie aged 4, while caring for the baby between them, and when Jack Grainger joined the Durham Light Infantry in 1915 and was therefore unable to help with childcare, the family took the extra responsibility in their stride.

Despite doing well at school, which meant that Bella could read, write and do her sums, employment for girls of her age from the colliery villages centred around the skills they learned from their mothers, which were based on homemaking and service – either housework or shop work. The training received at the hands of diligent mothers stood the girls in good stead to be effective servants in the homes of the better off. They were taught that being able to run a clean,...