Blackhall Colliery

For a pub blog, the inclusion of Blackhall Colliery in County Durham is an odd choice. Although the village has a population of around 3,000, it currently has only one pub. I have included Blackhall because it is part of North East England’s rapidly-disappearing industrial heritage and because it was a village I knew well as a child - I attended the Infants and Junior schools there and my father taught at Blackhall Senior school in the 1950s and 1960s.

Blackhall Colliery is a former mining village on County Durham’s North Sea coast, but 100 years ago there were only a few scattered farms in this part of the county. After the mine was sunk in 1913, a new ‘modernised’ colliery village was created within a few short years. By 1920, there were around 500 houses, shops and other buildings.

Blackhall Colliery is connected by rail to Horden to the north via a spectacular brick-built viaduct. This crosses Castle Eden Dene, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a National Nature Reserve, at Denemouth. The railway was completed in 1905. This photograph was taken in 1993.

A Blackhall Colliery back street in 2007. Note the outside coalhouses and toilets, now all converted to sheds.

There were four classes of houses built in Blackhall Colliery, ranging from the Class 1 terraced houses with four rooms, two up and two down, plus wash house and kitchen, to the Class 4 houses which were far more spacious and were designed for the colliery officials. All houses had outside earth closets and a coalhouse. Sites were set out for a hospital, a church and vicarage, a theatre, a Working Men's club, a school, a park with bandstand, and two hotels/public houses. There was, however, a complete lack of imagination when it came to naming the streets. The rows of houses were named ‘First Street’ to ‘Eleventh Street’ and the main road through the village was called ‘Middle Street. There was also an ‘East Street and a ‘West Street’.

The Hardwick Hotel, on the imaginatively named Middle Street, is the only remaining pub in Blackhall Colliery. It was built in 1914 by Nimmo’s brewery of Castle Eden.

The Hardwick Hotel in 2007. Note the delicate metalwork to either side of the central window advertising the brewery which commissioned the building.

Castle Eden Brewery in 1987

Castle Eden Brewery was founded by John Nimmo in 1826 and remained independent until it was sold to Whitbread in 1963. Brewing ceased in 2002 and most of the buildings were demolished in 2003. In 1968, I had a Christmas job here working in the bottling section. I can’t recall much about my time at the brewery, other than my boss who was a ferocious woman we called ‘Lily the Pink’ after a current pop song. This dreadful woman would launch into a verbal attack every time a crate of beer fell off the conveyer belt.

The Chimneys Guest House in 2007. Built in 1925, this building was originally a pub known as the Blackhall Hotel, or locally as The Trust, after the company who constructed the building.

Blackhall Secondary Modern School in 1993. My father’s classroom was the left hand section of this prefabricated building. The school was closed at the time these photographs were taken, in 1993, and was subsequently demolished.

Blackhall Secondary Modern School, Science Room, 1993.

After school, my father would occasionally bring my brother and I here and show us all sorts of scientific tricks. We learnt how to clean pennies using dilute nitric acid, how to blow glass into interesting - but wholly useless -  shapes, the wonders of a Van de Graaff generator, how to repair a valve radio, how to make gunpowder and, best of all, how to make nitrogen triiodide.

My father, teaching in the 1960s. This lesson was not part of the curriculum.

In 1963 my father organized a visit to the colliery for the older lads in his class. Most would be leaving school at 16 to work in the mine. Although I was only 13 and my younger brother was 11, he arranged for us to join the party. The concept of Health & Safety was not well established at the time. The descent in the cage below ground, the journey to the coal face by conveyer belt and on foot and the realization that we were several hundred feet below the North Sea, are experiences I will never forget.

This photograph shows my junior school class sometime in the mid-1950s. I am the young lad in the middle of the crowd.

Blackhall beach in 1986, three years after the coal mine closed. Coal waste had been tipped at sea along this coast for many years producing an eerie, unearthly landscape. This beach featured in the final scenes of the 1971 British gangster film, ‘Get Carter’ starring Michael Caine.

In 1986, the sea along this coast was still throwing up coal waste.

Blackhall beach in 1993. Much of the coal waste has already disappeared and, following a major clean-up project at the start of the millennium in which 2 million tons of waste were removed, the coastline has now returned to its pre-industrial state.

I’d like to complete this post with a well-documented, but nearly-forgotten, tale of a local sea monster. In 1850, four people, including Mary Burden of Castle Eden, independently reported seeing a sea-serpent off Blackhall beach. At first sight, Miss Burden thought the creature to be a whale – she had seen some previously in the North Sea off Tynemouth – but when the sea creature reared out of the water and displayed two coils before swimming away at speed, she took it to be a sea serpent.

This may be the reason people refrain from swimming in the North Sea. Then again, it may simply be the temperature of the water.