Smoke, noise and dirt has gone, yet much still remains

SOUNDS make up early memories. The rattle of metal couplings on a warm afternoon, a steam train like a live thing, gathering itself to haul a load.

- Hilton Dawson

Newbiggin Colliery miners in the 1950s

Then, the creaking of wood in an iron frame, gravity makes the coal shift and move. Or, stood outside on a cold, starlit night, with the empty wail of the colliery buzzer marking the turn of the New Year.

I am who I am. Like a million more, even my bones were formed out of the movements of this history.

Mining families come to live among fishing families, come from Scotland or Cornwall or elsewhere, or leaving the countryside in search of a better life. They came from County Durham to Northumberland in their thousands, from Kelloe and Haswell and Sacriston and a hundred more.

Drawn by the promise of work, housing, better money, a chance for your family. Overlooking the wrenching hard labour and that there's even more danger down in the dark than out on a wild sea.

Bringing their own way of life, their people, their ideas of working people standing up for each other.

Supporting Sunderland over Newcastle, with not so much time for the Duke of Northumberland.

These days, some scare themselves silly, with talk of being 'invaded'. Those days, between 1891 and 1911, over the course of two decades, the fishing village of Newbiggin by the Sea population 1579 became a mining town of 3,466.