Harry Mead recommends a poetry book that deserves a place in every Durham home

There’s only one fault with the marvellous little book Brandon Pithouse: no Introduction or Preface. That leaves the reader initially puzzling over both the format and the contents. There are scores of short poems, many of them more prose than verse. Often several to a page, they describe the experiences of miners and their families in County Durham. But why do some, though not all, have a name attached? Sid Chaplin, JB Priestley and one or two other noted authors also appear. What is the poet’s precise role in relation to the whole concoction?

Worry not. John Seed explains all in a ‘Postface’ - a Preface oddly placed at the end. He says: “What I have done is to trawl through hundreds and maybe thousands of pages of printed sources – books, parliamentary reports, newspapers, magazines. I’ve also worked on source materials via many websites… and I’ve transcribed bits of recorded interviews for radio and television… From all this material I have selected bits and pieces that attracted my attention.

“I had no plan, no idea of what I was looking for… I then cut, rewrote and spliced the material together in various forms – prose, verse of various kinds, with punctuation, without punctuation, arranged on the page in various ways. And with no outline or narrative or theme in mind I shuffled and reshuffled this material.”

The result is a small, inexpensive book which, given just one sale in the former Durham coalfield, seems certain soon to be in every home there. In fact, since coal for centuries defined the county, if not shaping it all, the book deserves a place in every Durham home.

Using largely the miners’ (or, since this is Durham, we should say pitmen’s) own words, Seed captures graphically the hardships and dangers of mining and the special closeness of the mining communities. One poem reads: “and me back was catching the roof/making scabs down yer back/ called pitman’s buttons/. It would heal over the weekend/ and you would go in and knock them off on the Monday.”

Because of its near-exactness to the original, which explains the occasional credit, Seed attributes that to Tom Lamb. Other reworked source material reads much the same – e.g: “sinkers at Blackhall in 1909/ for their wives and families/ built huts out of/ packing cases on the beach banks/ at Blackhall Rocks there were still/families of pitmen in the 1930s/ living in huts on the beach/or caves.”

Cold and official, the infamous Category D document, condemning numerous pit villages to death, is quoted: “This generally means that when existing houses become uninhabitable they should be replaced elsewhere…” From a miner’s memories of the impact Seed gives us: “in 1969/we got the compulsory purchase order…/to ‘the reservation’/had happened.”

A particularly moving prose-poem is inspired by a pitman’s account of the punitive treatment of Durham miners during a prolonged winter strike of 1810: “delegates meetings were hunted out by the owners and magistrates/ mass meetings on the moors dispersed by troops/ many arrests the Old Gaol and House of Correction at Durham were soon overcrowded some were held under armed guard in the stables of the Bishop of Durham a Christian gentleman/ families were evicted from their cottages and turned adrift in the snow…”

Sid Chaplin’s contribution is his suggestion that “most Durham mining villages were, in fact, camps, and they were put down as camps.” JB Priestley railed at the “monster” tip at Shotton: “I thought of all the fine things that had been conjured out of it in its time: the country houses and town houses… the carriages and pairs, the trips to Paris, the silks and jewels, the cigars and old brandies…” He could accurately have concluded: “Not forgetting the Bowes Museum and all its rich contents.”

Though spanning the entire coalfield, Seed’s book is titled as a nod to forebears who worked at Brandon pit. But he emphasises: “Brandon Pithouse doesn’t claim the status of ‘History’… I sometimes rewrote my sources and interjected material of my own.” He also insists it doesn’t “aspire to ‘Poetry’.”

Yet it’s both – highly original and utterly engrossing. And of course the 1984 strike finds a place: “for three days police marched through the village/Gwent police/ police from Northampton/ I never thought I’d see scenes like this in Britain I never thought I’d/ see what I’ve seen on the streets of Easington/ we’re occupied we’ve been occupied by the police…”

Founded in Middlesbrough, but now based in the distinctly less smokestacky environs of Grewelthorpe, near Ripon, Smokestack Books has published nothing better than this. Yes, very definitely, every County Durham home must have one.

Brandon Pithouse by John Seed (Smokestack Books: smokestack-books.co.uk, £7.95)