IS it really only 30 years since Bearpark Colliery heaved its last?

Barely 20 since County Durham closed the coal house door?

It seems another lifetime, a different and a more dangerous age.

They held a service to mark the closure anniversary, the parish church packed like a back shift bait cabin.

Even the Bishop of Durham had to budge along a bit.

Bearpark’s a couple of miles west of Durham City, though it was the colliery and not the cathedral which for 112 years was the inescapable focus of community life.

The pit was sunk in 1872, the first coal won – the verb “won” is always used in such accounts, though not without a hell of a struggle – the same year. It closed, exhausted like many of the workforce, on April 6, 1984.

At peak production, more than 1,000 toiled down there. About 70, men and boys, were killed, though the figure didn’t include victims of black lung, nor the other potent perils of the deep.

Their names are listed in the order of service, solemnly intoned during it. The youngest was only 13 and the oldest 64; the first was George Hunter in 1874 and the last, Gary Mills, in 1978.

Many died under falls of stone, some caught in the machinery.

Durham Mining Museum archives tell of a miner who simply “strained himself”, another whose heart gave out “due to the nature of his occupation”, a third who fell 21 fathoms down the shaft.

Now just about the only visible remnant is a finger post, indicating Bearpark Colliery like the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, pointing inexorably towards the grave.

Church official Susan Eggleston tells those assembled of Henry Carter, her greatgrandfather, said in 1903 to have “slightly injured” his hand in a stone fall. Soon afterwards he went “raging mad”, tried to cut his own throat and was removed to the asylum in Sedgefield, where he died the following year The inquest ruled cause and effect, the compensation board decreed no connection. Susan is emphatic. “The pitmen, the village and the family always blamed the accident for his death”

THE Bearpark and Esh Winning Coliery Band is squeezed in, too, beginning proceedings with what might be termed Big Meeting music. They also accompany Gresford, the miners’ hymn, lachrymose as an instrumental and yet more moving with words.

There’s a reading from The Northern Echo the day after the closure, the remaining workforce only 71 and the great miners’ strike into its fourth week. “Bearpark was always a real family pit, a close feeling,” said Jordan Laing, the lodge secretary.

We sing Abide With Me, too, hear a reading from the Book of Job about men who explore the deepest depths, hear at least twice that they went down as boys and came back as men.

The Right Reverend Paul Butler, Durham’s new bishop, re-dedicates the restored plaque to the colliery’s dead, notes in his sermon that, unless five or more were killed in an incident, it wasn’t officially a disaster.

“Each accident was a disaster for the men and boys and their families.

In Bearpark, there was disaster after disaster. We all know that working in the pit was rough, hard graft. It was never glamorous, but it created camaraderie and friendship. It was an entire way of life.”

The band closes the service, the congregation applauding as they leave. Like Bearpark Colliery, clapped out.

IT’S an occasion simultaneously sombre, spiritual and social and for me serendipitous, too. In 17 years of the At Your Service column, 1994-2011, St Edmund’s, in Bearpark, was the only church which featured without my setting foot inside.

We got the time wrong, the Lady of the House insisting that a 900-word column was based entirely on the contents of the notice board. It was unfair; we also revealed that the carving of St George in the chapel at Windsor Castle was said to have been based on Lillie Langtrey.

Better late, Canon Robert Lawrence, the vicar, is happy again to extend a welcome. Old habits, we sit, scumfished, by the radiator. “Just be sure,” says Canon Lawrence, “that you remember it’s three o’clock”.

BY 4.15 they’re gathering down the road in what now is the community centre, but which many still call the Institute. The spread, quite wonderful, would cover the Great Bed of Ware.

There are old photographs, scrapbooks, myriad memories – even a special real ale, “brewed in the beer mines of Co Durham”, to mark the occasion.

John Corker – John George Corker, since it’s Sunday – swears that he left school at half past three and at four o’clock was signing on at Bearpark pit. He worked there for 31 years, had two accidents, spent long months in traction at Maiden Law hospital and finally ended up on light work.

“I had to go back, I had a family.

It was a job, wasn’t it? A lot of men didn’t have one. They were very bad conditions, thin seams, often lying in five or six inches of water with more water falling on top of you, but when it got mechanised it was a little bit better.

“It was a good pit, though. Births, deaths and marriages, we all looked out for one another, We helped one another. I think if I had my time over I’d do the same again. I had some good mates down the pit.”

OTHERS echo similarly mixed feelings. Clearly, the village has changed, but for the better? “It was closeknit, you knew everyone. Now I don’t know half of them,” says former miner Kevin Chicken.

“Down the pit you trusted everyone. We got transferred to Wearmouth, Sunderland, and it wasn’t the same. The shipyards were closing, they felt that we were robbing their sons of their jobs.”

Both Jordan Laing and Harry Nixon, the last lodge chairman, have surfaced, too. Harry says he wouldn’t go back if they paid him £1,000 a day, Jordan’s not so sure.

“It was a good pit, a happy pit. We had hard times, but we had a job. In a funny way, we enjoyed ourselves.

“I think it destroyed the village at the time, when the colliery went everything went with it. There were a lot of men displaced. It’s recovered a lot now, a nice place, but there’s still no work for the young ones.”

Jordan also recalls the fatalities, recalls how men on the same seam would be lowsed out (freed) after an accident, but still be expected back next day.

After a death in 1957, they were refused permission to take a shift off to attend the funeral, went anyway and had their wages docked. “The manager still protected our bonuses.

Bearpark was like that, a bit of give and take.”

Another 70 deaths? “It wasn’t really a bad record,” says Jordan.

“Seventy in 112 years.”

It seems like another lifetime, a different and a more dangerous age.