Tackling Chimney Bank

As this is the weekend of the Tour de Yorkshire, how about on Britain’s steepest public road?

The Echo’s pioneering photographer Douglas Jefferson had captured motorbikes and sidecars tackling a dangerous hill climb – “the track is only a foot from the edge”, he wrote on the back – which we suggested was in the Yorkshire Dales.

Lots of people pointed out the error. It was the North York Moors. For instance, columnist Harry Mead wrote: “The location is Chimney Bank, Rosedale, which is a noted hill climb and is seemingly still a roughish track when the photo was taken.”

Harry adds: “Evidence that the picture was not taken in the Yorkshire Dales is the hedges dividing the fields.” In the dales, of course, it would have been stone walls.

In places, Chimney Bank has a gradient of 33 per cent – or 1 in 3 as it used to be known – and so is known to cyclists as “the chain-breaker”. In just under a mile, you climb 173 metres (or 568ft), and only the most superhuman of cyclists can do it in less than ten minutes.

Coming down is probably even more dangerous – which is why there is a sign at the top instructing cyclists to dismount.

The bank gets its name from a 100ft chimney which was built in late Victorian times as part of the ironstone mines, and railways and tramways, of Rosedale. The mine closed in 1929, but the chimney stood on, a well known landmark, until it was demolished on July 28, 1972.

More on the Jefferson pictures next week.

MEMORIES 278 asked about a rumour that Newton Cap colliery, on the outskirts of Bishop Auckland, had once featured in a television documentary, with the pitmen bribed by the TV company’s offer of chicken legs to take part.

Harry Wilson of Witton Park not only knew about the film but played a brief part in it – “if you blinked, you missed it,” he says.

The Thames TV documentary was broadcast on January 21, 1975, and was part of the This Week investigative news series which ran from 1956 to 1992. Its famous presenters included Ludovic Kennedy and Jonathan Dimbleby, and its most famous episode was Death on the Rock, screened in 1988, which was about the shooting of three IRA men on Gibraltar by members of the SAS.

Newton Cap starred in an episode called This Week 1844 which was a re-creation of appalling events that took place in the Durham and Northumberland coalfields in, as the name suggests, 1844.

The North-East miners were attempting to form a union to stand up to the coal owners. When the owners refused to acknowledge such a thing, all 40,000 men and boys walked out. The owners evicted thousands of strikers and their families from the colliery homes, and recruited blacklegs from Wales and Ireland to replace them. Huge public meetings, the forerunners of the gala, were held – 40,000 are said to have gathered on Shadons Hill at Washington, and 10,000 in Bishop Auckland.

Lord Londonderry – the man on the horse in Durham’s Market Place – became the hate figure when he not only banned shopkeepers in Seaham Harbour from extending credit to striking miners, he forbade shopkeepers from selling food to them for cash. So not only was he driving his former employees out of their homes but also driving their families into starvation.

After 18 weeks, with thousands of people without food, the strike began to up in mid-August 1844, culminating in a mass brawl between thousands of English, Welsh and Irish men at Seaton Delaval in Northumberland.

It was this drama that the television programme sought to reproduce.

“Newton Cap was chosen because it was the only colliery which resembled an 1844 pit,” said Harry, who was the last putter at the pit when it closed on July 25, 1975.

“Thames TV brought a double decker bus to the site as a canteen and put chicken legs on because we had to stay back on the Friday night to help them get the lights in the pit so they could film over the weekend.”

Harry and a couple of others were engaged as extras, and had to dress up in 1844 clothing.

The stars of the show were Roger Avon, Gordon Frith and James Garbutt, and when it was screened, it was considered controversial. It appears not to have been repeated.

KEEPING on with the colliery theme, June Luckhurst writes from Ingleton on the edge of Teesdale. She spent some of her childhood in the Willington and Crook area where she picked up a dialect poem or story that she is now trying to remember.

It begins something like:

“The pitmans sorvice out of the grit read hymn buke.

Them that hasnt got hymn bukes look on with them that has.

Blar blar ye bugles but for heaven sake all bla together.”

Who can tell us what this is from and what the next lines may be?

IN October, the Caparo forge in Hartlepool closed after 76 years – very sad for the 79 people who lost their jobs due to the worldwide steel crisis.

It was also sad for the history of the North-East, because Caparo was the last survivor of the Head Wrightson group of engineering companies which, based at Thornaby, played a huge part in Teesside’s engineering.

Caparo was formed as Head Wrightson Stampings in Seaton Carew in 1939, and as it changed hands, it regularly changed names, but was always locally known as “Heads”. Indeed 12 of the 79 who lost their jobs had been with the company since it had been in the Head Wrightson stable.

Items retrieved after the closure are on display at Hartlepool library until May 6. They include a 1903 catalogue and the Stampings’ one millionth forging – an ash tray.

The exhibition, which will appeal to all HW aficionados, is open from 10am to 6pm on weekdays next week after the Bank Holiday.