Tragic pit ponies – and the valour of Roger the dodger

A DAY as grey as a ghost. Spectres of showers haunt the Ferryhill Gap, drifting down the steep valley and soaking everything in their path.

The horses of East Howle don’t seem to mind, tugging with their teeth at the grass that grows through the black clinkers at their feet. Little do they know that down below, 66 of their kind were horribly steamed to death more than 100 years ago.

East Howle Colliery was less than a mile to the north of Ferryhill at the foot of a very steep bank. It was sunk in 1872 and boomed briefly.

Ferryhill, the Gap and East Howle Colliery. Click on map to enlarge

Within 25 years, it was employing more than 1,000 men. But in less than 35 years, East Howle was shut – and the poor pit ponies were dead.

Standing at the empty valley bottom today, with the rain sweeping through, it is amazing to think this was once a hive of industry.

The colliery had three shafts: the Catherine went 80 fathoms (480ft) down to the Busty and Brockwell seams; the Marian went 40 fathoms to the Harvey; and the Annie was again 80 fathoms deep, and was used for ventilation – a 12ft fan spinning at 250 revolutions a minute providing the draught.

In the colliery yard were 195 beehive coke ovens, each 11ft in diameter. Each oven coked 11 tons of coal a week, the heat generated being used to raise steam which powered the 22 engines on the site.

There were nine kilns, each holding 15,000 bricks handmade from Brockwell clay.

A railway line – the Byers Green branch of the Clarence Railway – clanked through the middle of the scene, collecting the coke and coal and carrying on to the nearby East Coast Main Line.

And the men employed in this industrial hustle and bustle lived in terraces – Railway Street, Station Road and Pit Street – which ran up the side of the bank.

With an Independent Methodist Chapel, an elementary school and a couple of pubs, they formed a community that was used to tragedy. In East Howle’s 32-year working life, 27 men and boys were killed. They ranged from 11-year-old William Henderson, who died on March 27, 1889, when he was “run over by waggons while trespassing on the colliery sidings”, to 70-yearold James Salkeld, who was killed five years earlier in the mine by a fall of stone.

The 66 horses died on September 12, 1903. They were stabled underground, about 20 yards from the shaft bottom, when the catastrophe happened.

A large fall of stone pinned them into their stable and a steam pipe burst.

In an article headlined “Ponies suffocated”, The Northern Echo said: “The poor horses were discovered in a variety of positions, and many had broken loose, and all had evidently suffered very much before succumbing to the hot atmosphere. The pipe that burst is one that feeds the hauling engine and the pumping engine from the boilers at banks.”

The report concluded: “There are upwards of 1,000 men and boys employed at the colliery, and these will be laid idle until the damage caused by the fall of stone is repaired and until fresh ponies can be obtained and sent down.

“The dead ponies were brought to bank during the afternoon and burned.”

The colliery never fully recovered and closed 18 months later. Fortunately for the miners, the coalfield around Ferryhill was expanding rapidly.

The Dean and Chapter Colliery opened in 1904, and by the outbreak of the First World War employed 3,000 men; Mainsforth Colliery drew its first coal in 1910 and within four years was employing 1,600 men, and West Cornforth Colliery was still growing, employing 730 men at the start of hostilities.

But East Howle itself was at the foot of a bank in the middle of nowhere. It declined during the 20th Century along with the coalfield, and the area was cleared in the early Seventies and returned to rough grassland.

Today, only a house called The Tavern hints that once thirsty work took place here.

A few light industrial units, supplied by a busy stream of anonymous vans, occupy the colliery yard, and on the old railway sidings horses munch contentedly whatever the weather.

TWO famous East Howlians: James Dixon “Jimmy”

Murray, born in the terraces in 1887, a mining union official who was elected MP for Spennymoor in a byelection in 1942. He held the seat until Fifties boundary changes turned it into North-West Durham, which he held until 1955. He died in 1965.

And Jack Scott, born in the terraces in 1923, the son of a miner who became a BBC weatherman, appearing on screen from 1969 to 1983, and famed for introducing the magnetic weather symbols. He died in 2008.

BACK up the bank in Ferryhill is Cleves Cross – a nondescript stone that pokes up out of the pavement beside a bus shelter. It is so high above the Ferryhill Gap that the rainclouds seem to scoot along below it.

Once, the North Skerne River – a tributary of the Skerne – used to flow through the Gap, and Durham monks had a fishpond and a swannery down there.

But the nondescript stone above has a far better tale to tell from centuries gone by.

Because, once upon a time, this high ridge from Kirk Merrington to Ferryhill was bedevilled by a “horride brawn” – a fearsome wild boar. It made its home at Brandon (“the brawn’s den”) and it liked nothing better than to rampage through Brancepeth (“the brawn’s path”) on its way to its favourite forest at Ferryhill (which comes from an Anglo Saxon word, firgen, meaning “wooded hill”).

On the thickly-wooded hill, this terrible creature would root and snuffle in the most stomach-churning manner, before descending to the marsh at the bottom of the Gap. There, in the most despicable fashion, it would roll around, as happy as a pig in mud, enjoying “the luxurious pleasure of volutation”.

Knights from near and far tried in vain to slay the formidable brute, but it was too quick for them all and, with luck on its side, it made many fortuitous escapes – it was streaky bacon.

But Hodge, or Roger, of Ferry studied the movements of the porcine purveyor of panic, and tracked its favourite haunts.

Roger knew it liked to come crashing through the trees on the cliff at Ferryhill and so there he devised a fatal trap: a deep pitfall, covered lightly with boughs and turf.

And brave, brave Sir Roger stood on yon side of the pit, armed with his trusty sword, waiting for the appalling creature to reveal itself.

Sure enough, it did, greedily lured to the spot by bait that Roge had cunningly concealed in the trap.

When the boar saw him standing on its favoured path, apparently defying its awesome power, a red mist descended upon it and it charged. Roger drew his sword. “At once with hope and fear his heart rebounds,”

said a poet, desperately trying to dramatise a very thin story. Because the poor old porker plopped into the pit and Roger ran him through with his blade.

And that was that, the end of the big pig of Durham.

How the people of Ferryhill did celebrate. They had been freed from this malign presence that had terrorised their community, filling the minds of children and young women with paralysing dread, for so long.

Amid great cheering, they filled in the pit and, to mark the historic spot so that future generations would never forget the heroism of Sir Roger de Ferry, they placed a stone cross.

Because it was on the cliff above the Gap, it became known as cliff’s cross – or Cleves Cross, as it is today, poking out of the pavement by the bus shelter.

THOSE who know about such things, say Brandon, rather than being the brawn’s lair, is a corruption of “Broom Hill”.

Brancepeth, rather than being the brawn’s path, is more likely to relate to a family called Brant.

Tim Brown, of Ferryhill Local History Society, has not found a reference to the story before Robert Surtees’ history of Durham was published in 1816, even though the brawn was supposedly killed in 1208.

Was it just a product of Surtees’ imagination?

It could be that Cleves Cross marks the high spot where pilgrims got the first glimpse of Durham Cathedral.

DON’T forget to visit the Echo Memories blog at northernecho.co.uk/features.

Following last week’s article, there’s plenty on it about Pierremont in Darlington.

We’re particularly interested in Pierremont’s large fishpond and ice house that was beside the Cocker Beck.

Vera Chapman in her book, Rural Darlington, says: “The Ice House was probably a brick-lined pit built into the steep north-facing bank and shaded by trees to keep it cool. Ice was used for medicinal and culinary purposes, being shovelled in from the frozen pond in winter and rammed to compact it in the put, with perhaps straw to help with insulation. Pierremont was the only Darlington mansion to have one.”

The ice house was roughly where Brinkburn Dene is today. Are there any clues left to its whereabouts?

■ THE DVD Ferryhill – Your Town has been put together by Geoff Wall. It features lots of old photographs and modern film and a commentary about the history of Ferryhill. It costs £4.99 plus postage and can be obtained by calling 01740- 653886 or 01740-652771.

The DVD is dedicated to Ross Greenwell, who lived in Ferryhill for 20 years and died in August 2007, aged 45.