AS the Second World War drew wearily to a close, the council in east Durham announced plans to sweep away old colliery slums and replace them with 800 council houses to be built by its own labour force.

In Wheatley Hill next Saturday, the local history club is holding its annual open day which will focus on life directly after the war.

Those were very different days. Not only did councils build houses, not only did they have their own direct labour organisations, but the Durham mining communities were thriving, their centres full of shops and pubs, their males almost to a man employed in the pit.

Easington council set itself the target of building 800 houses to replace the slums that had been thrown up when the pits were first sunk 100 years earlier.

The Northern Echo:
RAILWAY HOMES: Old carriages in Wheatley Hill which were lined up and used as homes for people during the Second World War

The Northern Echo:
MINERS' HOMES: Louisa Street, Wheatley Hill

In January 1947, the council unlocked the front door of the 75th house it had built in Wheatley Hill, and invited the newspapers to inspect it. The house was in Liddell Terrace. It had three bedrooms plus a downstairs parlour which could be used as a fourth bedroom, and all the mod cons: a convector air heater taking warm air to the bedrooms from the range, a calorifier providing hot water, even a built-in wireless aerial.

The Durham Chronicle reported: “A novel arrangement is that rainwater falling on the roofs is collected in a storage tank built into outbuildings and provides soft water on tap at the laundry sink.”

Such green credentials were decades ahead of its time.

However, a couple of months later, the Chronicle heard a whisper that housewives in the new houses were “in rebellious mood” and re-visited them. It learned that they had been living in the new council homes for four months, “and whilst they are modern in every detail, electricity has not yet been laid on, with the result that householders are becoming more and more discontented as the days go by”.

Although these were very different days, some problems were still the same.

The Wheatley Hill club’s open day runs from 10am to 1pm in Wheatley House. Beamish Museum will be exhibiting a 1950s kitchen and living room, there will be live 1940s-1950s music on the piano, and a stall of 1950s rockabilly gear plus tea will be served on retro crockery.

The Northern Echo:
POET: Gladys Bromilow

There will also be a chance to buy a copy of the club’s new booklet, which is a collection of poems written by the late Gladys Bromilow. She was born in Pitt Street, in neighbouring Thornley, in 1925, and lived all her life in the village. In her poems, written with east Durham phrases and rhythms, she tells of life in the mining communities that have now disappeared.

MY GRANDA 
My granda was a dear old man, he lived to eighty four
With his clay pipe and his cracket, he’d sit outside the door
He had an old melodeon, when he’d had a drink of beer
He often played and sang for me, songs of yesteryear
He’d sometimes take me on his knee to tell me of his youth
He taught me how to say my prayers, to always tell the truth
He used to take me by the hand on a sunny Sunday morn
To show me things I’ve treasured like a lamb that’s just been born
His patience never faltered when teaching me right from wrong
He wiped my tears of childhood years and helped me to be strong
When my shoes needed mending, by brothers and sisters too
He’d take out his last and hammer to make them look like new
He always had black bullets in an old and battered tin
He also had an old cracked pouch he kept his baccy in
I’ll never forget my granda, such a fine old man was he
And I know he will be happy wherever he may be 
Gladys Bromilow