A hill with history

Next Saturday, Wheatley Hill History Group holds its annual local history day. Pride of place among the stalls, exhibits and working engine will be 12 new banners that the group has created.

Entitled Coal Under the Limestone, the banners tell of the area’s history from pre- Roman days to modern times.

Here are a couple of tales that the banners touch upon: The Wheatley Hill Ring THERE are several piles of stones near Old Wingate, to the south of Wheatley Hill, which are ancient barrows, or burial places.

One is a Neolithic long barrow, from a few thousand years BC, and another is a Bronze Age round barrow, from a few hundred years BC. There is speculation that because the barrows are so close together, Old Wingate had some special importance in pagan times.

But indisputably, in Wheatley Hill itself, when the foundations of 53 Woodlands Avenue were being dug in 1993, an Anglo-Saxon ring was discovered.

It was made in the late eighth Century from silver. It has three bosses rivetted to it which once would have been filled with gems. Only one gem remains, made of red glass.

The ring is one of only a handful known in the country with a runic inscription on it.

The ancient runic alphabet was in use in this country until the spread of Christianity brought the Latin alphabet in the seventh Century. There were 33 letters, or runes, in the runic alphabet. Most of them comprised horizontal and vertical strokes.

On the Wheatley Hill ring, in between the concentric circles, with a little imagination you can see that it says “ring ic hatt”. This translates as “ring I am called”.

From whose finger the ring fell 1,200 years ago we shall never know, but it is proof that a human was on the hill long before coal became king.

The runic inscription on the eighth Century ring

The Trollopes of Thornley Hall SEVERAL ancient farms are dotted around Wheatley Hill. Rock Farm, in the centre of the village, has a display of its own next Saturday. It is a 16th Century manor house which has grown out of a medieval long house – a single storey barn, with people living one end and animals at the other.

Perhaps the most dramatic history belongs to Thornley Hall, which dates from Norman times. For 200 troubled years, it was home of the Trollope family.

Andrew Trollope of Thornley fought bravely in the War of the Roses under the Duke of York, until he swapped sides and became a Lancaster commander.

He was killed at the Battle of Towton in 1461.

Another Thornley Trollope, John, made his will on October 30, 1476, leaving £20 to each of his three daughters “to get them husbands”, which was very generous of him.

PIT TRAGEDY: A headline from The Northern Echo in 1871

Further generations of Trollopes were Catholics and another John was arrested for his part in the 1569 Rising of the North. The Protestant Queen Elizabeth I executed many Northern gentry who had tried to topple her from the throne, but John was pardoned.

He was, though, forced to forfeit his estate to a London gentleman.

When the Londoner arrived at Thornley, he was greeted with great and generous hospitality by the locals. So great and generous was their hospitality that the Londoner passed out through drink.

The locals bound his feet and hands, tied him onto a horse which took him to Hartlepool, where he ended up in a boat bound for Flanders.

He was never seen in Durham again and gradually the Trollopes re-acquired their estate.

Then they endeavoured to lose it again. On December 4, 1636, John Trollope killed William Selby, of Newcastle, in a duel over a horse race and fled. At Durham Assizes, he was declared an outlaw.

In 1641, the remaining Trollopes supported King Charles I against the Parliamentarians.

Two were killed in battle, and Oliver Cromwell’s men seized the survivors’ lands. It was a blow from which the Trollopes of Thornley Hall never recovered.

The Wheatley Hill Inundation BUT much of the hill’s history does concern mining. Thornley pit was sunk in 1835, Ludworth pit in 1837 and Wheatley Hill in 1869. As befits an area which had very close connections to miners’ leaders Peter Lee and John Wilson, it was noted for its militancy.

MINING HERITAGE: Wheatley Hill Colliery

On September 23, 1869, the Durham Miners’ Association held its first delegate meeting at the Halfway House pub, in Thornley. It was a movement dangerous to the coal owners and they persecuted its leaders.

Then, on Thursday, January 19, 1871, water burst out of an old Thornley working into the new Wheatley Hill pit, trapping 22 men. “Not a small amount of alarm was rapidly spread in the district,” said The Northern Echo.

Fifteen men, up to their necks in water, were rescued.

“They stated that the missing seven gave some awful shrieks,” said the Echo.

The paper named them as: James Hall, 50, married; Michael Rogan, 30, married with three children; John Bell, 26, married with three children; Robert Smith, 32, married with two children; John Walker, 26, married with two children; John Smith, 26, single; John Cooper, 14.

“It is supposed that the unhappy sufferers had got washed into some of the workings and had thus got entangled,” said the Echo.

Down below, despite what the paper said, four of the men were not yet dead. Messrs Hall, Rogan, Bell and J Smith were washed above the waterline, and, in semi-conscious states, sat and waited to be rescued.

The mine owners immediately turned on a “pumping engine of immense power” to drain the pit, and rescue parties entered the old Thornley workings.

But it wasn’t until Saturday afternoon – two days after the inundation – that they made contact. By then, Hall and Bell were dead, and Rogan was “out of his senses and raving”.

An inquest was quickly opened into the deaths of the five, and for the first time, the fledgling miners’ association swung into action. In its first collective action, it hired W Crawford, a legal representative, for the workers.

Mr Crawford demanded that once the jury had heard from the pit officials, witnesses who had been at the coalface should also be called.

RURAL ELEGANCE: An Edwardian postcard of Thornley Hall

Because of their evidence, the jury reached a sensational verdict: “The deceased were killed… by a burst of water in the Wheatley Hill pit through the gross negligence of W Spencer, head viewer, W Hay, resident viewer, and Thomas Watson, overman, and that the said W Spencer, W Hay and Thomas Watson did kill and slay the five deceased previously mentioned by neglecting to put in proper boreholes for the safe working of the mine.”

The three officials were sent to Durham Spring Assizes to face charges of manslaughter.

Justice in those days was unbelievably swift. Eighteen days after being charged, the three were in front of the Grand Jury in Durham, overseen by Judge Mr Baron Martin.

The jury did not contain any working men. It was made up of members of the gentry – for instance, RH Allan, of Blackwell, GJ Scurfield, of Hurworth, JL Wharton, of Dryburn, Morley Headlam, of Whorlton. At least four jury members – CL Wood, of Howlish Hall, D Dale and Henry Fell Pease, of Darlington, and Thornton Salvin, of Croxdale – had commercial interests in pits.

And the miners’ solicitor could not bamboozle Judge Mr Baron Martin. The judge said that while the pit management should possibly have known where the water lay, the hewer whose blow unleashed the inundation should definitely have known.

The miners’ solicitor seems to have faced an agonising decision: if he was going to get the managers convicted, he would first have to sacrifice one of his own – hewer John Roberts, from Wales.

Seeing the hesitation, Judge Mr Baron Martin took decisive action.

“His lordship stopped the case, and the prisoners were discharged,” said the Echo.

And that was that. Five lives had been lost, four widows had been made, five children had been orphaned, all by an accident.

Yet the union had showed for the first time that it could act.

Much to the coal owners’ dismay, it was a growing force in the coalfield.

Some of Wheatley Hill miners. All of these old pictures are from Wheatley Hill History Group’s collection