Norman Cornish: The story of County Durham's greatest artist

A Slice of Life was the title of the biography that Norman, perhaps County Durham’s most celebrated artist, wrote in 1989. It tells how, at the age of 14, on Boxing Day 1933, he started down the Dean and Chapter Colliery, known locally as “the butcher’s shop” because of the number of accidents.

For the next 33 years, he somehow divided his time working full time in the county’s pits while also digging out for himself a career as an artist, recording the scenes and the people that he saw around him in the mining communities.

An oil painting of miners crossing a bridge at East Hetton Colliery

He became something of a cultural curiosity, creating pictures of deep emotion while also working underground and having the scars along his back to prove it, which meant he regularly appeared on radio and television.

His biggest commission in 1962 was to create a 30ft by 6ft mural to grace the new headquarters of Durham County Council. Gradually his representation of the miners’ gala took shape as he worked on a trial version of it in his home in Spennymoor which he shared with his wife, Sarah, and two young children, John and Ann.

In A Slice of Life, he writes: “I eventually conceived of the idea of a great sea of people on the field at Durham. The lodge banners like sailing ships were floating on this sea of people, and the whole design was to be full of movement reflecting the spirit of this time-honoured event... This smaller version reached from the bedroom window to the top of the stairs and so for a time we were obliged to crawl under the painting in order to go to bed. The dressing table was flecked with paint and the smell of turps and oil was evident. My wife had a lot to put up with.”

READ MORE: THE STORY OF NORMAN'S MASSIVE MURAL

Norman Cornish during filming of Shapes of Cornish, a documentary made by Tyne Tees TV

The success of the mural and the decline of the pits gave him the push to give up mining and become a full time artist and lecturer and, eventually, a cultural icon – no other artist has managed to capture the hard, cold trudge of mining life and the warmth of the communities that surrounded the pits.

He explained his life in A Slice of Life, which also contained black and white photos of his home town and some of his own sketches done in Spennymoor’s pubs and streets. Once the book had been published, the hot metal plates from which it was printed were destroyed, and so the two subsequent reprints were abridged versions with different images.

But now, eight years after Norman’s death, modern technology has been used to recreate A Slice of Life exactly as it looked when he first compiled it.

To give a flavour of A Slice of Life, here are a few slices from it, slices of pitlife and also slices of nostalgia for a way of life that Norman could see fading away before his own eyes, which inspired him to capture it before it was gone…

The front cover of A Slice of Life features Norman Cornish's fabulous Busy Bar painting

READ MORE: THE STORY OF BUSY BAR

A slice of Spennymoor: “Generally speaking, the houses had no bathrooms, gardens or indoor toilets. An earth closet, or ‘nettie’ as it was locally called, sufficed for a toilet. I remember as a youngster that there were several epidemics of diphtheria, smallpox, scarlet fever etc. At the age of seven, I myself contracted diphtheria. I had, I understand, been named after an uncle who had died of diphtheria at seven years old, but thanks to better medicine I managed to survive. It was the only world that we children knew and somehow we managed to be happy in it.”

Bishop's Close Street in Spennymoor was where Norman grew up, with the Arcade Cinema in the distance. This picture was taken from the elevated railway line at the bottom of the street shortly before the houses were demolished

A slice of town life: “On a Saturday night, a market occupied the whole of the main street with stalls and chip vans. Some of the stall holders were very entertaining, like the little man who sold almost everything. He would hold up a bicycle pump and shout: “Good pump this, it'll blow up a battleship”.”

A first slice of pitlife: “When I finally reached the pit that first morning, I was amazed at the great scene of activity going on unnoticed by the world... The men climbing the steps with their oil lamps looked like fireflies trapped in a great steel spider’s web. As the shunting engine passed beneath them they became lost in a cloud of steam which reflected the arched window lights of the colliery like a cinema screen.”

Pub sketch: Dog Talk

And a slice of death: “When a fatal accident occurred in the pit, the whole pit ‘lowsed out’. Everyone came to the surface and went home for that day as a mark of respect. As I was just a lad, employed at the shaft bottom to help draw coals, I was obliged to stay back on one occasion in order to send the remaining coals to the surface. When I finally arrived home the dead man's widow was sitting in our house being comforted by her neighbours. I'll never forget having to wash in the tin bath in front of the fire whilst this poor woman never took her eyes off me. Maybe she hoped that as I was one of the last to leave the pit, I might have some better news for her. Alas, this was not the case.”

A quick sketch of a man and a dog

A slice of early television: “One day I notice that the play called Portrait by Rembrandt was to be televised the following week, but we didn’t have a TV at home. The nearby pub had had a TV set installed behind the bar. Come the night of the play, I entered the pub, saw that the TV was switched on – good. There were very few drinkers in the bar – excellent. I positioned myself in front of the TV in anticipation whilst the publican came from behind the bar in order to play dominoes with the few other drinkers present. It couldn't have been better. Eventually the play started and I settled down to enjoy it. Suddenly the publican put down his dominoes, leapt across the bar and switched the set off to my shocked surprise. Then he said ‘nee-body wants to watch that rubbish’. So, in a minority of one, I went home.

A pub sketch: two old ladies in the snug

A slice of lights: “One morning plodding to work in the early hours, the pit road covered in ice and the coal trucks glued to the rails by enormous icicles draining off from the washery, I notice some strange lights, like coloured curtains, in the sky ahead. They were the Northern Lights or aurora borealis and having never seen them before I was very impressed. I caught up with another workman, walking wearily with his head hung. I asked: ‘Did you see the lights, Bill?’ Bill lifted his head and said: ‘Eh?’ Then dropping his head again he mumbled: ‘I've seen nee bloody lights’. Who can blame him. It was two in the morning and he was dog tired.”

A slice of fame: “The Prime Minister Edward Heath once bought two of my pictures. It gives me pleasure to think that they have probably hung in 10 Downing Street.”

Norman with his wife, Sarah, and children John and Ann

A slice of infamy, when he appeared in a National Coal Board film in 1967: “I took my young son, John, to see it, especially as John Wayne in The Alamo was the main feature. When we emerged from the cinema after the show the little lad didn’t seem too happy. When I asked him whether he had liked it, he said: ‘No cos all the lads at school will have seen my bare backside and they’ll laugh at me.’ I then realised that one of the paintings featured in the film was of John, when younger, being dried in front of the kitchen fire by his mother after his bath. Ah, well, you can’t please everyone I suppose.”

Slices of shapes: “The lights of industry and towns are like stars at night; a telegraph pole can suggest a crucifix; a lady bending over her knitting can suggest a lady praying… Pit-heads can look like windmills in old Dutch paintings. They loom up over the village. One wonders, with the passing of time, when no present day type pit-heads actually exist, if pictures of them might one day be thought of as picturesque and as socially significant as old windmill pictures.”

A rapid sketch of a man with his pipe

A slice of past life: “Sometimes, I have been accused of painting things of the past. Modernist town councillors are not too happy about this. They are trying to put the past behind them, give the towns a new look. I paint the past because…I am concerned about, and influenced by, my whole lifetime’s slice of historical experience and not just a few modern days. The artist is simply trying to portray what it felt like to live in his own lifetime.

“The local collieries have gone, together with the pit-road. Many of the old streets, chapels and pubs are no more. A large number of the ordinary but fascinating people who frequented these places are gone. However, in my memory, and I hope in my drawings, they live on. I simply close my eyes and they all spring to life.”

• A Slice of Life by Norman Cornish, with a new introduction by Melvyn Bragg, costs £17. It is available from normancornish.com plus independent bookshops including Spennymoor Town Hall and the Bowes Museum

Footnote: Modern technology assists in the production of Memories, as well. We can read a passage from Norman’s book into the laptop and it magically creates as text what it thinks we have said. But it is not perfect, particularly not when dealing with a changing world. Norman wrote of a traditional British pub scene when he said: “Suddenly the publican put down his dominoes, leapt across the bar…”. But the 21st Century voice recognition translated it as: “Suddenly the publican put down his Domino's…” So no longer does a publican play fives and threes; instead he’s eating a pizza no doubt just delivered by Just Eat. But at least it was a slice of pizza to go with Norman’s slice of life…

Pub sketch: Convivial Company