How Norman Cornish captured pitman poet Arthur in full flow

It is unfair. Although many of them were denied the chance to further their education because their families needed them to be down the pit earning money from a young age, many did pursue their cultural interests by attending nightclasses and lectures, and then by actually doing.

Artist Norman Cornish is the best known example of this. He attended the Spennymoor Settlement, which was founded in 1930 to give unemployed miners the chance to improve themselves. One of its first courses was in shoe repairing which led to sewing, sketching and woodworking classes and on to theatre productions.

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Late last year, a new appreciation of Cornish’s works was published, entitled Test of Time. Following our articles on the book, Sam and Christopher Robinson got in touch with a rare Cornish sketch showing their father and grandfather, Arthur Robinson, in full flow in a Spennymoor pub.

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Arthur Robinson with two of his greyhounds in a picture that is probably taken from the Northern Despatch, the Echo's sister evening paper. It had the headline "from pit to poet" above it. He seems to have the same cap, and the same nose, as Norman Cornish captured in his sketch

Arthur worked underground in Whitworth colliery pulling coal tubs – he was known as “Flash the pullman”, probably because one of his greyhounds was called Flash and because of his speed about the coalface. “When showers were eventually installed in the colliery, the tale my mother told me was that I did not recognise my father when he came home,” says Sam, who now lives in Chelmsford. “He was always covered in coal dust but he was now a different man with a white face.”

Arthur followed the usual pastimes for a pitmen: he was into greyhound and pigeon racing.

“I was close to my Granda,” says Christopher, of Kirk Merrington. “He used to take me bottle digging, pigeon racing and he even had me training the greyhounds with a upturned bicycle with rope on the back wheel with a rabbit skin attached to a rope. He was on one side of the field and I was on the other, and I had to pedal like mad and he then would let the greyhound off to chase the ‘hare’!”

With his wife Annie, Arthur lived in the Ox Close area of town with their 10 children (six survive) and he drank in pubs like the Pit Laddie or The Wheatsheaf where Norman often went to sit, by himself with a beer, and sketch the slices of real life he saw all around him.

The Pit Laddie, in Dundas Street, Spennymoor, with the Voltigeur on the left, as seen on Google StreetView in 2009. The Pit Laddie is believed to be where Norman Cornish sketched Arthur Robinson. It is now a vet's surgery

And Arthur was a poet. Although he left school young to work in the mines, he went to the Settlement for classes and then he found an audience for his poems.

“When we were kids, he’d recite Ferdy the Pheasant in the kitchen, about a fox going round and round a tree until the pheasant fell out, and we were mesmerised by him, and you can imagine him when he’d had a few beers, and getting encouragement from the crowd, doing this in the pub,” says his grandson Christopher.

Arthur Robinson in full flow, by Norman Cornish. Picture courtesy of Christopher Stolbert Robinson

A couple of years ago, Christopher found in an auction in Newcastle a sketch that Norman had made showing Arthur in full flow, possibly in the Pit Laddie. He’s got a big smile beneath his broad cap, and his hand is animated as he recites a poem which obviously tickled Norman as he wrote its first line on his drawing: “List to the linnet on the bough!”

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Arthur’s poems were never published – amazingly, really, because they are actually very good – so the family members had to hunt through their papers to find the one that inspired the drawing.

Linnets are small, brown members of the finch family and were so renowned for their tuneful trilling and twittering that they were kept in cages. However, since Arthur and Norman’s youth, their numbers have declined disastrously – a 56 per cent drop between 1968 and 1991 – due to use of herbicides and the removal of their favoured scrub and hedgerow.

So just as Norman recorded in his paintings a way of coalfield life that has gone forever so Arthur recorded a sound of the countryside that has now changed, and Norman would surely have known that he was capturing the poet in full flow just as the poet was portraying the linnet in full song:

To A Linnet

List to the Linnet on the bough,
He sweetly sings for Spring is now,
He knows not of Einstein’s equations,
And nowt he cares for men’s relations.

Now list to our Geordie down the pit,
His hands are wet with baccy spit,
He knows his coal and stows his stone,
And whilst he toils he grunts and groans.

Now who’s the happiest, bird or man?
Of brains and brawn the bird has none,
Yet he sweetly sings upon his bough,
Whilst Geordie delves in darkness now.

So sing, my songster, sing thy song,
’Tis man, not thou who dost belong,
To a mad world of his own creation,
Whilst thou dost sing in jubilation.

Sing shy Linnet on the bough,
No songster can as sweet as thou,
Thou dost with charm and rapture rouse
The classic chords of music stir.

Sing shy Linnet on the dyke,
Thou singest now the song I like
Thou art the master of them all,
If I were blind I’d know thy call,
He who taught thee how to sing,
Of the song birds, made thou king.

Arthur died in 1983, aged 72. “He was very clever,” says his grandson, Christopher. “My dad, Joe, who’s now 90 and is Arthur’s eldest son, remembers how he always used to say to him ‘there’s many an intelligent man who never got off the shovel…’.”

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Norman Cornish at the Spennymoor Settlement in 2008