THE largest pitheap in the Durham coalfield was at Trimdon Grange, containing one million cubic yards, and 100 years, of colliery waste which towered 150ft high over the terraced houses.
“It dominates the front street, giving the impression that one day it will move like an avalanche and engulf a large part of the village,” said The Northern Echo, in May 1965, as local people expressed their concerns.
The pitheap had grown so large that it had engulfed Duff Heap Row – itself named after a pile of “duff”, or fine coal dust – where Peter Lee, the first Labour leader of Durham County Council, had been born in 1864.
And the villagers knew the dangerous potential of the pitheap. During the Second World War, rainwater had collected in a depression on top of it. The water broke out, cascaded down the heap and, rushing past the school, had flooded houses in North and South Plantation Row.
Seventeen months after the Trimdon Grange concerns had been raised, the appalling tragedy at Aberfan unfolded – 60 years ago this week – as a massive pitheap, weakened by heavy rain and undermined by springs, slid down the side of a valley and engulfed a school.
The Echo’s headline of October 22, 1966, highlighted the enormity of the disaster: “85 bodies found, 50 still buried”.
In all, the slide killed 116 children and 28 adults, and it left the 116 primary children who survived – many dug out – deeply traumatised.
Because Aberfan occurred at the beginning of the television age, the black and white pictures – and the ages of the victims – gripped the nation in a way few previous disasters had.
“It is a story with special significance for another mining area, like the North East,” said the Echo’s editorial the day after the tragedy. “We have more than our share of slag and pitheaps. As our hearts go out both to the bereaved and to the young children who have survived a terrible ordeal, we must look to our own defences.”
It was unknown how many pitheaps there were in Durham and Northumberland, but it was estimated that there were about 200. Most contained up to 200,000 tons of waste although the couple of larger ones – Trimdon Grange and one near Willington – had a million tons.
It is now estimated that 140,000 cubic yards of waste engulfed Aberfan so if the Echo’s report is correct, Trimdon Grange’s heap was seven times larger.
However, said the Echo, geographic differences made a similar disaster in the North East unlikely. It said 99 per cent of pitheaps up here were on the flat, coastal plain, whereas in Aberfan, the waste was dumped on the top of the hills with the communities down below.
Norman Palmer, chief surveyor for the regional National Coal Board, told the paper: “There are no sizeable precipitous valleys in Durham or Northumberland. There are only the odd one or two places where there is anything steep and by comparison with Wales, they are nothing.”
The most concerning pitheap that the Echo’s reporters could locate in the aftermath of Aberfan was one 70ft high and covering 10 acres at Stillington – to the north-east of Darlington – which was the product of 100 years of iron refining. It was owned by Darchem and was in the process of being removed, its “rocklike” waste being used as the foundation for the new A1(M) which was being built through Durham.
In 1966, the Durham coalfield was swiftly contracting and, unlike in Wales, the NCB seems to have already been “reclaiming”, a new word in the industrial language, the pitheaps. It discovered in them red shale and plenty of coal which it could sell, and, once it had levelled them, it was experimenting with techniques like spraying them with seeds to help nature get a hold.
Trimdon Grange Colliery’s last shift was on February 16, 1968. The closure of the pit meant the loss of 700 jobs, and triggered the landscaping of the giant pitheap as well as the demolition of the miners’ terraces, now classed as slums, in the Plantation area of the village.
The day after the shocking tragedy in Glamorgan, the Echo reassured its readers that “it couldn’t happen here”, but it also noted that in Durham “production is switching more and more to the highly-automated long-life coastal pits which tip their waste straight into the sea.
“This, of course, also raises problems – but of a different sort from those which the mounds of waste present.”
It would be many years before all the inland pitheaps were levelled and then several decades before the tide was turned and the east Durham beaches had their waste cleaned up.
BY coincidence, the first event in the year of celebrations to mark the 1,000th anniversary of King Canute’s visit to Trimdon is a special evening on November 14 entitled “The Life and Times of Peter Lee – the Man They Named a Town After”.
READ MORE: THE 1000th ANNIVERSARY OF KING CNUT'S VISIT TO TRIMDON ON HIS PILGRIMAGE TO DURHAM
It features local historian Margaret Hedley, author of the Women of the Durham Coalfield trilogy, who will be introduced by Trimdon historian and author Adam Luke.
It starts at 7pm at St Alban’s Church, Trimdon Grange. Tickets are £5, available from Victoria on 07974-263738. All proceeds will go to the Trimdon 2027 Appeal led by volunteers from St Mary Magdalene Church to install a monument to mark Canute’s visit.
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