STANDING in snow on a freezing hilltop, the smart brass band strikes up Abide With Me.

The voices of more than 200 people, pensioners in their eighties, children as young as six, join as one.

It was a moving moment at a tragic place - the mass burial trench graves of many of the 168 people who died in the 1909 pit explosion in Stanley, County Durham.

Afterwards, those gathered chatted, some giving interviews in front of television cameras. There was a woman from Doncaster, Jacquie Garforth, who came to honour her ancestor, Thomas Worby, who was 26 when he died of gas poisoning and severe burns.

A wreath was sent from New Zealand by Frances Simpson in memory of three members of her family who died.

Earlier, in a service at St Andrew's Church that featured the Reg Vardy Brass Band, the Bishop of Jarrow, the Rt Rev David Pritchard, summed up why it was important the graves were marked.

He said: "On that black afternoon in Stanley, it was women and children who lost their men, and it happened in a moment.

"In the time it takes to put on a kettle or make up a child's bottle, they were gone.

"What we do is make a cross. We make it to remember. Remember the sacrifice of 168 sons of Stanley, to make that sign of the cross and leave it there."

The memorial, which cost £5,600, was erected after the Advertiser and The Northern Echo campaigned to win recognition for victims of the disaster.

Local historian Jack Hair spoke at the service. He told of the moment when 27 men and boys trapped underground in a rare pocket of fresh air broke into song.

They sang the hymn Lead Kindly Light. By the time it was over, Jimmy Gardner, a boy of 14, was dead.

Somehow, most of the families of the men and boys who died managed to provide gravestones for their loved ones. And yet it could hardly have been a priority. A quick glance at the names of those buried in the mass trenches shows a number of fathers and sons (often two or, in one case, three of them) lying side-by-side underground.

They were buried in an atmosphere of chaos, with up to 200,000 people cramming into the small town to grieve.

Other photographs show corteges being stopped and people climbing walls as up to five funerals at a time were held. The constant playing of The Death March over three days was a memory that many of those there kept for life.

The Northern Echo reported the scene at the time: "Very quickly the crowd took possession of the long trench and stood for hours on the damp clay, several deep on both sides and at the ends, watching first one, and then another of the yellow pine coffins deposited side by side, starting from the south running to the north end of the trench."