The Horsekeeper's Daughter

by Jane Gulliford Lowes

  Sarah Marshall was the eldest of seven daughters born to Thomas and Margaret Marshall; there were some twenty years between Sarah and Fanny, Edie’s mother, the youngest of the Marshall girls. Little written evidence remains of Sarah’s childhood, and certainly no hint of the adventures and trials that lay ahead of her. I decided to search the census records to see what, if anything, I could glean about her there.

  In the 1871 census, I found Sarah aged nine, living in Cassop, another mining village a few miles outside of Durham, with her parents Margaret and Thomas Marshall, Margaret’s widowed father, other assorted relatives, and two younger sisters Ann and Elizabeth, then aged five and two. Another four sisters would follow in the next eleven years. Thomas’ occupation is given as “horsekeeper” – in colliery parlance this meant he looked after the pit ponies.

  Pit ponies (usually mules or small horses as opposed to actual ponies) were the living and breathing engines of every coal mine, pulling the laden coal wagons from the coal face to the base of the shaft, which could sometimes be a distance of several miles. These unfortunate animals would often spend their entire working lifetimes underground, permanently blinkered, never seeing daylight, stabled in the bowels of the mine. Theirs was a desperately hard life of burden and toil but in general they were very well looked after and well-fed, as without them a coal mine simply couldn’t function. Quite often they worked until they dropped; occasionally, if they were lucky, they might be put out to grass once they were too old to work.

  A poorly-paid horsekeeper like Thomas Marshall could expect to be in charge of the welfare of a team of eight to fifteen ponies, and he would be responsible for grooming, washing down and feeding his animals, and would know each one by name. He would also be responsible for a team of drivers, usually teenage boys who led the ponies back and forth from the coal face. The horsekeeper also mucked out the stables and cleaned and dressed the frequent grazes and cuts suffered by his team in the course of their work; many horsekeepers developed a great fondness for their animals, and would bring them apples and carrots or maybe a cube of sugar as a rare treat.

  Pit ponies were still used in the mines of County Durham in living memory, though their use was gradually phased out after the coal industry was nationalised and with increased mechanisation. In later years, during the statutory summer holiday “pit fortnight” every July, the ponies would be brought up and put out to grass in nearby fields. My mother remembers watching them galloping and prancing around in the fresh air, temporarily released from their underground prison. “Darkie”, the last pit pony at nearby Murton Colliery, was brought to the surface in 1972.

  In 1953 there were still over three hundred pit ponies working in the Seaham collieries. My father recalls clearly the overwhelming stench that came from the underground stables at Seaham Colliery where he started work as an apprentice electrician in 1958. At Ryhope, a little way up the coast from Seaham, there is a bronze statue of a pit pony marking the entrance to the village, a memorial to the countless ponies who lived and died for the getting of coal.

  In later records, Thomas Marshall is described as a “colliery cartman” and “banksman”. The banksman’s job was to empty the coal tubs as they arrived on the surface, having been drawn up the shaft from the depths of the mine. He would then weigh the coal and stone and send the empty tubs back down. It was unrelenting, back-breaking, dirty work but at least he was spared the horrors and dangers endured by those who toiled at the coal face.

  Each of the Marshall girls had been born in a different village, another indication of the family’s itinerant lifestyle, until they appear to have settled in Tursdale near Spennymoor in 1872, a few miles from where Margaret Marshall had been born and raised in Coxhoe.

  I could find no further trace of Sarah until the 1881 census.

  The census of 1881 was carried out on the night of 11th April. I looked for Sarah in Tursdale where her parents and younger sisters still lived. I looked for her in the surrounding mining villages, of Spennymoor, Coxhoe, Thornley, Page Bank, Brancepeth. And then all of a sudden, there she was, in the place I had least expected. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. I read and re-read the manuscript record before me, my heart pounding and my mind racing, convinced that my eyes were deceiving me, that I had made some sort of mistake. I hadn’t.

  “Sarah Marshall. 19. Place of birth – West Rainton. Domestic Servant in the household of Thomas Boland, Farmer. Village Farmhouse, Seaton Village.”2

  Sarah was the girl next door.

  4

  Troubled Seams

  Occasionally something happens which completely changes our perspective of that which we know and love. It can be something as simple as discovering a new footpath across familiar fields which affords us a fresh view of our homes in the distance. Sometimes it is the discovery of a secret about a dear friend or relative which can deepen or extinguish the bonds between us. Perhaps it is an event or circumstance or coincidence that casts the familiar in an unfamiliar light, the places we have known and loved for a lifetime seen through a different lens.

  I was completely stunned by the discovery of the connection between Sarah Marshall’s life and my own. She began to occupy my thoughts day and night. In the mornings, I pulled open my grey silk curtains and looked out onto the village green, the manor house with its tree-lined gardens, bordered by ancient brick walls, at the edge. I glanced along the street to the pub, its whitewashed walls, brass lamps, and the words “DUN COW” picked out in gold upon the smart green paintwork, dazzling in the early morning sunshine. I saw with fresh eyes the scene that had greeted me for twenty years – the same scene that would have greeted Sarah one hundred and thirty-five years before as she went about her duties, perhaps feeding the animals in the barn where my house now stands, perhaps hanging out the washing in the same spot as I did, at the top of the farmyard which is now my back garden. At night, I would lie awake for hours, constantly turning over in my mind the information I had stumbled upon. I even began to dream about her.

  Sarah Marshall was taking me over, body and soul. She became my obsession. Always, though, I came back to the same question. Why did she go to Australia? What life experiences had she encountered, what things had she witnessed, what hopes and ambitions did she harbour – what factors had combined to cause Sarah to leave her life as a domestic servant in a quiet County Durham village and travel thousands of miles to start a new life on the far side of the world?

  I could find no record of Sarah’s departure from England to Australia; I didn’t even have an approximate date. I knew Bill Campbell had been born in 1892 in Queensland, but that was my only point of reference. There was no clue in Edie’s box of treasures, no mention of her in any of the letters or photographs other than the faded photograph of Sarah’s final resting place. I was no closer to discovering Sarah’s story than when I had first learned of her existence.

  I was searching for Sarah in the wrong place. I began to look for her at the end of her journey rather than the beginning. There, recorded amongst the thousands of names of those who had sought out new lives in the colonies in the nineteenth century, in the immigration records and ships’ passenger lists in the Queensland State Archive, I found her.3

  Sarah Marshall had sailed on the SS Duke of Sutherland from London, bound for Brisbane, in the late Autumn of 1886, aged twenty-three. I wondered if perhaps she was newly married, setting out with her husband to seek a new life in a far-off land. However, the records are quite clear. Perhaps unusually for a young woman in those days, Sarah was travelling alone.

  Gradually I began to piece together the story of Sarah’s life, both in England and in Queensland. As I delved deeper into the history of Seaham and Seaton Village in the 1880s, a surprising picture began to emerge. Far from being a quiet little backwater on the North-East coast, in the 1870s and 1880s the burgeoning town of Seaham was a hotbed of politics and industrial unrest. The Seaton and Seaham of
the early 1880s, in particular, was not a happy place to be, scarred forever by the events of 8th September, 1880.

  After purchasing Old Seaham and the surrounding land from the Milbankes in 1821, Lord Londonderry had set about creating the harbour at Seaham for the purpose of transporting coal from his pits at Rainton and Pittington; however, he also knew that the surrounding land was rich in coal deposits. The building of the town around the harbour began in 1828, and eventually the town would support three collieries – Seaton (later known as Seaham) sunk in 1845, a mile or so across the fields from the village after which it was named, Dawdon, a half mile or so south of the harbour along the coast (1907), and Vane Tempest (1928) on the cliff tops a half a mile north of the harbour.

  Londonderry built the Rainton–Seaham railway line in 1831, linking his collieries with his newly-built port. Nothing of the railway remains – it was dismantled in the 1890s – however, you can still trace part of its path, from Seaton Bank Top, skirting the edge of Scout’s Wood and “Darkie’s Plantation”, crossing the fields just south of Seaton Village over to where Melrose Crescent stands now, and on into the old pit yard. Every day Sarah Marshall would have heard the endless clanking and rattling of the coal wagons back and forth along the railway line as she went about her duties on the farm.

  When John McCutcheon wrote his famous book Troubled Seams – The Story of a Pit and Its People in 1955, which details the events in this and subsequent chapters, the town’s three mines were producing some 1,800,000 tons of coal each year. At that time, it was estimated that some six thousand men were employed in the coal industry, and that some eighty per cent of men in the town were connected directly or indirectly with the coal industry.

  Seaham Colliery, known locally as the Nicky Nack and in later years as simply the Nack, was an amalgamation of two collieries, Seaton Colliery, the “High Pit” and Seaham Colliery, sunk in 1849, the “Low Pit”. The two collieries were linked together underground in November 1864, as it was considered safer to have two separate shafts in case an accident or explosion blocked one. Among the older generation of Seaham residents, parts of the town are still known by their old names; the Westlea and Eastlea areas are referred to as the High Colliery (there is still a High Colliery Post office); the Low Colliery describes the brick built terraces of colliery houses that run at a ninety-degree angle from Station Road to Christchurch, where I was brought up. Eventually the new village of New Seaham which sprung up around the colliery and the older village of Seaham Harbour, around the port, would merge and become simply, Seaham. The old names still live on – even today, if you happen to be heading to the town’s shopping area or seafront, you’re going “down the Harbour”.

  Accidents and explosions, injuries and fatalities were a regular occurrence in 19th century coal mining. For those whose forefathers have not laboured at the coal face and who have no knowledge or understanding of the heavy price that the coal industry took upon the lives of those who toiled, it is difficult to put into words the desperately hard lives of the miners and their families and the conditions in which they worked and lived. Labour was cheap and so were lives. Some five hundred and twenty-seven men and boys perished in a little under a century and half of coal mining in this small town, with fatalities occurring as recently as the late 1980s.4

  From almost the very beginning, Seaham Colliery had a dangerous reputation, and it soon became known throughout the county as the “Hell Pit”. This nickname was well deserved – in 1852 alone there were three separate explosions, with six lives lost in the last. An inquest revealed that naked lights were still being used, despite the widespread availability of miner’s lamps. One of those killed was a ten-year-old boy, Charles Halliday. His brother escaped.5 Child labour was of course commonplace, and continued into the early twentieth century. A government enquiry in 1842 had established that children as young as five years old worked underground as trappers, opening and closing the doors situated at intervals from the shafts to the coal face to allow fresh air to flow, for up to sixteen hours a day. My own great-grandfather, John Clyde, first went to work down the mine at Seaham when he was twelve years of age, and worked there all his life, apart from a few years during the First World War when he exchanged the horrors of the coal face for the horrors of the trenches.

  A further explosion claimed two lives in 1864, and some twenty-six souls were lost in the horrific events of the explosion on 25th October 1871.6 Only four bodies were brought out initially – the remaining twenty-two were not recovered for another two months, as the part of the mine where these poor souls lay was sealed off to prevent the risk of further explosions and so that coal production could continue. As far as the colliery owners were concerned, mining had to continue, at any cost.

  As a result of these events and others like them in coal mines across the country, not least at Hartley in Northumberland in January 1862 when two hundred and four miners perished, and in response to increasing industrial discontent about safety, pay and conditions, the Durham Miners Association formed in 1869. The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers was created as a direct result of the 1852 explosion, and met for the first time in the Mill Inn, Seaham. The First Miners’ Gala took place in Durham City in 1871, creating a tradition that continues today, decades after the last Durham coal mine disappeared.

  The infamous Mill Inn holds a special place in the history of the town. It’s still there, in a dip at the bottom of three small hills, just below the modern Catholic church of St Cuthbert on the main road to Sunderland. It has passed through a succession of owners in recent years and its whitewashed walls have perhaps seen better days, but it’s still going and still serving pints to the locals. The windmill, which gave the inn its name, is long gone, though my mother can still recall it. Mill Road and Mill Cottage, built where the mill once stood, are the only evidence of its existence. The original Mill Inn was probably a coaching inn; the current building was constructed around 1892 and now lends its name to that particular area of the town.

  In February 1874, the Mill Inn was the scene of one of the most notorious incidents in the town’s history.7 Growing resentment at the appalling working conditions and the mistreatment of the miners and their families at the hands of the colliery owners, coupled with frustration at a lack of redress, as these poor workers did not even have the right to vote, combined to create a powder-keg atmosphere. At that time, Britain was a two-party state, governed alternately by the Conservatives and Liberals. The Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone had been in power for a little over five years, and the Conservatives under Benjamin Disraeli won a landslide victory in the 1874 parliamentary elections. However, Durham was a Liberal stronghold and its thirteen parliamentary seats all returned Liberal members. The first election in February 1874 had been extremely tight, with the Liberal, Bell, a Middlesbrough iron manufacturer, being declared the victor with 4364 votes, his fellow Liberal, Palmer, attracting 4327 votes, and the two Conservative candidates Elliot and Pemberton polling 4011 and 3501 votes respectively.

  The Conservatives were livid and challenged the election results in the courts on the basis of the events in Seaham on election day. Rioting had occurred on Church Street, near the Harbour, at that time the main shopping thoroughfare of the town, with shop premises being attacked at random and carts overturned. Tar barrels had been set on fire to form a barricade, and extra police were brought in from Castle Eden around seven miles to the south, and a detachment of soldiers from Sunderland were hastily summoned to try to disperse the crowds.

  A local magistrate read the Riot Act, but late that evening a group of rioters headed to the far end of the town, past the colliery and attacked the Mill Inn. No one seems to know why the Inn was selected as a target, but the innkeeper, John Barrett Wells, appears to have heard about the rioting elsewhere in town earlier in the day and had locked up and barricaded his premises as a precaution. A group of around forty men laid siege to the inn,
throwing rocks through the windows and attempting to use a battering ram on the front door. What followed has been described as like a scene from the American Wild West,8 with glasses and bottles smashing everywhere and the besieged landlord, Mr Wells, firing on the mob from an upstairs window while his terrified barmaid Ellen Cook escaped by climbing through a skylight and clambering along the roof. The rioters finally began to disperse around midnight as a large group of policemen and special constables approached. Miraculously, no one was killed.

  As a result of these events, the Conservatives successfully petitioned the High Court for a fresh election on the basis of intimidation and the election was declared “null and void on account of the general intimidation resorted to”. A second election was held on 8th June 1874, and this time Sir George Eliot, a colliery owner and Conservative who had come third in the February election, was victorious. The Siege of the Mill Inn would go down in history, and the Inn bears a blue plaque near the front door in commemoration. Unrest and discontent at pay and conditions continued, but all was overshadowed by what was to come.

  Seaton Village stands atop a small hill. To the rear of the Dun Cow and the farmhouse, the town of Seaham is clearly visible a mile or so away across the fields. Sarah Marshall would have looked out every morning at the colliery in the distance, perhaps greeting those of her neighbours who worked there on their way to start their shift, including the two young Knox boys, John and David, who lived in a small cottage with their parents Eliza Jane and John, in the small square of houses where Redroofs bungalow now stands.