by Tom Fort
Exploitation of the deposits of coal in this area began centuries ago. But the scale of extraction, by means of shallow drift mines, was very modest, and Chopwell remained a tiny agricultural hamlet until late in the nineteenth century. It took the development of deep-shaft mining to unlock the potential of the vast blanket of carbon laid down millennia before to form the Durham coalfield. In the 1890s the Consett Iron Company acquired the mineral rights at Chopwell with a view to using the coal for its smelting works several miles to the south. Within a few years the first shafts were sunk, and the company set about providing its rapidly swelling workforce with somewhere to live.
The first cottages were built in accordance with the pattern familiar in mining areas everywhere, in terraces facing each other across an unmade street, with a narrower throughway behind where the earth or ash WCs were installed. The smallest cottages had one bedroom, a living room with fireplace and a minute kitchen. The largest boasted three bedrooms, two living rooms and a back kitchen. Each had a single cold-water tap. A few had gardens, but the usual practice was to provide allotments.
Tyne Street, Wear Street and Tees Street were ready for occupation in 1895. Six more streets were completed by 1901, and the first phase of building went on until 1911. By then there were more than 400 cottages arranged on a north–south axis in slender blocks, two terraces to a block. The streets were all named after British rivers – some (Thames, Severn, Tweed and Tay for instance) celebrated, others (Wansbeck) less so. The eastern expansion of the village was restricted by a steep dip in the terrain with Chopwell Wood on the other side. But there was plenty of room to the west and south, and Chopwell grew steadily. The main road through it, Derwent Street, was a dogleg that connected the eastern and western sections of the settlement. By 1901 there were several shops along it, as well as a hotel, a small block of flats and a branch of the Blaydon Co-operative Society. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Chopwell had grown in less than twenty years into a sooty, smoky, thriving settlement of more than 5000 people.
Post-1918 it continued to expand, mainly to the south and east. This housing was mostly undertaken by the council rather than the mining company. It left Chopwell in the shape of a lower-case ‘r’, with the stem running south. The classiest district was the north-west, where the houses of the colliery managers were built near their social centre, the Chopwell Officials’ Club, from whose windows they could look down on the miners’ cottages and keep an eye on the pit in case of signs of trouble.
In 1926, the year of the General Strike, Chopwell acquired a notorious, almost infamous reputation, in the national press. The colliery had by then been largely paralysed for the best part of a year after the 2000 miners refused to accept the demand of their employers that they should work longer hours for less pay. The union called it a lockout; the bosses called them strikers, malcontents and troublemakers. The right-wing newspapers damned the village as a hotbed of Communist subversion. The Newcastle Chronicle accused it of ‘clutching at the hand of Communism’. ‘Spectre of a miniature Russia’ bellowed another.
For evidence they needed to look no further than Chopwell’s recent past. In 1924 the local Miners’ Lodge had proudly and noisily shown off its new banner for the first time – bearing the images of Lenin and Marx as well as that of the Labour Party’s favourite working-class hero, Keir Hardie. Two newly built streets had been named Marx Terrace and Lenin Terrace – the latter in honour of a man publicly hailed by a member of Blaydon Urban District Council as ‘the greatest and noblest of trade union officials that ever lived’.
In the year of the General Strike, Chopwell’s best-known son, Will Lawther – later president of the National Union of Mineworkers and a long-serving Labour MP – was jailed for two months for fomenting unrest. A year later he led a trade union delegation to Moscow to join the celebrations of the Russian Revolution. Even more sinister in the eyes of the newspaper proprietors, editors and commentators was the way in which the infection of Marxist doctrine had reached the football field. The Chopwell Institute FC had won the Northern Football Alliance League in 1920, whereupon they applied to the Durham FA for permission to change their name to Chopwell Soviets. The Durham FA said no, so the club asked if they could be registered as Chopwell Reds. In the end they had to settle for being known as Chopwell White Star. Chopwell itself was regularly referred to as ‘the reddest village in England’ and received the honorific – shared with other centres of unrest – of Little Moscow.
Not for the first time or the last in the history of British journalism, the name of a whole community was blackened because of the activities of a small handful of individuals. The village was indeed united in opposition to wage cuts and longer working hours, and was led by trade union officials to whom the spouting of Socialist and even Marxist slogans came easily. But there were never more than a few card-carrying Communists among the rank-and-file miners. ‘It was just a spirit of fighting the boss,’ one union activist explained, looking back. ‘If you fought the boss, you were a Communist, that’s how they saw it.’ Another remembered it thus: ‘We never knew anyone in the village that was Red . . . no one preached Communism. It was because Chopwell Lodge fought for every privilege they could get in the pits. We had loyal pioneers who fought . . . it made a lot of people jealous.’
The Chopwell miners and their womenfolk may not have been closely concerned with the finer points of Marxist dialectic, but they were acutely conscious of the common cause that bound them together. ‘Community spirit’ is an inadequate term for the bonds clamped around Chopwell and other mining villages. At its heart was a proud shared awareness of the dignity of the work. In his autobiography, A Man’s Life, the ex-miner and Labour politician Jack Lawson wrote of the watershed in his life when, aged twelve, he went to work: ‘I was now a man, for a man is not really a man in Durham until he goes to the coal-face.’
Underground, miners depended on each other to an extent perhaps only paralleled between soldiers in war. That communality bred a unity of purpose and thinking that made dissent extremely difficult and unusual. From that grew the violent hostility bordering on hatred towards those who dared to break ranks: strike-breakers, blacklegs, scabs. The most detailed study of the social background to the strike is The 1926 Miners’ Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield by Hester Barron, an academic from Sussex University. She had the nerve to suggest that strike-breaking itself took a kind of courage, an idea greeted with predictable disdain by a former miner who posted an online review: ‘A scab adopts an entirely alien persona. Gives up membership of a community, turns his back on everything of value and worth.’ The isolation of a blackleg within the community was absolute, and the wives were as pitiless as their husbands. ‘It was the women who went to the pithead with their rolling pins,’ one Chopwell veteran of 1926 recalled. ‘Wherever they [the blacklegs] lived, about fifty or sixty women would sing them home or we’d get them in the middle of us and be sticking them with our hatpins.’
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In 1947 the coal industry was nationalised and Chopwell Colliery ceased to be the property of the Consett Iron Company and became part of the empire of the National Coal Board. Less than twenty years later it closed; its reserves of easily recoverable coal were exhausted and what was left was deemed unviable.
Soon afterwards the village was, unknowingly, included in one of the most infamous programmes of social planning – or destruction – ever devised by the bureaucratic mind. Faced with the challenge of deciding what should happen to scores of similar settlements that were economically dependent on their pits, Durham County Council compiled what became known as the Category D list. It comprised mining villages assessed as being beyond redemption or salvation once the coal ran out. Some were scheduled for demolition, others were simply to be starved of funding for new development and left to decay. The policy was discreetly drawn up and never publicised, and was eventually ditched in the late 1970s. But by then Chopwell was well advanced along its downhill path.
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Without the colliery there was no work, and without investment there was no hope of work. One by one the threads that helped make up this rich community life withered and died. The colliery band packed up, followed by the St John Ambulance and the British Legion. The Colliery Institute closed. The Co-op Women’s Guild, Mother’s Union, the Male Voice Choir and the WI went the same way. The annual Chopwell Fair was discontinued. The Youth Club, Scouts and Guides all folded, as did the Ex-Servicemen’s Club, the Men’s Club, the Boxing Club and the Old Age Pensioners’ Club. In November 2010 the football club that had once proudly topped the Northern Football Alliance League withdrew because of lack of players.
Chopwell has not ceased to exist, far from it. But the population is half what it was in its mining heyday, and its heart is palpably on life support. The primary school is running at two-thirds of capacity, and along Derwent Street the hotel is boarded up and rotting away. Bargain Zone and the betting shop have closed, and the windows of other empty shops are filled with old photographs of the colliery from the time when the coal trucks were running and the band was playing and the heart was beating strongly.
There is virtually no job opportunity in Chopwell. In addition the old housing stock is progressively deteriorating, most of it now in the hands of absentee landlords not in the least particular about who they put in their properties as long as someone picks up the bill. The week before my visit a noisy protest was staged outside a house in Forth Street after it became known that two women on remand charged with the murder of their two-year-old son (and subsequently convicted) had been placed there by the Probation Service. Police were called out in force to disperse around seventy local people, and the women were taken somewhere else.
The unfunny joke is that the original late Victorian cottages are actually neat and a pleasure to look at, with their front doors opening on to a rectangular green shaded by flowering cherry trees; and if they could somehow be airlifted to Berkshire or Hampshire or Surrey they would be prettified and gentrified and sold on at £300,000 each instead of being accumulated by shady property companies at fifty grand apiece and used to keep society’s unwanted discards out of sight.
Blyth Street is one of the originals, but shorter than others, having been squeezed between Severn Street and an abbreviated Tees Street. I knocked on one of the doors. In times past no one in Chopwell ever locked their doors, but now it took some time for the bolts to be undone and the key turned. A lively old lady welcomed me in – I had been put in touch with her by the landlady of the pub in Shotley Bridge where I was staying and where she still worked a couple of shifts a week. Her husband had been a miner, as had her father and grandfather and all her uncles. ‘That’s how it was,’ she said. ‘And it were a lovely place to live.’
What had gone wrong? She told me that recently a lad just out of prison had been put in next door, and he’d come to ask her if she could lend him a bowl and a spoon. ‘He’d nothing to eat with, poor bairn,’ she said shaking her head. Before that she had had a prolonged run-in with ‘a druggie from Portsmouth,’ as she put it. ‘They put her in four different houses in Chopwell, can you believe that? Because there were that many complaints against her. Gone back to Portsmouth now, hasn’t she.’
I went to talk to an ex-miner now living in a bungalow towards the bottom of the village. He’d gone down the mine at fifteen, a couple of years before it closed, then worked at other pits until shortly before the 1984 miners’ strike, but not since. He had multiple sclerosis and had been left with two boys to bring up after his wife went off with someone else. He blamed the council for ruining Chopwell by using it to dump what he referred to contemptuously as ‘the rubbish’. A lifelong union militant, he remained intensely proud of the village’s history. His sons, he said, both still had houses there, but had made their lives elsewhere. ‘There’s nothing here for them,’ he said.
In 2009 Gateshead Council published a Draft Masterplan for Chopwell. Why a Masterplan rather than just a plan or a modest proposal is a matter for them, but the stated intention was to help bring the village back to life – or, as the preamble put it, ‘to identify the problems within the village and build upon its inherent strengths and link this to spatially and thematically linked interventions.’ Who in God’s name writes this stuff?
The proposals were few in number and short on specifics: to support, retain and develop economic opportunities, to create a sustaining and balanced community through investment and regeneration, to protect and enhance the local environment, to tackle the problems of poor housing stock (and who could argue with any of that?). The one firm project was for a private housing development on a roughly triangular piece of land owned by the council to the east of Mill Road, and known as the Heartlands.
The Draft Masterplan spoke of a ‘phased and prioritised approach to regeneration’ which may explain why, six years later, I could find no evidence of any ‘intervention’ of any kind. The council did produce a Planning Brief for the Heartlands, but the area itself remains a wide open space of rough grass and scrub intersected by informal paths for exercising fierce-looking dogs. However, Chopwell’s representative on Gateshead Council disputed the suggestion that they had given up on the village. Negotiations, he told me, were at an advanced stage for a big housing development – not on the Heartlands, although that would surely happen in the fullness of time – but on a site to the west which was favoured ‘because of the view’.
One major but invisible sign of progress, he said, had been a licensing scheme for landlords, requiring them to maintain properties in a decent condition and vet their occupants. Most of Chopwell’s absentee property owners were said to have signed up for this voluntary agreement, and pressure on the rest would be maintained. The councillor insisted that community spirit was good and antisocial behaviour was ‘under control’. I pointed out that there was no work available, no business park, no small units for start-up businesses, nothing to stimulate economic revival. He said he had hopes that the deficiency would be addressed by Gateshead Council’s Rural Growth Network Initiative. I was glad someone had hopes.
There was one business in Chopwell that caught my eye, possibly because of the life-sized blue swordfish over the door. It is a brick warehouse of modest size on the north side of Derwent Street and is the premises of a company called Ultimate Fishing Supplies. Confident of a warm welcome, I went inside. It was stuffed to the ceiling with boxes of flies, fly-tying gear, feathers, fur, rods, reels, spinners, spools of line – all the wonderful variety of stuff that supports the angler’s happy pastime. The chap running it was away, but his dad was there, sitting in the office chair watching his wife and daughter-in-law scurrying about dealing with mail orders and very happy to hold forth about what was wrong with Chopwell.
He, like the ex-miner, blamed the council. ‘Killed it, haven’t they?’ was his verdict. ‘Used to be full of shops, Chopwell did,’ he said. One was his own fruit-and-veg business. ‘What did they do? Laid on a free bus to take Chopwell folk to the Tesco at Consett. Everything’s gone now.’ He told me he’d expressed an interest in buying the old hotel and moving the fishing-tackle business there. ‘They wanted £80,000 for it, with the roof half gone. I ask you. It’s had it, Chopwell has.’
But it hasn’t had it, nor should it have had it. The mining and the way of life that went with it have gone, and will not come back. But that should not mean the end of the place. People still live there and some of them retain a deep fondness for it. There is a school, a pub, a busy community centre and a spanking sports centre with floodlit outdoor courts and an indoor hall. There is decent housing which has not been engulfed in cloned, characterless estates. There is glorious countryside all around, a walk away. There is plenty to build on.
There is also the small matter of a trout stream at the bottom of the hill. Across much of industrial Britain one of the unsung dividends of the end of coal mining and the factories it powered has been the rebirth of rivers. For a hundred years the main function
of the Tyne was as a conduit for the filth spewed out by the factories along its banks. But over the last thirty years or so it has been not so much cleaned up as resurrected, and has been able to resume its position as England’s premier river for salmon.
The Derwent is but one of the Tyne’s many tributaries, but it is an important one and has a long and proud angling history. Up to the 1980s much of that history concerned pollution incidents, fish kills caused by discharges from the factories and plants along its course and battles to obtain compensation from polluters. It is an irony not lost on the loyal and committed members of the clubs that control the fishing on the Derwent that the dramatic improvement in the river’s condition and their sport is an accidental dividend from the end of the coal-mining and associated industry across the North-East in which their forefathers worked.
For £55 a year you can join the Derwent Angling Association and fish the fifteen miles of water between Derwent Reservoir, out to the west, and Lintzford, a mile or two upstream from Chopwell. It is full of wild trout and grayling, as well as some bigger trout that the club put in. In early summer, so I learned from the club’s website, the hawthorn fly with its dangling hind legs gets the fish up and feeding. There is a good mayfly hatch to follow, and olives and sedges later on.
I had a good long look at it from the bridge at Blackhall Mill that carries the road into Chopwell over the Derwent. I had not heard of the river before, and I thought how fishy it looked. But being where I was, I did not have trout in mind, so I asked the old bloke who was also watching the flow if they used worms and maggots. He looked at me with disgust and spat eloquently on the ground. ‘It’s fly-fishing, lad,’ he said. We chatted for a while, and he told me that not many fished this stretch but it was good on its day. He recommended a Grey Duster as a dry fly, and a Pheasant Tail Nymph for below the surface.