Where the Angel Stands: The Richardsons of Team Colliery
- Jun 9
- 9 min read
The story of a coal hewer, his wife, and a life lived by the pit, 1890–1965
In the churchyard at St Andrews in Lamesley, on the southern fringe of Gateshead, one word brings my great-grandparents' story to its close: Reunited. The stone carries two names. Margaret Richardson who died on 25th October 1943, aged 51. William Richardson who outlived her by more than twenty years, dying on 14 February 1965 at the age of 75. The full transcription from the Parish Burial records reads:
In loving memory of our dear mother Margaret RICHARDSON died 25th Oct 1943 aged 51 years And of our dear father William RICHARDSON died 14th February 1965 aged 75 years Reunited
Margaret and William are the parents of my grandma Alice. What follows is an attempt to set their lives against the coalfield that shaped them: the county they were born into, the seams William worked, and the family Margaret held together in the pit rows of, what was then, County Durham.
A county made of coal
In the County Durham of the early 1890s, coal had already turned it inside out. A county of perhaps 150,000 people in 1801 had swollen more than twelvefold to around 1.88 million by 1901, as the hunger for coal drew workers in from across Britain and Ireland. Pit villages appeared almost overnight, and the industry kept growing until it employed something like 170,000 Durham men at its height in 1923.
That tide of newcomers explains a detail in the early census records I've uncovered — the Scottish and Irish families living close to the Richardsons when William first turns up in 1891. The combined Durham and Northumberland coalfield, the old "Great Northern Coalfield," pulled in miners from Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Wales and the Yorkshire pits alike. A single terrace of colliery cottages might hold families from half a dozen counties and countries, united by the work waiting for them underground. The Richardsons themselves were local people — William's father John was born around 1866 at Swalwell, just up the Tyne, and his mother Ann around 1870 in Jarrow — but their neighbours were threads in one of Victorian Britain's great internal migrations.
William, a child of the rows
William Richardson came into the world in 1890 in the Heworth district, around the hamlet of Wardley near Felling. The 1891 census, taken when he was barely a year old, places the family at 3 John Street (Pattinson Terrace), Heworth (most likely here)— exactly the sort of terraced housing the coal companies threw up beside every pit for the men who worked it.
His father John earned his living as a colliery banksman, working the surface — the "bank" — at the pit head, taking in the full tubs as they were wound up the shaft and sending the empties back down. It was above-ground work, but it was pit work nonetheless, and it set the tempo of the home: the shifts, the colliery buzzer, the fine grey dust that settled over everything.
By 1901 the family had shifted to Cross Row, Heworth, where William, then eleven, was still at school. The records give his address as 20 Cross Row in 1901 and 18 Cross Row in 1911 — reflecting either a short move along the row or one of the renumbering muddles that were routine in colliery housing. Tidy, fixed street numbers were something the pit rows didn't always bother with.
William was the eldest of a crowded household. The censuses give us his brothers and sisters: Isabel (born about 1894), Hannah (1897), Lizzie Ann (1899), John (1901), Elsie (1904), Thomas Alexander (1907) and Joseph (1910). Some trees on FindMyPast add a Sarah Ann (born circa 1896), a sister I haven't been able to pin down in census documents — so I'm interested in learning more about her when I can.
A family that size, packed into two or three rooms, with the father working shifts and the mother fetching water, feeding the fire and feeding the children, was the everyday norm for a Durham mining family. It was also unrelentingly hard.
Underground: putter, hewer, deputy
Three job titles, spread across thirty years of records, sketch the whole arc of William's working life.
In 1911, aged 21, he is listed as a "Miner Putter." Putters were the young muscle of the pit's haulage system. The job was to put — to shove and wrestle the heavy coal tubs from the face along the underground roads to the point where ponies or machinery took over. Cramped, wet, dark and exhausting, it was the work a man was expected to leave behind as he got older.
By 1921 he had become a "Coal Hewer" for the Pelaw Main Colliery Company — the promotion pitmen often wanted. The hewer stood at the sharp end of the whole operation, cutting coal straight from the solid seam with his pick. Hewers were the elite of the Durham pit: the best paid, reportedly the most respected, the men whose skill and strength actually won the coal. The North-East ran a system found almost nowhere else, cavilling, in which hewers and putters drew lots each quarter for their working places underground. Since a man's "cavil" could make a real difference to how much he could earn, the draw mattered hugely — and drawing lots was the coalfield's way of keeping it fair and beyond the reach of favouritism. It's very possible that William worked within this system.
By the 1939 Register he had risen once more, to Coal Miner, Deputy Overman (Below). A deputy was no longer simply a workman but one of the pit's junior officials — the safety man who timbered the roof, laid the tub roads, tested his district for gas and bad ground, and carried responsibility for the men working beneath him. Becoming a deputy meant study and a formal examination, no small thing for someone who had begun by pushing tubs in the dark. In plain words on three documents, William's life is the story of a man climbing as far as the pit would let him.
Pelaw Main and the company's reach
The Pelaw Main Collieries company, with its base at Birtley, worked a string of pits across the Birtley and Lamesley district south of Gateshead — among them Bewicke Main and the Ravensworth ("Betty" and "Shop") collieries at Lamesley, and the Ouston and Urpeth pits at Birtley. The family's own map is laid over the company's: Chowdene by 1921 and 12 Ravensworth Terrace, Team Colliery by 1939, this is situated by Lamesley where William lived his final years — the very district those Pelaw Main pits served. Trace the family from one address to the next and you are tracing the shape of the company that employed him.
Marriage, and a census taken in a lockout
William married Margaret Currie in about May 1912, in the South Shields district — he around 22, she about 20. Margaret was Tyneside born and bred: she arrived on 10 April 1892 in Jarrow, was baptised at St Peter's, Jarrow, that May, and grew up in the Currie household on Monkton Road, where the 1901 census recorded her at the age of ten.
Their eldest, John, was born in 1915, in the thick of the First World War — years when coal counted as essential war work and Durham's miners were pulled between enlisting and staying at the seams the country couldn't do without. Three daughters followed in close succession through the war years and just after: Doris May in 1917, Ivy Millicent in 1919, and my grandmother Alice in 1921. After them came William (1924), Thomas A. (1926), Hazel (1928) and Albert (1931) — eight children in all, arriving at roughly two-year intervals across a decade and a half. So when we picture the family through the upheavals of the 1920s, it is a household already full of young children, with more still to come.
The 1921 census, due in April, was pushed back to 19 June 1921 — moved because the coalfields had exploded into one of the fiercest disputes of the age. When the wartime controls came off and the mines returned to their private owners, the owners forced through heavy wage cuts, and on 1 April 1921 the miners were locked out. The hoped-for backing of the railwaymen and transport workers fell away on "Black Friday," 15 April, and the lockout dragged through the summer. So when the enumerator reached Chowdene that June evening and wrote William down as a Pelaw Main hewer, the truth was that he — like nearly every Durham miner — was most certainly locked out and earning nothing, in a household that by then included baby Alice. The census froze the family in the middle of the storm.
The worst was still ahead. 1926 brought a second upheaval: first the nine-day General Strike in May, then a miners' lockout that ran on for most of the year behind the rallying cry "not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day." Durham was among the worst-hit coalfields anywhere, and a hewer's family at Chowdene would have endured months of hardship. Times like these forged the famous solidarity of the Durham pit communities — the same communities that flooded into the city every July for the Durham Miners' Gala, the "Big Meeting," behind their colliery banners and brass bands.
Margaret, and the work no census names
Set beside William's mining career is Margaret's 1939 entry: "Unpaid Domestic Duties." It is the dullest phrase imaginable for the most demanding of lives. The wife of a miner was the household's engine. With a husband and growing sons on staggered shifts, scarcely an hour passed without someone either setting off for the pit or coming home black from it. Before pithead baths were common, the men washed in a tin tub before the kitchen fire — which meant water carried, heated and emptied by hand, shift after shift. There were fires to keep in, ranges to clean, bread to bake, washing to scrub and dry in soot-thick air, and a houseful of children to feed and clothe on wages that a strike or a lockout could wipe out without warning. The 1939 Register, compiled barely three weeks after war was declared, found Margaret running that home at Ravensworth Terrace — a home that within months would be coping with ration books, identity cards and the blackout.
The household in 1939
The 1939 Register offers one last family group, the children still under William and Margaret's roof at 12 Ravensworth Terrace as war began:
John (born 28 September 1915) — Pit Head Bath Attendant, the eldest, already working at the colliery surface
William (born 9 May 1924) — a Butcher's Apprentice, taking up a trade away from the pit
Thomas A. (born 18 May 1926) — at school
Hazel M. (born 6 October 1928) — at school
Albert (born 21 April 1931) — at school
By then the three eldest daughters had all left home, which is why they appear in the 1921 census but not here. Doris May (1917), Ivy Millicent (1919) and my grandmother Alice (1921) were young women in their late teens and early twenties by 1939 — most likely within their own households, out at work or in service, as so many daughters of mining families were before they married.
There's an interesting detail in that record. Hazel appears as "Hazel M. (Wood) Richardson." The name in brackets points not to some hidden parentage but to a later annotation. Unlike a census, the 1939 Register was a living record — kept current for identity cards and rationing, and after 1948 carried forward as the NHS Central Register, amended right up to 1991. The commonest amendment of all was a woman's change of surname on marriage. So "(Wood)" simply records that Hazel grew up, married a Mr Wood, and had her entry updated — a small, cheerful postscript added long after that wartime night.
A memorial, raised by chance
By an extraordinary turn, the ground that this branch of my family lived on has become one of the most recognised places in England. The site of Team Colliery — the very pit on whose doorstep Ravensworth Terrace once stood — is exactly where the Angel of the North now stands. Antony Gormley's 20-metre figure in rust-red weathering steel, unveiled in 1998, was raised on the spot once occupied by the colliery's pithead baths, on a knoll built up from the demolished remains of a mine that had been worked since the 1720s. Gormley meant it as a deliberate act of remembrance: he spoke of the "poetic resonance" of generations of men who had laboured in the dark beneath that hill, and of an angel now standing in the light above them.
There is a closer thread still. In the 1939 Register, the eldest son, John, is set down as a pithead bath attendant at Team Colliery — almost certainly at the very baths whose foundations the Angel now stands upon. The family did not merely live in the colliery's shadow; one of them worked at the building that has, quite literally, become the monument's resting place.
Knowing all this, the Angel feels less like a landmark than a memorial raised, by chance, over our own — above the dark seams where William and his sons once worked, and where so many like them gave their lives to the coal.
A note on the records, and one loose thread
This account rests on William and Margaret's own paper trail — the censuses of 1891, 1901, 1911 and 1921, the 1939 Register, and parish and memorial records — read against the broader history of the Durham coalfield. The descriptions of the putter, hewer and deputy, the cavilling system, the disputes of 1921 and 1926, the Pelaw Main company and the great migration into the coalfield all come from that documented history. Where I've imagined the texture of the family's daily life, I've tried to mark it as likely rather than proven.
