Great-grandparents Walter and Annie lived in South Yorkshire with their children [PH]A few, such as Richard, a 48-year-old author now living in London, had travelled further. This was home, the venue familiar from occasions big and small over the years but the mourners knew it would be the last gathering of its kind. When Winnie was born in December 1909, delivered at home by her grandmother while her father paced the streets, Dearne Valley was a world apart.
Its rich coal mines and the villages that staffed them seemed almost unconnected with anything beyond. The coal travelled out on purpose-built railway lines but the people stayed put and, Richard says, “just got on with it”.
By 2002 the mines were closed and the landscape was changing. Industrial parks and housing estates stood on the sites of former pits. Communities were no longer so tightly bound by coal and matriarchs such as Winnie.
“It felt like the end of an era,” says Richard. Yet the funeral also marked a beginning. This month – the 30th anniversary of the 1984 miners’ strike – sees the publication of The Valley, a book he first envisaged on that day. It traces his mother’s family for 100 years and four generations – from her grandparents’ to his own.
Great-grandparents Annie and Walter
Richard knew that his great-grandfather Walter had been saved from a First World War One bullet by a miraculously positioned brass button – later fashioned into an ornament and displayed on the sitting room wall. He also knew that spiritualism had been important.“People talked a bit of ghosts,” he recalls. “There was a benign sense in the family that those from the past are always around.” In fact it was a connection with “having the sight” which brought Walter and his wife Annie together.
She was 16, he two years older, when they met at a séance held, not unusually for the time, in the local chapel. Walter was a fledgling healer, Annie developing a reputation as a medium. As he found out more about their lives though Richard uncovered “the sadness of it all”.
The war left Walter, aged 30, “a frail old man”. Injured and traumatised he headed back down the pits, often venting his pain on Winnie, the oldest of his four children, through draconian rules and the buckle of his belt. Poignantly she adored him to the end, when he died of TB aged just 43.
“Winnie used to tell my mum that it was very important to her to show strength by never letting him see her cry,” says Richard.
Grandparents Winnie and Harry
The harsh treatment Winnie endured gave an insight into her character as much as her father’s. “Even as a child I had realised that while she was a typical grandma – making amazing steak and kidney pies, knitting – she was a complicated character,” he says. “Piecing her life together was like a puzzle.”To his huge surprise Richard discovered a brief but passionate affair with her husband’s young cousin Alf. “That was the biggest shock of all for me,” he says. “She seemed so upright, masochistic even on the surface, but she wasn’t getting a lot of love at that time. I concluded all marriages start off roughly similar. It is by the end of it you have the unique relationship.”
It was this end result that was so familiar to Richard. His grandfather Harry was as theatrical and open as his wife was private and restrained. Their daughters considered the couple, who married in 1931, spectacularly unsuited.
To their grandson though, “They were a fantastic double act, like Morecambe and Wise. She used to play up her disapproval.”
Known to most as The Juggler, Harry was a miner at Manvers Main Colliery and a semi-professional club turn by night. He played drums (learnt by tapping on his mother’s sideboard), sang and famously performed the Mother Riley Roadshow, which would see him produce a half pint of bitter from below his flowing skirts.
“I remember him always drumming a beat on something,” says Richard. “I loved watching him play at the club and he was always doing little tricks for us. He had an effect on a room.” Entertainment at the club and impromptu parties were a regular occurrence, perhaps Richard feels in defiance of such dangerous employment.
“There was always the fear of an accident. That created a bond.” In 1948 Harry survived an underground explosion but in 1957 his brother-in-law Danny did not.
“The anxiety was quietened by routine but it was always there.”
Richard, who was one of the first to not work in the mines, with his grandmother and his aunt Lynda [PH]Mother and aunt Pauline and Lynda
Winnie’s fortitude and determination may have been exceptional but Richard feels she was in many ways typical of women from the mining world.“They shared the ability to endure without self-pity and an incredible resourcefulness. Not much in the way of work or money. If you were lucky like Winnie your husband wouldn’t hit you.”
Winnie and Harry’s daughters, Richard’s mother Pauline and aunt Lynda, appear to have inherited their mother’s steel and purpose. Lynda, now happily married to her teenage sweetheart, walked out on two earlier unhappy marriages, finding herself back in her parents’ house with a young son and practically no chance of a job.
She refused to give up and eventually got a secretarial post at a mine while Winnie minded her son.
“There was an instinctive sense of cooperation among the women,” says Richard. They watched each other’s children, lent money from their rent tins, filled collecting boxes on the streets with food when the 1984 strike hit hard. A sense of purpose was important.
“There was a notion men would work hard in the mines to improve things and to better the community and the lives of their children.”
For women though ambition was difficult. Despite being top of her class and keen to go on to college Pauline was withdrawn from school in order to help care for the family.
“It is seen as a macho world but women held mining communities together,” says Richard. “Those women could have run anything.”
Richard
Richard’s generation was the first for whom the pits were an unlikely career option. Deeply proud of their part in his family history, he decided against going down one for the first time in the course of his research.Richard makes no claim for a comprehensive history of an industry in decline and a society in transition but believes the small details – the “domestic dramas, generational tensions and simple emotions” – are often the most telling.
“What actually changes people’s lives and what changes ‘the world’ are not necessarily the same thing,” he says.
“These are ordinary people but when you dig deeper they have extraordinary lives. They show the virtue in small achievements.”
The Valley by Richard Benson (RRP £25) is available at £20 with free P&P. Call 0871 988 8451 or visit www.expressbooks.co.uk. You can also send a cheque or PO (payable to The Express) to: The Express Orders Dept, 1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF.
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