Topic: Disaster.

Recently I was working on my husband’s family history and discovered that not only was his great grandfather Thomas “Tom” Brown 1857-1940 a coal miner in Wingate, Durham, northern England all his life, but he was also a third generation miner. Tom lived to be 83 and rose to be a Deputy Overman in the mine, an important position. His father John and three brothers were also miners. The 1861 Census shows that one of these brothers was only 12 years old.

From https://www.nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/accidents-disasters/durham/wingate-grange-colliery-explosion-wingate-1906/
The Wingate Colliery had an excellent safety record. Coal was first discovered there in 1839. It employed 1,200 men and boys in the various shifts…. There were two shafts at the colliery, an upcast and a downcast each of fourteen and a half feet in diameter and five seams had been worked at the colliery. They were The Five Quarter seam at 74 fathoms, the Main Coal seam at 89 fathoms, the Low Main seam at 110 fathoms, the Hutton seam at 129 fathoms and the Harvey seam at 153 fathoms.

The shift for the workmen was arranged as a fore-shift for the hewers which went down at 4 a.m. and worked up to 10.30 a.m. when the places they occupied were filled by a similar number of hewers in the back shift who went down at 9.30 a.m. and finished work at 3.30 p.m. A shift of haulage man and lads went down at 6 a.m. and loaded the coal produced by the hewers. They stopped work at the same time as the back shift hewers.

A repairing and stonework shift went into the mine at night. On ordinary nights, the shift in the Five Quarter seam was from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., in the Low Main seam from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. and in the Hutton and Harvey seams from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. but on Sunday nights this shift went down together at 10 p.m., being proceeded by a shift of examiners. The undermanager was Mr. Robert Owen who had worked at the Wingate Grange colliery in various capacities for 40 years. There were also four overmen….. and one of them was Tom Brown’s father John Brown 1815-1900.

Up to 1906 the colliery had not had a serious accident for the 67 years that it had been established. But explosion in 1906 in the mine killed 26 pit workers and 86 ponies. The colliery closed in 1962.

My husband’s forefather John Brown and his sons must have been lucky – we do not know if they were actually working at the time or on other shifts.

As someone wrote: ““In those days, many young teenagers endured 12-hour shifts in the dangerous underground world. Wages were poor, working conditions appalling and serious injuries often occurred.”

Topic for this week: Newest Discovery

I missed the deadline this week – I was trying to finish off a family history book in time for a printer’s deadline.

The book is about my late husband’s family. An interesting mix of Northern Irish, Scottish lowlanders, English colaminers, South Londoners, schoolteachers, newspaper proprietors and an airforce pilot.

I did wonder how one of the grandfathers, Syd Attrill 1890-1968 from Plumstead, Kent from a family of metal turners who worked in the Royal Arsenal in London, met his wife Florence Brown 1887-1963 from Wingate, County Durham, from a family of coal miners going back several generations. It became clear when I checked the family papers my wonderful mother in law had accumulated – both Syd and Flo were newly minted schoolteachers, two of the first to be officially certificated, and in what was probably Syd’s first job, he was sent – you can guess – to Wingate! They were married on 24 July 1915 in Castle Eden, Co. Durham.

Postscript: Syd was a gunner during the First World War, serving most of his time in Egypt and the Middle East. He was wounded but survived. A little daughter was born during his time away but sadly did not survive. But mother in law Joy did survive and had a very happy childhood with adoring parents. I love the photo of them – so young and hopeful.

The theme for Week 33 is “Strength.” Strength comes in many forms: physical, emotional, spiritual, just to name a few. What ancestor do you think of when you think of strength?

My G GrandUncle John Johnston 1831-1909 was born in Glasgow, the second-last of seven children. His father was a shoemaker as was one of his brothers, the others were a master tailor, a carver and gilder, a cabinetmaker, a tobacconist and later commercial traveller and then Court officer. John, initially a warehouseman, married Benjamina “Jessie” Leckie in 1856, according to the forms of the United Presbyterian Church. Soon after the birth of their first child they moved to Edinburgh where he studied for the Congregational Ministry at the Edinburgh Theological Hall. This was a little surprising seeing the Johnstons were strong Presbyterians with several Reverends in the immediate family. But religious differences did not split the family –
for example in 1875 John travelled from London to Glasgow to officiate at the marriage of his niece Elizabeth Jane Johnston to the Rev. Adam Gray, Minister of Sutton United Presbyterian Church in Cheshire.

John must have preached for a time in Edinburgh, but his little family were soon on the move, first to Stirlingshire, then Aberdeenshire and finally to Stoke Newington in London where John became the long-serving minister of the Raleigh Memorial Church (nowadays the Abney Reformed Church). Along the way four more children were born. Jessie died in 1871 aged 38 and John remarried, another, younger Jessie with whom he had another child in 1874.

Between 1886 and 1903 Charles Booth did an important survey into life and labour in London, and it includes 27 pages devoted to an interview with John Johnston.

John’s obituary, which appeared in the Congregational Year Book for 1910, includes the following:
“Mr Johnston twice underwent imprisonment for non-payment of the education rate, being an ardent Passive Resister. “

The ‘education rate’ was a locally-collected tax fixed on property values, collected from everyone in the parish to support Church of England institutions such as a National School, and other schools were not allowed to share this money but had to depend on voluntary contributions, so no wonder a Congregational minister would be against it.

Topic: Reunion.

In 1806 my 5 X GrandFather Hugh Vesty Byrne (1772-1842) was transported to Australia on the convict ship “Tellicherry” for his part in the Irish rebellion of 1798, along with Michael (Martin) Burke, Michael Dwyer, Arthur Devlin and John Mernagh. The voyage took 168 days. Of 166 prisoners, five men and one woman died on the voyage. And at least one baby was born – my 4x GrandMother Ann “Nanno” Byrne. Her mother lived to be 98 and had 16 children.

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland had summoned them from Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin and exiled them to Botany Bay as Irish State Prisoners but free men in the Colony of NSW. His directive was that they were NEVER to be allowed back to their beloved Ireland. Most of them were given land grants of 100 acres.

200 years on a Reunion of Tellicherry descendants was held in Campbelltown, NSW, the area where most of the released convicts settled. Two full days were devoted to various presentations, the walls of the meeting hall were covered with family trees, and special visits were made to the local church of St. John and the cemetery where so many of those early settlers and their immediate descendants were buried.

The organisers, principally Dr. Ann Prendergast and Jennifer Killen, did a fantastic job. I met so many Darchy relatives I knew of only vaguely. It was the start of my abiding interest in my Darchy family and my mysterious 4X Grandfather Thomas who married ‘Nanno”.

Thomas Darchy’s story is told elsewhere on this website. I will be adding some photos at a later date.