Research Projects

by Robert Jackson

Up to 1800 the moor remained largely barren, and the few roads across it were dangerous. The one good road was maintained by tolls at turnpike gates. Some of the largest horse race meetings in the north took place on the moor, and miners and their families attended in all their holiday splendour. These men, early industrial workers, wore their hair long and on these gala days it flowed freely over their shoulders, instead of being, as usually was the case, tied in curls. Floral waistcoats and ribboned hats were worn on these highly colourful occasions.

Modern Spennymoor was built on mining and had its origins with the sinking of the Whitworth pit in 1839. Rough houses were built for pit workers, houses with two rooms and a loft, more like piggeries than human habitation as stated by Dodd. The first coal from Merrington Colliery was brought up in 1841, and this pit had a chequered career and only prospered under the partnership of L.M. Reay and R.S. Johnson who made a fortune out of it. The trade depression of the late 19th Century however caused its closure in 1882.

The coal mining at Whitworth and a small foundry at Merrington Lane were the earliest industries, but in 1853 the Weardale Iron and Coal Company opened its great ironworks at Tudhoe. As a result, many hundreds of immigrant workers came here from the Midlands, and more rows of dark little houses were erected, and more workers came from Wales and Lancashire. A mine was opened at Page Bank (ten lives were lost in a pit fire here in 1858), and a new pit was sunk at Tudhoe in the 1880s . The latter resulted in colliery workers' houses springing up on the main Durham Road. Slightly before that, in the 1860s, a rather advanced area of working class housing had been erected at Tudhoe Grange, built by Marmaduke Salvin to house local workers. These houses were, unusually, semi-detached and arranged in a chequerboard layout, very much in contrast to the dreary terraces that were then the standard.

Although these days of rapid industrialisation and rapid growth of population were days of ignorance and squalor, they also saw the 19th-century drive forward in education and religion. St Paul’s Church was built in Spennymoor, previous to that a National School was built and opened in 1841, and all through these formative years the nonconformist churches combined welfare work with prayer. An era of prosperity dawned in the 1860s and 1870s when the miners were earning £1 a day. Spennymoor was ringed with collieries, black furnaces and coke ovens. The new prosperity showed itself in the building of better houses and in the opening of the Co-operative stores. The comparative isolation of its moorland situation ended too, with the opening of a branch railway from the main line at Ferryhill in 1876.

But, as always in industrial life, boom was followed by ‘bust’ or ‘near bust’, and by 1879 miners wages were down to 4s 9d a day, and those of ironworkers to a mere 3s. On top of these economic misfortunes came the terrible explosion at Tudhoe Colliery in 1882 when 37 lives were lost. A strike that lasted 13 weeks paralysed the area in 1892, although out of the enforced idleness came foundations of new growth, for the machinery at the Tudhoe Ironworks was then renovated and a new mill laid down. The works then possessed the largest mill in Europe, capable of rolling plates up to 13 feet in width.

This is part of a series of projects, others are listed below:

Spennymoor (Part 1) - earliest days and troubled years

Spennymoor (Part 3) - into the 20th century

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