Pelton Fell
Early Pelton Fell
This map shows the course of the Twizell and the rural nature of the landscape at this time. Pelton Fell Colliery had opened just over a decade previously and is situated in the area of the map marked ‘Township of Edmondsley’.
Pelton Fell in 1915
At the height of coal production in the Durham Coalfield industry and housing have all but erased the rural landscape of less than seventy years previously.
Pelton Fell Colliery
Opened in 1835, Pelton Fell Colliery was one of the earliest on the Twizell. T.H. Hair, making a tour of Durham and Northumberland to sketch the collieries, immortalised the site at a time when there was very little else in the vicinity.
By 1866, Pelton Fell Colliery was one of the largest in northern England, with more than 500 men and boys working there. The previous year, work had begun on the Busty Seam, which produced excellent coal, but was unusually gassy. Safety measures were taken, but in the early morning of Wednesday 31 October 1866, there was a large explosion, which was felt more than two miles from the pit.
Twenty four men and boys were killed in the blast. The youngest were Joseph Gladstone, a trapper, and William Felton, a coupler, both only eleven years old.
Under the Mines Act of 1860, boys could go underground at ten years old, as long as they could read and write. In fact, education was not compulsory until 1880, but the Act encouraged parents to send their children to school, if only so they could work down the pit when they turned ten. The school leaving age was gradually raised and by the time Pelton Fell Colliery closed in the 1960s, boys had to be fifteen before starting work there.
Like most mining villages, Pelton Fell grew substantially in the nineteenth century.
By 1894, the colliery employed 1,550 men and boys, with 210 coke ovens and an output of 2,500 tons of coal per day.
There was also a literary institute, provided by the mine owners in 1889 and supported by subscriptions from the miners themselves. Its facilities included a lecture hall, reading and billiard rooms.
By 1961, Stella Gill boasted a vast array of sidings where coal trains would be marshalled and wagons stored. It was a vital element in the complex system of railways serving the many local coal mines and its large size is an indicator of the scale of mining in the area at this time.
The colliery closed in 1965, at a time when many local pits were closing. The village, however, continued.
Reclamation work was carried out to repair the scars of industry and create a more pleasant environment for future generations.
‘Our Colliery Villages’
On 8 February 1873, The Newcastle Weekly Chronicle published an article on the village as part of a regular ‘Our Colliery Villages’ feature. The journalist’s first impression was “that an earthquake has occurred, riving the village asunder, and at the same time conglomerating into one great pit-heap the upper works of half-a-dozen neighbouring pits”.
He was impressed with the local shops. The main store was rapidly growing, with a turnover of £2,000 per quarter and “there are two good general shops in the same street – which is a sort of high street, and contains free houses – mostly hired by the colliery, and two lubberly pubs, which are driving a vigorous business”.
The houses also drew comment, “perhaps in few colliery villages is there so great a variety of dwellings as in Pelton [Fell]. In one place you see four storey houses, or at least three; but the middle and top storey are reached from the level of the hill side on which they are built, on the north side, where the only entrance to the basement is on the south.
The windows in [the] south east overlook the dene or dell or burn, and so anxious mothers can keep one eye on their washing and the other on the bairns romping in the valley, or playing hide and seek like squirrels amongst the furze and underwood”.