James Joseph Irvine (Autobiography) 1911 1990

A Memory of Tow Law.

Stretching over about a mile on the A68 road to Edinburgh from Darlington, lies the small mining town of Tow Law. Approaching it from Elm Park Road Ends, on a clear day, as you pass the various openings in the terraces of the sandstone houses and cottages, at regular intervals like colour slides, you catch glimpses of the rounded moorlands and hills over and around the Wear Valley.

These glimpses of the brown or purple moorland are the redemption of this land and insignificant little town. Not that it is insignificant to the people who live there because they have, especially the older ones, a fierce loyalty to this place.

Nor to me either, because that is where I was born on October 30th 1911 in one of these same little colliery cottages in Baring Street, now demolished and rebuilt with the grander name of Baring Court.

In the early decades of the 1900's it was a hard place to live in. Tough, because of the harsh slavish work of the pitmen, the quarrymen and the iron workers who with their families made up 90 percent of the 2,500 population. Hard for the women too, who struggled to rear their families, very often large ones, in their one-up, one-down, one tap, one "netty" cottages. How they slaved on their Monday washing days at their great wooden poss sticks and their cast iron mangles with thick wooden rollers.

The smell of carbolic soap, or that hard cheese-like yellow household soap, filled the house with the steam which belched out when they opened their back doors. All their hot water was carried from the big black cauldron which heated upon the coal fire in their one downstairs room which also served as living, dining, washing and bath room. Of course they also had a scullery with one cold tap, and a pantry.

Outside was a back yard laid with lines of bricks, with the coal house and one open sink for every two cottages. Across the black ballast back-road were the “netties” built in pairs, with a connecting ash-pit regularly emptied by mighty men, who heaved shovels day after day, into the carts pulled by docile horses. Nothing much was wasted and even horse droppings were a very valuable commodity for those with allotments rented from the colliery owners for about 6 pence or a shilling a year.

It was a hard town too because of the weather. Old men used to say they had seen snow lying on the ground in every month except August. The cold of this place was legendary! The dry pitmouth humourists said that even the Arctic explorers comforted each other by saying, "By lad a’ bet it's bloody card at Tow La'."
They had never heard of the high altitude 200 mile an hour space winds but they wouldn't have been very impressed any way. Not when they had winds that didn't "gan round yer but stricte through!"

"Why aye man," they'd say with the slow West Durham drawl on the "aye" when they were wishing to impress strangers with the snow blizzards they had experienced-

"Why aye man! many's the time a' went to werk haddin' the telephone wires.".

"Why aye man! - they used to tak' the coffins out o' the upstairs winders, and the grave diggers had to use gelignite to get a stairt with th' graves”

"Why aye man! - Tow La' - it's the healthiest place in the country!"

They were proud of their endurance as they had every right to be. Most families had sledges and even the milkman delivered occasionally from the churn carried on a trap mounted on sledge irons. After the snow blizzards, out came the sledges from the coal houses where they were stored. Cars were few and far between, certainly up to the mid 20's, so that Furnace Bank and Ironworks Road were real Cresta Runs. These hilly roads of black ice on hard packed snow were treacherous for pedestrians and exhilarating venues for "belly flopper" tobogganists who shot down the slope at great speed for about a quarter of a mile as far as the old Slag heaps on the Bridge Inn Road.

Contrary to popular rumour they did have a summer. It was those glorious summer days with the Pennines almost within jumping distance that emptied almost every airless, musty smelling cottage. It was then that the gorse and whin husks popped their seed pods and large red and black butterflies fluttered near the nettles. It was then you saw the pit-men hunkered down beside the old broken down foundry wall for hours puffing away at their short, almost black clay pipes filled with their beloved acrid twist baccy. The fumes from those same pipes were only equalled in pungency by that of old Betsy's billy goat which she had tethered on the close cropped rye grass in the old Foundry.

That old "foundry" was a remnant of the once big Ironworks closed down towards the end of the nineteenth century after about fifty years of work. Now, all that remained were the sprouting slag heaps, the "High Wall" standing up like a massive fortress, several old drifts, and jumbles of huge iron blocks of sandstone or half melted iron stone. The foundry was, in those days, really a tangle of small allotments with a maze of paths through the ubiquitous burtree hedges. Here and there were flat spaces of levelled sand where donkey engines had once stood amidst hillocks of black breeze which lay every where. On these areas of waste land the population of Tow Law found their recreation and exercise. Here a group of sturdy pitmen swung their iron quoits, with the natural rhythmic beauty of strong men, on the waste ground near their terraced homes. On other fairly level areas groups of boys fought with bows and arrows and sometimes stones, or in a slightly more civilised way played football.

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