Northumberland Before Tv

A Memory of Earsdon.

I was born in Backworth in 1937 and lived in a large house at the bottom of Percy St until about 1945, i can dimly recall the end of the war but in no great detail. My father was the colliery engineer for the coal mines in that district and in 1946 we moved into another colliey owned house in the ancient village of Earsdon where I went to Earsdon village primary school. I have some fairly clear memories of the very hard winter of 1947, I doubt if anyone who lived through it will ever forget it. Coal mining was the main industry in that area and I can still rememember the names of most of the pits. There were the Maud & the Eccles, the East Holywell, the Rising Sun, the Prosperous, the Church Pit and the Holystone. The whole area was dominated by huge slag heaps, some of them on fire. Looking back now it was a great place for kids to live and we roamed the countryside which apart from the slag heaps was mainly farm land