| Description | Born 1898 in Rough Lea, Co. Durham. Died Nov 1983. Father a pit deputy. 4 brothers, 3 sisters. Educated at council school and Sunday school. Won scholarship to Grammar School at Bishop Auckland but only stayed for one year (1911 - 1912) as family moved district. Won a two year scholarship to the Labour College, London, 1925 - 1926. Married 1926, one daughter and one adopted son. Lived in Rough Lea; High Grange; Boulby near Staithes (1913); Wylam on Tyne; South Shields (1914 - 1928); London; Taunton.
Coal putter 1913, enlisted in 1917 but never left the training camp; left mining in 1928 when made unemployed; labourer in bacon curing dept and engineering works 1928; in the statistical dept of a Russian trading company; advertising manager for tourists; civil servant.
member of Durham Miners' Association; member of Labour Party; minor novelist; interested in reading, gardening; classical music.
3 main themes:
Life in an early twentieth century North East mining company; worklife in the mining industry; a visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.
Sanitation, housing, parenting, children's games, leisure: quoits, tipcat, gambling, knurr, angling; ancestry, domestic chores and gender roles, discipline in the home, death and funerals, education, local and national politics, moving home, midwifery, trade unionism, Labour College, unemployment, the Minority Movement, Communist party, Methodism, Soviet state, literary endeavours, World War Two WWII and air raids, coke ovens, pollution, technological change in the mining industry, the Sankey Commission, strikes. |