BOOKS & ARTS
Mining art
Girls from the black stuff
Laura Gascoigne
Breaking Ground – Women of the
Northern Coalfields
Mining Art Gallery, Bishop Auckland,
until 24 March 2019‘They did not look like women, or at least
a stranger new to the district might easily
have been misled by their appearance, as
they stood together in a group, by the pit’s
mouth.’ As opening sentences go this is a
cracker, but few modern readers of Frances
Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s
get far beyond it because the novel’s charac-
ters speak in a Lancashire dialect that makes
Mark Twain’s Huck Finn sound like a Har-
vard preppy. In real life, though, it wasn’t the
Lancashire pit girls’ lingo that put contempo-
raries off so much as their costume. For these‘pit brow lasses’, as they were known around
Wigan, strutted about in the Victorian era
wearing what the Manchester Guardian fas-
tidiously described as ‘the article of clothing
which women ought only to wear in a figure
of speech’. Trousers!
The last pit brow lass retired in the 1970s,
but for more than a century before that
the women of the northern coalfields had
pulled their financial weight by working
at the pit mouth emptying coal tubs, sort-
ing coal and shifting it on to wagons. Until
the passing of the 1842 Mines and Collier-
ies Act, women had worked down the mines
themselves as ‘hurriers’ hauling coal to the
pit bottom, stripped to the waist like their
menfolk when the heat was unbearable.
Curiously, toplessness seems to have caused
less offence to Victorian sensibilities than
trousers which, as Lord Ashley reported
during the parliamentary inquiry leading to
the Act, were sometimes holed at the crotch
‘by the chain passing high up between the
legs... Any sight more disgustingly indecent‘Pit Brow Lasses’, 2015, by David Venables© THE ARTIST’S ESTATE
the telling impact of voices talking straight
to mike. Patricia Raybon and her daughter
Alana were telling Mike Wooldridge how
they have learnt to live with their profound
religious differences after years of conflict.
Patricia is a deeply committed Christian,
who brought Alana up in Colorado to attend
church, say grace before meals, believe in the
salvation of Christ. ‘It’s the definition of who
I am,’ she said, ‘and it defines everything I do.’
As a teenager, though, Alana found her-
self uncomfortable at church services and
then came across verses in the Bible that
said: ‘Slaves should obey their master.’ As
the daughter of an African-American moth-
er, she was horrified. At first she joined the
Nation of Islam and began wearing the
hijab. She said it made her feel ‘safer’ if she
dressed modestly. For Patricia, though, it
produced echoes of discrimination on the
school bus, when no one would sit next to
her, or on family picnics, when the white
families would leave as soon as the black
families arrived at the site. She feared that
if she went out with Alana in her hijab she
would get the same glances. Then Alana met
her future husband, also a Muslim convert,
and Patricia realised there was no possibil-
ity of Alana giving up her Muslim faith. They
could not talk without arguing.
Now, though, they’ve published a book,
letters written to each other that put down in
words the things that matter most to each of
them. For the first time they have been able
to talk to each other about what they believe
without coming to an impasse, hitting that
wall of incomprehension. ‘We’ve been forced
to confront each other’s beliefs,’ says Patri-
cia. The process has been so cathartic that
Alana has moved back to Colorado and is
living with her parents. They continue to say
grace before meals to God while their daugh-
ter, son-in-law and three grandchildren pray
to Allah — at the same table. A family story
told with insight, economy and purpose.
Turbulence on Radio 4 (produced by
Justine Willett) is a series of 12 short stories
by David Szalay, all set on plane journeys.
Not much liking air travel, I was intrigued
by the premise and the first story did not
disappoint, capturing that altered state
which being cooped up in a silver-lined cap-
sule seems to invoke. Read by Sara Kes-
telman, it takes us on a short-haul flight
from London to Madrid as a mother leaves
behind her son, who’s been ill with cancer.
She begins to feel profoundly uneasy as the
plane leaves the ground, ‘the tightly packed
fabric of the world seemed to loosen... Her
thoughts started to seem like things that
were actually happening.’ We have to wait
a whole week before we can fly on from
Madrid to Dakar.
Alana joined the Nation of Islam and
began wearing the hijab. She said it
made her feel ‘safer’