She’s Fired

St Michael and All Angels Church Houghton-le-Spring

4/5

IT’S not often that I sit in a church. It’s even less often that I do so supping a glass of Newcastle Brown ale. 

I did though while watching the musical show She’s Fired in St Michael and All Angels Church  as part of the Houghton-le-Spring Feast, the annual 10-day event in the former mining community five miles from Seaham.

Anyone deducing from the show’s title that it  must be about an unjustly sacked woman worker would be wrong because She’s Fired is about a colliery disaster in September 1880, when a pit explosion in the town of Seaham on the north-east coast killed 164 men and boys. 

Eighty-one  pit ponies expired too, which caused the colliery owner much distress, as miners were easy to replace but ponies had to be bought at a much higher price.

“She’s fired,” were the words which spread through the community to inform people there had been an explosion.

The tragedy got brief mention in some of the national press, which failed to mention that dozens of miners were trapped underground and could have been rescued. But a fire was raging, endangering the pit’s lucrative coal reserves and it was decided to seal off the affected seam to deny oxygen to the fire, which would save the reserves. And kill the trapped miners.

The pit’s owner was Lord Londonderry, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Nowt new there then.

How can a musical which includes some eye-watering comedy be based on such a tragedy and such a crime? The answer is that the show was written and performed by north-eastern former miners and folk musicians and they certainly know what they’re doing. 

There are tears mingled in with the laughter. A miner who could have escaped stayed with a trapped 10-year-old boy — the marvellous Toby Hodgson (pictured) knowing his decision guaranteed his own death. 

He wrote in chalk on a plank: “I’m staying with the bairn,” then cradled him in his arms until the end came. Some of the scrawled messages left by trapped miners can still be seen today in a Seaham churchyard.

A story in the Times of the period is read out. Coal, it points out, made Britain great. It powered the industrial revolution. It fuelled mills, ships and trains. 

So important was coal that Lord Londonderry and his managers sealed the trapped men and boys in to save the reserves.

The show poses the question: “What kind of people put coal before men?” 

It’s a rhetorical question of course. We know the answer. The same people who today transfer money from the poor to the rich, leaving Britain’s worst-off to rely on foodbanks, along with  the multi millionaires who grow wealthy on the privatisation of our NHS.

She’s Fired is at Sedgefield Parish Hall, County Durham, on Saturday November 8, details: (01740) 621-347 and it will play at The Sage in Gateshead on March 14 next year. 

Peter Lazenby