Ushaw Moor Memories

Part 2of 2

Goodbye to New Brancepeth. Broadgate was all about innocence, tiddlers and sunshine. Sixty or so yards up the road, on the left, was Brough’s shop; as others have already given in a mention I will merely state that my late aunt, Mrs Ethel Hodgson [maiden name Hope], worked there for a time as a shop assistant. Her husband Arthur did the same before working at Ushaw Moor Colliery. He eventually became a Deputy/shotfirer.

Opposite Brough’s was The Albion pub. My late stepfather once told me that one day two workers at Ushaw Moor Colliery ran from the colliery to that pub to inform “Dicky” Hope [who was having his lunch and was apparently the most accessible official at that moment] that a very unfortunate young man had tragically died at the colliery. I imagine that this was before 1950. Dick had the duty of dealing with the immediate aftermath of that tragedy. I am sure that some of the old miners will know the details of that incident. It was not a question of an accident at the pit.

Part one of two

Leaving Surrey in 2006 and armed with a bottle of cherry aid, I hit the deck at the bottom of Unthank Terrace, New Brancepeth, in 1952. I first of all noticed a really big bolder on what looked almost like a bombsite. Had that got something to do with post war reconstruction? I thought that I might be able to pose that question to a small boy [me] because it was a Saturday and junior school was out. I did not spot myself however and guessed that my younger version was playing cowboys and Indians not far from Rock Terrace. I would not in any case have known what reconstruction meant. There was a church on the right, a few yards further up from the boulder; for some reason I remembered the mild controversy when a young girl of that church formed a relationship with a much older man. Some members of society cannot handle anything but the norm, but that is one for the sociologists.

I could not fail to see the flying buckets of coal high up in the sky, seemingly coming to and from New Brancepeth Colliery. I am now aware that a few years earlier, during the war, such a flying bucket crashed into a house. Luckily no one was killed.