Coalfield Stories by Side Gallery & Cinema

COALFIELD STORIES spans 115 years from three archives - the AmberSide Collection, Northeast Film Archive (NEFA) and the British Film Institute (BFI). Each film broadens the perspective on the work and life above and below ground across the Durham Coalfields while celebrating the communities that grew around the industry. In addition, we are sharing work by local filmmakers and young people, evoking a new future.

This work was originally shared at our pop-up cinema as part of ‘The Miners’ Picnic’ - a celebration of music, heritage and community held at the former Easington pit site which is now nature reserve at Easington Colliery. The pop-up cinema and multimedia magazine are made possible by funding from the BFI New Directions fund.

Miners Picnic 2021 © Paul Alexander Knox Cover Image © Keith Pattison 1984 / Paul Alexander Knox 2017

AMBER FILM AND PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTIVE We are honoured to present this programme as the celebration of our 40 year collaboration with the community of Easington and the wider Durham Coal Fields. This sustained relationship between the collective of filmmakers and a community is wholly unique and one we are deeply proud of. Since 1982 in the Durham Coalfield area, we have worked with the community to: - Commission 14 films including three award winning feature length films and documentaries -

Commission 24 photographic projects including internationally renowned Coal Coast by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

Acquisition 3 bodies of work including Keith Pattison’s ‘EASINGTON 1984’

Share a new film commissioned by the National Trust WHAT HAPPENED HERE premiered at the Miners’ Picnic 2021

With this multimedia magazine, we are threading together the films and the photographic bodies of work that informed them.

CONTENTS 16 - 11 What Happened Here Amber Last Shift Aidan Doyle

2021

12 - 15 16 - 19

Black Diamonds Day in the Life of a Coalminer Nines was standing Dawdon Colliery

BFI BFI BFI NEFA

1904 1910 1950 1963

Song for Billy Coal Coast

Amber 2017 Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

20 - 31

Coalfield Trilogy

The Scar Easington 1984

Amber Keith Pattison

1997

Like Father Horden Victory Club

Amber Martin Figura

2001

Shooting Magpies Fathers

Amber Peter Fryer

2005

32 - 35 It’s the Pits Amber 1995 Post Industrial Richard Grassick 36 - 45 Arise - A Film Poem Carl Joyce 2019 The School on Seaside Lane Carl Joyce 2021 Durham Coalfield John Davies Touching the Past. Barn at Easington/Amber 2018 Easington: A Mining Village Bruce Rae Hollowed Ground Lonely tower 2019 Easington: People: Place: Heritage AmberSide Education 46 - 49

Gala Day. John Irvin Of Whole Heart Cometh Hope Amber

1963 2018

WHAT HAPPENED HERE AMBER FILMS

2021

72 mins

On August 25th, months into the miners’ strike of 1984-’85, 2,000 police descended on this small colliery village with the aim of getting one man across the picket line. Easington became a village of occupation. In 2019 Amber were invited to take part in the National Trust’s People’s Landscapes programme. This was an opportunity to re-engage with the ex-pit villages of East Durham and in particular Easington Colliery. Thirty-five years later, on August 24th 2019, Amber helped stage a Miners Picnic to remember with pride the efforts the people of Easington had made to save their jobs and protect their community.

‘What Happened Here’ is the film that came out of this year long engagement. It makes extensive use of photographs by Keith Pattison, Isabela Jedrzejczyk, Aidan Doyle and John Davies and film footage that Amber shot in Easington and Durham during the strike and its aftermath. It looks at what happened during the strike through the eyes of the community itself and what has happened to the community since.. image opposite © Keith Pattison

*****DVD & ONLINE RENTAL COMING SOON *****

‘If you have had this in your community, how on earth do you ever square it again? When you have been at war like this? Then when it is over, back to normal?’

- Charlie Hardwick discussing Easington Miners Strike We met with community members and filmmakers to share a preview of the film and a conversation. Recorded via Zoom, October 15th, 2020 as part of (Off) Side Cinema’s - Workshop Season image opposite © Keith Pattison

THE LAST DAYS AIDAN DOYLE

“With the closure of Ellington, coal mining in the North East is finished. The scars in the landscape, through which any community recognises its history, are rapidly disappearing, but for mining they only ever indicated a world of work carried out in unseen places.” Aidan Doyle In the early 1990s Aidan Doyle visited the remaining collieries that ran along the Durham and Northumberland coast, documenting the last days of this lost territory. He documented the demolition of Easington mine. The Last Days is featured in WHAT HAPPENED HERE.

images ©Aidan Doyle

ARCHIVE FILMS British Film Institute North East Film Archive We were excited to share the following four films from both the national and regional archives that reflect life both above and below the ground in a colliery village. BLACK DIAMONDS, filmed 1904 show the to share one of the first known representations of coal mining on film. This rare and remarkable film shows the men and boys hauling the tubs of coal while the girls and women sort through. This is followed on by DAY IN THE LIFE OF A COAL MINER from 1910 which shows dramatic recreations of the men working the cramped coal face.

Each film title will be hyperlinked to the location online if currently available. 12

BLACK DIAMONDS - 1904 This is one of the earliest surviving films featuring the workings and working conditions of British mining industry, using constructed narrative ‘documentary’ technique, this extraordinary film is tragically incomplete but the 2 remaining sections , ‘‘Hauling the Tubs’ and ‘Pit Brow Girls Sorting’ do much to show the unbefore seen world of mining and a revolutionary approach to documentary film. Variants of the same story would be told in greater depth by later generations of filmmakers, who would unconsciously echo this film’s final shot, picturing the pithead winding gear from a dramatic low angle.

NINES WAS STANDING - 1950 The title might need explaining nowadays. To anyone well-up on mining then it needed none. Coalfaces were customarily referred to by numbers, expressed in the plural. ‘Standing’ was the adjective applied to them when at an unproductive halt. So at the start of this ‘story documentary’, we find a substantially pre-mechanised, behind-target face, anxious to yield “more coal and some new ideas for getting it”. The point being to publicise a recently-built vehicle for sharing ideas - and grievances. Most pits had a Consultative Committee in place by the end of 1947, with staff, union and management representatives,and advisory (not binding) powers.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A COAL MINER - 1910 This early example of an ‘interest’ film from Charles Urban’s Kineto company captures the daily routine of the average coal miner, from his early-morning goodbyes through the full day’s work and eventual evening journey home. It’s now regarded as a key film in the development of the British documentary, long before the term was coined, for its utilisation of staged sequences and the creative application of contrasts and intertitles, in a manner familiar to the later lexicon of documentary cinema

DAWDON COLLIERY - 1963 This candid, observational Tyne Tees TV news feature powerfully communicates the raw experience of a pitman’s shift at Dawdon Colliery in 1967 – the heat, dirt, cramped tunnels and deafening noise of coal-cutting machines and conveyors. Without commentary, this film recalls a vanished era of courage and camaraderie for the miners working in hellish conditions two miles out and 1,000 feet below the North Sea, off the Durham coastline.

SONG FOR BILLY AMBER Films

2017

17 min

A meditation on a lost era and the regenerative power of the sea, Song For Billy grew out of the haunting photographs of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photography project The Coal Coast. The wreckage of the mining industry that defined a culture and shaped the communities of the north eastern coast of England lay strewn across its beaches, discarded ‘memorabilia’ erupting from the plateaux of colliery waste. The clues embedded in the chemically coloured landscape lead to the vivid re-enacting of the death of a young coal miner Billy, by his workmate. The story inspired the New York based percussion ensemble So Percussion, who together with Amber created the film’s cathartic music. 16

*****DVD & ONLINE RENTAL COMING SOON *****

THE COAL COAST Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Landscapes exploring the post-industrial legacy of mining on the Durham coastline, part of Side’s ‘Coalfield Stories’ programme of production, it was developed between 1998 – 2002. Revealing ‘a terrible beauty’, the work was Sirkka’s first exhibition of colour photographs, a move necessary to capture the extraordinarily vivid colours created in part by chemical pollution. She had been led to a documentation of the beaches by the ex-miners of Easington’s allotments, who she was initially photographing. The exhibition was first shown at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in 2003. It was published in book form (currently out of print) and in 2015 Amber began work on a photo film of the Coal Coast images. Song for Billy was developed in 2016 as a collaboration with the New York group So Percussion. images © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

THE SCAR Amber Films, 114 mins, 1997 The first film in Amber’s coalfield trilogy, exploring women’s lives in the aftermath of the last colliery closures in East Durham. Rooted in the relationships Amber made in the coalfield in the early 80s, the film drew on the participation of a number of the women involved in the Support Groups during the Miners’ Strike. Like many of these, May Murton (Charlie Hardwick) feels like she has been left to clean up the mess: the failure of a marriage , community disintegration and teenage children (Darren Bell and Katja Roberts) increasingly out of control. Her estranged husband (Brian Hogg) has taken up residence in the allotments. The manager of an open cast coal mine (Bill Speed) meets her at a dance, the night before the Miners’ Gala 20

COALFIELD TRILOGY A series of feature films grown from Amber’s involvement with the coalfields, particularly Easington Colliery, which illuminate the complex lives of those left in the wake of the mine closures and shifting socioeconomic tides: THE SCAR, 1997 Exploration of women’s lives in the aftermath of the last colliery closures in East Durham. LIKE FATHER, 2001 Exploration of the lives of a grandfather, father and son as they come to terms with the post-pit closure landscape of East Durham. SHOOTING MAGPIES, 2005 The final feature drama explores the impact of heroin in East Durham after pit closures.

DVD can be purchased HERE and the film rented online HERE

EASINGTON 1984 Keith Pattison

A portrait of the East Durham colliery village under police siege, at the height of the Miners’ Strike. Pattison continued the documentation and published it as No Redemption in 2010. Pattison secured funding from Artists’ Agency (now Helix Arts) to do a month long photographic residency in the East Durham colliery village of Easington, when the temperature of the Miners’ Strike was a raised by the return to work there of Paul Wilkinson. The images have become iconic, influencing many visualisations of the strike. Side Gallery purchased a set of prints and toured them extensively during the strike. Huw Beynon wrote the text for a booklet of Pattison’s photographs, published by AmberSide and distributed during the Strike. Images © Keith Pattison

LIKE FATHER Amber Films, 2001 94 mins The last pits have closed, the redundancy money has been spent and a family is in crisis. 70 year old pigeon man Arthur Elliott is losing his allotment to the local authority’s coastal redevelopment scheme. Working as a trumpeter, teacher, club singer and club act agent, his son, 40 year old ex-miner Joe can just about scrape a living, but his marriage is breaking up. 10 year old Michael is left to grapple with his own realities as coalfield culture begins to disintegrate. Three generations struggle to come to terms with the past and find the ties that still bind them; three worlds unfold against the rich and extraordinary backdrop of East Durham.

The stories around which the film was developed originated in actual lives and the unfolding of real events. Incorporating documentary situations, the film draws strong performances from local people with no previous acting experience: Ned Kelly as Arthur, Jonathon Dent as Michael and Joe Armstrong, himself an ex-miner, both taking the role of Joe and writing the brass band suite which features in the film.

DVD can be purchased HERE and the film rented online HERE

HORDEN VICTORY CLUB Martin Figura

A workingmen’s club in Horden, County Durham, and its annual Leek Show documented in 2000 as part of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories programme of production. The club was used as a location in the making of Like Father. The Amber filmmakers were interested in the way it thrived in the heart of an economically depressed ex-colliery town. Side Gallery approached Figura to explore this further. The commission was supported through a Year of the Artist residency and the photographs were first shown at the club in 2001. images © Martin Figura

SHOOTING MAGPIES Amber Films 2001 RATING:15 In the ex-colliery villages of East Durham, there is an abyss: falling down is an easy thing. In a dangerous landscape, Barry, 40-year-old ex-youth worker, occasional labourer, wryly comic storyteller and single father, watches out for his 12-year-old son Callum. His eye is drawn to Emma, a 22-year-old with two children, Jade, 7 and Shannon, 4. Barry likes to help, likes kids and likes Emma. But Emma has her own worries.

The film follows her personal journey as she single-mindedly tries to get her partner Darren off heroin: as she acquires the cocktail of drugs that will see him through his ‘rattle’ and takes him to ‘The Breakies’, a bleakly isolated collection of fishing huts, out beyond the steelworks, at the mouth of the Tees. And it follows Barry, Jade, Shannon and Callum in tow, picking up the pieces in a community that has moved further and further away from the economic mainstream. The abyss yawns and Barry negotiates the difficult terrain opening up from his own serious misjudgements. Watched by the disapproving Callum, his attempts to help Emma draw him ever closer to the edge.

DVD can be purchased HERE and the film rented online HERE

FATHERS Peter Fryer

The lives of two fathers in Seaham, County Durham, undertaking primary childcare responsibilities after the breakdown of a relationship. Developed between 1998 and 2000. Developed as part of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories series commissions, this collaboration between Fryer and writer Graeme Rigby grew initially out of Amber’s research as part of the development of the feature film, Like Father, with which both Barry Gough and Paul Heron helped. Their relationships with their children have been affected by both the opportunities and the difficulties presented by unemployment. Over a two year period, they allowed Fryer and Rigby to work alongside them and their families to develop this documentation of their lives. Barry Gough and his son Callum later participated in Shooting Magpies, the third feature film in Amber’s coalfield trilogy. images © Peter Fryer

IT’S THE PITS Amber Films 1995

32 min

A video documentary made with youth workers and young people, looking at the lives of young people in East Durham and the lack of facilities for them after the closure of the area’s last coal mines. Amber was invited by youth workers to make the video, a key figure among them being Barry Gough, who went on to help in the making of The Scar (1997) and Like Father (2001). For one of Side Gallery’s Coalfield Stories exhibitions, he and fellow Seaham single parent father Paul Heron, collaborated with photographer Peter Fryer and writer Graeme Rigby on the development of Fathers (2001). He and his son Callum then took on lead roles in the film Shooting Magpies (2005), which completed Amber’s coalfield trilogy. Barry’s daughter Aimee helped photographer Karen Robinson develop her Coalfield Stories project All Dressed Up (2005). 32

POST INDUSTRIAL Richard Grassick The lives of four East Durham ex-miners and their families, 1998 to 2004, compared with postindustrial experience in Bremerhaven, Germany, developed as part of Coalfield Stories. Together with Peter Fryer’s Fathers, Dean Chapman’s Shifting Ground and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s The Coal Coast, this was one of the works which initiated the Coalfield Stories series of commissions. Recognising the need to redevelop photography production in the absence of funding, the four photographers agreed to set these connected projects away. Living himself between Bremen and NE England, Grassick explored the common themes and differing social approached that have distinguished the ways in which Britain and Germany have handled post-industrial change. images © Richard Grassick

ARISE - A FILM POEM CARL JOYCE

2019

10 min

Building on an emotive yet methodical poem by Paul Summers, Carl Joyce’s shortfilm provides a whistle-stop tour of the last 40 years, summarising generations of heartbreak and suffering in the process. The ghosts of the miners’ strike loom large, as Summers’ words conjure up memories of an ill-fated fight against the merciless policies of Margaret Thatcher – while Joyce pairs this with the terraced skeletons of Northern pit villages that now stand as a legacy to that defeat.

CARL JOYCE

Trailer

2021

5min

In November 2020 Carl Joyce, filmmaker and photographer, was granted the first AmberSide Trust commission. The project aims to engage with the local community to explore and creatively respond to issues around the demolition of Easington Colliery Primary School. A Grade II listed building, the former Infant School has stood on the site for over 100 years. Closed for 23 years, former pupils and local residents have been sharing memories and photographs of the school via social media. The Amber Collective has a long and deep rooted relationship with Easington; including photographic work showing the town before the Miner’s Strike 1984/85, numerous films. This commission is an opportunity to connect with the community and explore the iconic building in the town. This work is ongoing.

THE SCHOOL ON SEASIDE LANE

DURHAM COALFIELD John Davies

A landscape survey exploring the impact of the industry on the working coalfield. It was commissioned and first shown in 1983 and toured extensively during the Miners’ Strike. The project was a collaboration with the writer Graeme Rigby and focused on the, then, 13 working collieries, major opencast mines and, to a lesser extent, the drift mines and seacoal gatherers. Davies is a landscape photographer who was born in the Durham Coalfield. Interested in visual stories about process, change, transformation, the work represented a shift for him into a detailed engagement with the industrial landscape. For Amber / Side Gallery the commission formed part of a wider engagement with coalfield concerns in the build-up to the strike, which included Bruce Rae’s Easington: A Mining Village and Amber Current Affairs Unit’s News from Durham / Where Are We Going? images © John Davies

TOUCHING THE PAST AMBER Films/ Barn at Easington 2018

39 min

A record of the children’s journey of discovery and their engagement both with the landscape and social history of Hawthorn Dene but also their connection with older people in their community who brought knowledge and personal memories of the life of the Dene over the last 100 years. This journey was very much led by the children’s curiosity and imagination. The film captures this from the very start as the children explore the wild wooded valley with no prior knowledge, coming upon mysterious remnants of the past which trigger their imagination and questions. These questions are gradually answered in the course of the project through their interaction both with the community members and the National Trust guides and through the use of Archive photographs and maps. 40

The Barn collaborated on this project with Amber filmmaker Ellin Hare and the AmberSide Education. Amber have a long history of working on the East Durham Coast since before, during and after the Miners Strike of ’84 and the subsequent pit closures and had many valuable contacts with local people, which fed into the project. The project ran over a year with the Easington Guides and Brownies, the National Trust rangers, Easington Colliery Heritage Group and local residents taking part. It resulted in a film , Touching the Past, an Exhibition of the girl’s photography and several celebratory events where the participants and members of the public met and enjoyed sharing the memories evoked. The project was funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, County Durham Community Foundation, Seedbed Trust and the National Trust.

EASINGTON: A MINING VILLAGE Bruce Rae In the build-up to the Miners’ Strike of 1984, Rae was commissioned to develop this portrait of Easington Colliery in County Durham. He worked with the writer Paul Rutishauser. Rae and Rutishauser spent a month in Easington in February 1984, taking photographs, talking to people and taping interviews. The work’s stated aims were ‘to try and describe the extent to which a community has been determined by an industry and the vulnerability of its way of life to decisions taken elsewhere about that industry’s future.’ Toured extensively during the strike with John Davies’ Durham Coalfield, it formed part of a wider engagement with coalfield concerns that also included Amber Current Affairs Unit’s News from Durham / Where Are We Going? and then Why Support the Miners? as well as the touring and publication of Keith Pattison’s Easington, August 1984. images © Bruce Rae

HOLLOWED GROUND - The People of the Durham Coalfield A feature length documentary film, currently in production LONELY TOWER 2019

11 min

What is identity & where does it come from? In the 19th Century, County Durham in North East England, saw its population explode as mine workers and their families flooded into the area in search of work. Built on coal, these pit towns and villages forged their own unique identity, absorbing the varied cultures that came with these immigrants to create something new and unique. Shared community, struggle, despair and resilience has meant that the County Durham Coalfield story is one of enduring dignity, pride and hope for a better future. 44

AmberSide Education

19 min

Pupils at Easington Colliery Primary School discover and record Easington’s rich mining heritage on a journey inspired by the Amber archive and the stories of local people. Freddie Welsh, one of the ex-miners who came into the school for the project became a key collaborator on Amber’s current film project Song for Billy. AmberSide is proud to partner with many schools accross the region using the AmberSide Collection and other resources as inspiration to develop creative, participative projects teaching documentary skills in photography and filmmaking to engage with local history and cultural heritage.

EASINGTON PEOPLE: PLACES: HERITAGE

MINERS GALA - THEN AND NOW ‘Hosted by the Durham Miners’ Association since 1871, The Big Meeting is a vibrant carnival of hope and unity. It is a living expression of the Durham Miners’ motto – ‘the past we inherit, the future we build’. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.’ Marras, Friends of Durham Miners’ Gala

In the heart of Durham, people from all over the Durham Coalfields meet as their families have done for generations. More than 200,000 people pack the streets of Durham to enjoy the sights and sounds of The Big Meeting as it is called by the locals. Beautiful banners celebrating the region’s working class history are carried through the medieval city to the sound of brass band music, creating a wonderful feel of street theatre and celebration.

We are excited to share GALA DAY, an experimental film (for it’s time) with no commentary, observing the Durham Gala of ’62, from start to finish. Complete with Teddy boys, circles of dancing girls and a very young Tony Benn. The Miners’ Gala was filmed on Saturday 21st July 1962, from dawn to dawn, by three different film crews equipped with 16mm lightweight cameras and tape-recorders. The film was edited at night and weekends for five months in the cutting rooms of the BFI. It was shown to the public at the National Film Theatre in January 1964

The film can be found HERE.

OF WHOLE HEART COMETH HOPE In July 2018 a large collection of women marched in the Durham Miners’ Gala as the first ever all female group affiliated to the Durham Miners Association. This was a hugely important step forward for the recognition of the support women offered during the miners’strikes. However this group of women marched not only for one cause but for many causes, protests and celebrations. Of Whole Heart Cometh Hope - Story of a Womens Banner tells the story of how The Women’s Banner Group came to fruition, displaying the courage, enthusiasm and determination of the women involved in making a statement for women’s rights and equality. The documentary follows the Banner Group from inception through to their epic inaugural Gala Day. A heart warming, emotional and empowering journey. 48

*****DVD & ONLINE RENTAL COMING SOON