Handball game turned colliery into brickworks (From Durham Times)

Handball game turned colliery into brickworks

1:54pm Friday 4th September 2009

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WHEN Tom Barker clinched victory in front of 7,000 people in a handball championship, it was to change the face of Bowburn.

For the local man took his winnings and invested them to create a brickworks on the site of Bowburn’s first colliery, now wood and scrub just north of Coxhoe.

The handball championship had been held in a ball court behind Coxhoe’s Railway Hotel – and the crowd of about 7,000 had gathered to see Barker defeat Dan Kelly, of Tow Law, who was then the reigning world champion.

Barker’s Bowburn Brick Works operated into the early decades of the 20th century, and the old clay pits associated with the works can still be seen.

Bowburn’s first colliery had opened in 1840 and, by the time it was abandoned in the 1860s, Bowburn was still little more than a hamlet.

In truth, it was the second Bowburn Colliery that really brought about the area’s growth and development.

The colliery owners were Bell Brothers Ltd, an ironmaking company from Middlesbrough, which started mining near Bowburn hamlet in 1908. The company already owned Tursdale Colliery, established a little further south, back in 1859.

It was intended to call Bowburn Colliery New Tursdale, and it is possible that the new mining village could also have acquired that name.

In the end, both colliery and village took the name Bowburn.

From about 1900, Bell Brothers bought farms and farmland in the area for developing a colliery and village.

Among the farmhouses bought was a property called Bowburn House, and the colliery opened on land immediately to its south.

Neither house nor colliery can be seen today, as the North and South industrial estates now respectively occupy the sites.

For many Bowburn miners, one particular attraction was the racecourse at Shincliffe.

This opened in 1895 and stood near Shincliffe Bank Top railway station, now a private house just north of Bowburn.

Sadly, the race meetings ceased at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and were never revived, but remnants of the concrete grandstand remained until demolition in 1999.

On March 20, 1912, during a minimum wage strike, the race meeting at Shincliffe was called off because of cancelled trains.

It was a great disappointment to many Durham miners, and Bowburn inhabitants hit upon the idea of racing pit ponies on a field behind the colliery.

Money raised by the event went towards impoverished miners.

When another industrial dispute arose in 1921, resulting from the post-war wage cuts, similar fundraising races were held that May, but the strike was over by July.

Bell Brothers played a big part in the development of the pit village, providing land and finance for the development of housing and a school.

Early colliery streets in Bowburn included Clarence Street, Steavenson Street and other housing developments along Durham Road.

Steavenson Street was named after the Bell Brothers’ colliery agent and engineer.

A county school (now the junior school) was opened in 1909, in Wylam Street, on land donated by the firm. The designer was HT Gradon, who built Durham Miners’ Hall at Redhills.

In the previous year, a Primitive Methodist chapel built of iron was opened in Durham Road West, and was followed in the same road by the Wesleyan chapel near Bowburn Beck, which was opened by Lady Bell in 1910.

By this time, Bowburn was home to more than 100 houses and a population of about 1,200.

By 1941, Bowburn residents had found a new form of entertainment in the form of the Crown Cinema, in Durham Road, which opened in 1941.

In its later days, it served as a bingo hall and eventually closed in 1996. It was demolished in 2002.

Bell Brothers’ concerns at Bowburn Colliery were taken over in 1923 by the Middlesbrough steel firm of Dorman Long, which later gained fame for building the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Following nationalisation in 1947, the colliery was taken over by the National Coal Board.

The NCB also acquired RACING VIEW: The old Shincliffe grandstand, courtesy of Michael Richardson Bowburn Grange, a former colliery agent’s house dating from the 1920s that stood to the east of Bowburn. The house was acquired by Ramside estates in the 1960s, and is now better known as Bowburn Hall Hotel.

East of the hall, across the motorway towards Quarrington, lies a prominent magnesian limestone hill called the Heugh.

This marks the very edge of the limestone region that dominates the eastern part of County Durham, and is an extensively quarried area.

Quarrying continues in the area to this day, but coal mining ceased with the closure of Bowburn colliery in July 1967.

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