Mr Robert Reay

I’ve been sat here in my kitchen ‘office’ during lockdown doing a bit of time travelling for the County Archives. So no, they didn’t give me a Marty McFly DeLorean or that spinning thing Hermione Grainger has, or even an H.G. Wells time machine, but they did give me two beautiful hours in the company of Mr Robert Reay and his life memories, as recorded back in 1971 when he was 78 years old. In my efforts to transcribe these tapes, I have been to another time and place – time travelling between the cups of coffee and emails to a mining heritage so familiar to me as a miner’s daughter and yet so removed from the modern world in which we live.

In 1971 Mr Reay recorded his memories of living at Coxlodge, Northumberland (now City of Newcastle Upon Tyne) and working at Hazlerigg mine for the County Archivist, Mr Robin Gard in the front room of Mr Reay’s house at 24 Mary Agnes Street, Coxlodge. His soft Pitman accent, alive with Northumbrian tones and rolling ‘r’s invites us into the near past to explore the everyday lives of our colliery forebearers.

Working man and boy in the mines, Mr Reay relates his memories of over 50 years of unprecedented change in the colliery villages of south east Northumberland. He recalls his life in vivid colour, leading us through the day-to-day of the colliery before and just after the First World War, describing the advent of mechanisation and the hopes of a new dawn that nationalisation promised. Through his warm dusty words we meet this mother and glimpse the difficult life a colliery wife led and his father who links us to earlier times in the mines of Seaton Delaval and Seghill. He shows us the shadows of men and boys in the underground lamp light, working along side him to ‘hew’ (hand digging coal) and ‘put’ (transporting tubs of coal from the coal face) the black gold that fuelled England’s place in the world.

We see the lost streets of Coxlodge Colliery through Mr Reay’s bright descriptions of the buildings and people that made up this thriving village community. I had to go! Armed with an old map and sat-nav, I spent an afternoon circling the streets and avenues of a now suburban Coxlodge, imagining the farms, the brickyard, the fields, the mine yards, the stone quarry and the rows of colliery dwellings that vanished under the spread of ’50s and ’60s housing development. Glimpses of old Coxlodge are still there if you are willing to look. Tantalising road names that echo earlier days – Regent Farm Road and Jubilee Road, reminders of the Regent and Jubilee pits sunk in the early 19th century and heralding the start of Coxlodge village. The Trap, the Coxlodge Inn public house, is still there on Kenton Road; a grand old establishment that was in Mr Reay’s earlier days the life blood of the colliery community, now shut up and showing signs of vandalisation and decay. And then, surprisingly and delightfully, tucked away amongst Coxlodge’s anonymous ’60s and ’70s developments, hidden from the modern world by the back wall of St Nicholas’ Hospital, is Mary Agnes Street, Mr Reay’s colliery row home from boyhood. There stands this neat little terrace, unchanged as the concrete world of the Newcastle’s suburbs engulfed it and looking very much like it probably did on that day back in 1971 that the County Activist and tape recorder came to call. A pocket of colliery history in the midst of a rainy suburban landscape – I could almost see the young Mr Reay racing through his front door, hoping to beat his brothers home to be first in the tin bath – or wiping tired sleep from his eyes as he set off in the early morning with bottle and bait in hand to catch the wagon-way down to Hazlerigg mine. And in concluding my Coxlodge adventure, it was lovely to realise that the final words on the tape, Mr Reay’s parting hopes, came true – Mary Agnes Street was reprieved from demolition to survive as a token of the world he knew.

So thank you Mr Robert Reay, miner of Coxlodge, for the chance to spend some time in your world. It’s 50 years since that tape recorder clicked on to record your words. We became such good friends, I couldn’t bring myself to look up the day you passed away – but bless you Mr Reay and know that your memories of Coxlodge and Hazlerigg, Seaton Delaval and Seghill are cherished in the County Archives so that the world you knew stays with us; a heritage in which we are proud.