I took an intercity train to Newcastle and then a local to Pegswood, eighteen miles to the north, where I emerged into more splendid, unseasonal sunshine and hiked a mile or two along an arrowstraight road to Ashington.
Ashington has long called itself the biggest mining village in the world, but there is no mining any more and, with a population of 23,000, it is scarcely a village. It is famous as the birthplace of a slew of footballers Jackie and Bobby Charlton, Jackie Milburn and some forty others skilled enough to play in the first division, a remarkable outpouring for a modest community but I was drawn by something else: the once famous and now largely forgotten pitmen painters.
In 1934, under the direction of an academic and artist from Durham University named Robert Lyon, the town formed a painting club called the Ashington Group, consisting almost exclusively of miners who had never painted in many cases had never seen a real painting before they started gathering in a hut on Monday evenings. They showed an unexpected amount of talent and'carried the name of Ashington over the grey mountains', as a critic for the Guardian (who clearly knew fuckall about football) later put it. In the 1930s and '40s particularly, they attracted huge attention, and were the frequent focus of articles in national papers and art magazines, as well as exhibitions in London and other leading cities. My friend David Cook had an illustrated book by William Feaver called Pitmen Painters, which he had once shown me. The illustrations of the paintings were quite charming, but it was the photographs of burly miners, dressed up in suits and ties and crowded into a little hut, earnestly hunched over easels and drawingboards, that stuck in my mind. I had to see it.
Ashington was nothing like I expected it to be. In the photographs from David's book it appeared to be a straggly, overgrown village, surrounded by filthy waste heaps and layered with smoke from the three local pits, a place of muddy lanes hunched under a perpetual wash of sooty drizzle, but what I found instead was a modern, busy community swimming in clean, clear air. There was even a new business park with fluttering pennants, spindly new trees and an impressive brick gateway on what was clearly reclaimed ground. The main street, Station Road, had been smartly pedestrianized and its many shops appeared to be doing a good trade. It was obvious that there was not a great deal of money in Ashington most of the shops were of the Price Busters/ Superdrug/Wotta Loada Crap variety, their windows papered with strident promises of special offers within but at least they appeared to be thriving in a way that those of Bradford, for instance, were not.
I went to the town hall to ask the way to the site of the oncefamous hut, and set off down Woodhorn Road in search of the old Coop building behind which it had stood. The fame of the Ashington Group, it must be said, rested on a large measure of wellmeaning but faintly objectionable paternalism. Reading the old accounts of their exhibitions in places like London and Bath, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Ashington artists were regarded by critics and other aesthetes rather like Dr Johnson's performing dog: the wonder was not that they did it well but that they did it at all.
Yet the Ashington painters represented only a small fragment of a greater hunger for betterment in places like Ashington, where most people were lucky to come away with more than a few years of primary education. It is quite astonishing, seeing it now, to realize just how rich life was, and how enthusiastically opportunities were seized, in Ashington in the years before the war. At one time the town boasted a philosophical society, with a busy yearround programme of lectures, concerts and evening classes; an operatic society; a dramatic society; a workers' educational association; a miners' welfare institute with workshops and yet more lecture rooms; and gardening clubs, cycling clubs, athletics clubs, and others in similar vein almost beyond counting. Even the workingmen's clubs, of which Ashington boasted twentytwo at its peak, offered libraries and readingrooms for those who craved more than a pint or two of Federation Ale. The town had a thriving theatre, a ballroom, five cinemas, and a concert chamber called the Harmonic Hall. When, in the 1920s, the Bach Choir from Newcastle performed on a Sunday afternoon at the Harmonic Hall, it drew an audience of 2,000. Can you imagine anything remotely like that now?
And then, one by one, they faded away the Thespians, the Operatic Society, the readingrooms and lecture halls. Even the five cinemas all quietly closed their doors. Today the liveliest diversion in Ashington is a Noble's amusement arcade, which I passed now on my way to the Coop building, which wasn't hard to find. At the back of the Coop stood a large, unpaved car park surrounded by a scattering of low buildings a builder's merchants, a boy scout hut, a DHS compound, a Veterans' Institute building made of wood and painted a bright veridian green. I knew from William Feaver's book that the Ashington Group hut had stood beside the Veterans' Institute, but on which side I didn't know and now there was no telling.
The Ashington Group was one of the last local institutions to go, though its decline was slow and painful. Throughout the 1950s, its numbers inexorably fell as the older members died off and younger people decided that it was naff to put on a suit and tie and ponce about with paintboxes. For the last several years, only two surviving members, Oliver Kilbourn and Jack Harrison, regularly showed up on Monday nights. In the summer of 1982, they received a notice that the ground rent on the hut was to be raised from 50p a year to .14. 'That,' as Feaver notes, 'plus the .7 standing quarterly charge for electricity seemed too much.' In October 1983, just short of its fiftieth anniversary and for want of .42 a year in running costs, the Ashington Group was disbanded and the hut pulled down.Now there is nothing to look at but a car park, but the paintings are faithfully preserved in the Woodhorn Colliery Museum another mile or so up Woodhorn Road. I walked there now, past endless ranks of former miners' cottages. The old colliery still looks like a colliery, its brick buildings intact, its old winding wheel hanging in the air like some kind of curious and forlorn fairground ride. Rusting iron tracks still curve across the grounds. But all is quiet now and the marshalling yards have been turned to tidy green lawns. I was almost the only visitor.
The Woodhorn Colliery closed down in 1981, seven years short of its hundredth anniversary. Once it was one of 200 pits in Northumberland, and of some 3,000 in the country as a whole. In the 1920s, at the industry's peak, 1.2 million men worked in British coal mines. Now, at the time of my visit, there were just sixteen working pits in the country and the number employed had fallen by 98 per cent.
All of which seems a little sad until you step into the museum and are reminded through photographs and accident statistics just how harsh and draining the work was, and how carefully it systematized generations of poverty. It's no wonder the town produced so many footballers; for decades there was no other way out.
The museum was free and full of cleverly engaging displays showing life down the pits and in the busy village above it. I had no idea, other than in a loose notional sense, just how hard life was in the mines. Well into this century, more than a thousand men a year died in mines and every pit had at least one fabled disaster. (Woodhorn's was in 1916 when thirty men died in an explosion caused by criminally lax supervision; the mine's owners were sternly told not to let it happen again or next time they would really get told off.) Until 1847, children as young as four can you believe this? worked in the mines for up to ten hours a day, and until relatively recent times boys of ten were put to work as trapper lads, confined in total darkness in a small space with nothing to do but open and shut ventilation traps when a coal cart passed by. One boy's shift ran from 3 a.m. to 4 p.m. six days a week. And those were the soft jobs. Goodness knows how people found the time or strength to haul themselves off to lectures and concerts and painting clubs, but they most assuredly did. In a brightly lit room hang thirty or forty paintings executed by members of the Ashington Group. So modest were the group's resources that many are painted with walpamur,a kind of primitive emulsion, on paper, card or fibreboard. Hardly any are on canvas. It would be cruelly misleading to suggest that the Ashington Group harboured a budding Tintoretto, or even a Hockney, but the paintings provide a compelling record of life in a mining community over a period of fifty years. Nearly all depict local scenes ' Saturday Night at the Club', 'Whippets' or life down the pits, and seeing them in the context of a mining museum, rather than in some gallery in a metropolis, adds appreciably to their lustre. For the second time in a day I was impressed and captivated.