Nutters Buildings, on Binchester Moor, picture dated May 6 1969 Outside Nutters Buildings on Binchester Moor. Two terraces – front (12 houses) and back (seven houses) – were built from rough rubble, presumably by a Mr Nutter, shortly after nearby Westerton Colliery started producing coal in 1841. They were substantial, two-up, two-down pit houses without running water, and were demolished in 1968-69. A little estate called Westerton Close has replaced them. It is now part of Middlestone Moor (which itself runs seamlessly into Spennymoor). “That seat was where the old men used to congregate and sit and talk,” says Enid Dailey, of Spennymoor. There is still a seat there today THE OLD CODGERS Tommy Stamp: Worked at Westerton, lit the Nutters’ gaslights and was a bookies’ runner in the days when gambling was illegal. He had eight runners working for him – he paid them half-acrown for every £1 they collected. In turn, he laid bets off at a bookmaker’s in Spennymoor. “I was only ten or 11 and I used to reckon his bets,” says his grand-daughter, Marlene Stroud, who lives near Mansfield. “The police knew what was going on, because they came drinking with him at night. It was only when a high-up officer was on the patch that there was trouble.” Harry Blenkinsopp: A Chilton miner, the youngest of the codgers who died a couple of years ago in his eighties. The child: Could be Richard Gibson or Peter Ebdon, or one caller thought it was a girl. Pat Smith: A Chilton miner. Like all the codgers, he lived in Nutters. Tommy Horn: “He was my grandfather who died in 1968,” emails Gillian Agar. “He worked at Chilton Colliery but was forced to leave work in 1959 due to a road accident (hence the two sticks).” Danny Hicks: “My grandfather was the watchman at Westerton woodyard on the site of the pit,” says Enid Dailey of Spennymoor. He died in 1962 aged 80. “I can remember it as if it was yesterday,” says Marlene. “The camera just came from nowhere and we all got these photographs. I was wanting to get on it, but my grandfather was saying ‘it’s not for little girls, go away home, our Marlene’.” THE PUB Opposite Nutters was the Excelsior, known as “the top house”. It was a Camerons pub run by Mr Lishman. “It was an old-fashioned pub, a men’s bar – no women were allowed in,” says Bryan Sheldon, of Spennymoor. It too was demolished in the late Sixties. THE FIELD Belonged to Dorman, Long and Company (which owned Westerton pit from 1929 until nationalisation in 1947), and was farmed by the Cornforth family. In the early Thirties, early aeroplanes involved in something like Alan Cobham’s Air Circus used it as a landing strip. More conventional was its agricultural use – some years corn, others potatoes. Arthur Stelling, 91, of Middlestone Moor, but a former Nutters resident, remembers creating the “tattie pie” in the field. The potatoes were harvested in October and piled along one side, covered with straw and soil. This was the “tattie pie”. “If I was on foreshift at Chilton pit, I’d finish at dinner time and would go tattie picking on the afternoon,” remembers Arthur, a veteran of Nutters. “I’d get a pail of potatoes and a shilling.” The pie was opened by the farmer before the end of the year. Merchants and hawkers would buy the potatoes by weight and take them to market. THE COLLIERIES Westerton’s peak was during the First World War, when it employed 822 men and boys. Binchester colliery was part of the same complex. It started declining in the War drift revived it for a few years. It closed in October 1961. Because of Westerton’s decline, Nutters also housed Chilton miners. Chilton, which grew phenomenally in the first decade of the 20th Century, employed nearly 1,500 men into the Fifties. It closed on January 15, 1966.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 21:07:17 +0000
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