All photos: Mark Harvey
UNITE Rural life
A HEARTWARMING DAY OUT
The workers’ stories of the North East brought to life
Beamish Museum, Stanley, County Durham DH9 0RG
Beamish Museum is a unique place with its open-air mixture of town and country stretching across its 350-acre site.
Little wonder it’s enjoyed daily by thousands of visitors who can discover how previous generations worked the land, before the majority of rural workers were swept into towns and cities to work in industry.
“Agriculture and pits are central to the North East’s history,” explains locally born Samantha Shotton, Beamish’s chief operating officer, dressed as an appropriate well-to-do Victorian.
“Our founder Frank Atkinson in the 1960s could visualise the loss of the traditional way of life for ordinary people,” and so he set out to preserve examples of everyday life in urban and rural life.
Just off the A1M and located outside Stanley, midway between Durham City and Newcastle, Beamish, opened in 1972, is a great day out for all ages.
Increasing numbers of Unite members who make an annual pilgrimage to the Durham Miners’ Gala on the second Saturday in July may want to consider taking time out to make the short trip.
The ticket price, which helps pay the wages of up to 550 staff in the summer that are engaged on a range of jobs that includes working with animals and maintaining the historic moving trams and buses that younger children particularly love getting on and off, includes multiple visits.
For older visitors the Museum, open all year, also has regular health and wellbeing group sessions. These take place in Clover Cottage, which is packed with sights, sounds, smells and tastes that are familiar to dementia sufferers. This work is based in Beamish’s most recently recreated 1950s town, chosen after research from its visitors.
Close by resides both the 1940s and 1900s towns. The latter’s busy main street is packed with shops, including one advertising opportunities to escape poverty by emigrating to Canada and the US, that leads down to Rowley Station. It was the invention of the railways that transformed trade, enabling the growth of new industries regionally and worldwide.
42 uniteLANDWORKER Summer 2025
One of the most hauled and valuable North East goods was coal, the mining of which in 1913 employed 165,246 men across Durham in 304 mines including the former Mahogany Drift Mine that Beamish visitors can access today before exploring a 1900s pit village.
Beamish’s oldest building, parts dating back to the 1440s, is Pockerley Old Hall, with its beautiful Georgian gardens and view. This was home to Mr. William Morgan, one of 13 local tenant farmers in 1825.
Engager Kevin Carroll explains Morgan “did very well such that we later find him living in Chester- Le-Street as a gentleman. It was a period when the rural landscape was changing dramatically away from strip farming to the larger fields combining agriculture and livestock.”
Those employed by Morgan did not do so well.
“You’d be taken on at a local hiring fair in the spring, required to work extremely hard from the moment the sun came up till it went down, and only get paid after the harvest. If you were not pulling your weight then you were gone, as there was plenty of other people out there who needed work.”
Visitors and J
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