History Walk: Murders and Mines - The Brass Family Killings and The Dean and Chapter Colliery

 

I have been reading about the Brass family murders which took place in 1683 in Kirk Merrington. Andrew Mills, a servant to the Brass family who occupied a nearby farm, killed the Brass family children when their parents were on vacation. They met their ends brutally; their parents returning home to find their lifeless bodies mutilated by Mills’ axe. Mills claimed that the devil had possessed him to carry out the act; a defence which bought him little sympathy. Even if Mills was instructed by the devil, so the prevailing thinking went, he must have let the devil into his heart in the first place. Mills was convicted of murder and placed in a cage on top of a gibbet, near to what is now a Costa Coffee takeaway (until recently the Thinford Inn), on the A688. There are conflicting reports about how he died. He was hanged, that’s for sure. But it has been claimed that he was already dead by this point. The children’s grave, old and battered, still stands in the churchyard at St. John’s, restored by subscription in 1789. Visiting this grave was the first objective of my walk.

My route started from home and sticks largely to the road, with some field walking and railway paths mixed in. I walked the road from Middlestone Moor past the graveyard then up the steep bank to North Close. At the junction I turned right and then took the left turn into Kirk Merrington. The church is on the left a little way down the road linking Kirk Merrington to Ferryhill. I knew what grave I was looking for because I saw a photograph in Maureen Anderson’s Foul and Suspicious Deaths In And Around Durham. It is a large rectangular block, laid horizontally. Overlooking it is an upright but slanted rectangular grave. The writing on the grave is now difficult to see. It has faced the elements over centuries and is largely covered in lichens. It is worth having a copy of the original inscription on hand. This makes deciphering the real thing much easier. The inscription in full reads:

HERE LIE THE BODIES OF

JOHN, JANE AND ELIZABETH

CHILDREN OF

JOHN AND MARGARET BRASS

WHO WERE MURDERED THE 25^TH OF JANUARY 1683

BY ANDREW MILLS, THEIR FATHER’S SERVANT

FOR WHICH HE WAS EXECUTED AND HUNG IN CHAINS

READER, REMEMBER, SLEEPING

WE WERE SLAIN

AND HERE WE MUST SLEEP TIL

WE MUST RISE AGAIN.

THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER.

RESTORED BY SUBSCRIPTION IN 1789

 

Although much of the text is now faint, a part which is completely missing is the word “EXECUTED.” It is not that the elements withered this word more than the others. It was deliberately deleted. Maureen Anderson suggests that this person might have done so because he knew that Mills did not die by hanging, but due to his prolonged time in the cage. The local historian James Dodd, writing in 1897, claimed that the person responsible was an old eccentric called Willy Lynn, who owned a local pub called the Bay Horse.

I walked behind the church. From here there is a towering view over Spennymoor, highlighting Merrington’s lofty height. I left the church and continued along the road to Ferryhill. Brass Farm is now called High Hill House. The farm is visible from the road. There is a windmill there, built some time after the tragic murders; though, notwithstanding its relative youth, some believe it is haunted by Mills’ ghost. It is not possible to get up close to the mill because the road to the farm is private. But I did catch a glimpse of it as I passed the aged miners homes approaching.

On a separate note, I noticed that one of the miners homes’ foundational stones was laid by the former Sedgefield Conservative MP Sir Leonard Ropner. He represented Sedgefield from 1923 to 1929, before losing his seat to Labour’s John Herriots. During Ropner’s time in office, Sedgefield was the epitome of a swing state: Ropner had a wafer-thin majority of six! Ferryhill was once surrounded by mines. The Dean and Chapter Colliery was the workplace of Norman Cornish, the highly regarded Spennymoor artist. This colliery is depicted in many of his paintings, as is the road he trod to get to work each day from Spennymoor. I aimed to find this track and take a similar route home. But first, I intended to take a little stroll around the town. I’m not actually that familiar with Ferryhill. I’ve rode my bike through it plenty of times and I once went on a pub crawl here – of which I remember little – but I haven’t spent much time walking and observing its streets, which is the only real way to understand a place.

The first building to catch my eye was the Literary Institute. I don’t know the story behind this, but I wonder whether there is any connection to Sid Chaplin, with whom I am familiar. Chaplin was a miner turned writer. He wrote novels, short stories and a newspaper column in The Guardian. I’ve been reading some of his short stories in a book I obtained from the university library. He was born in Shildon, a town near Bishop Auckland, but lived part of his life in Ferryhill. There is a memorial plaque outside his Ferryhill residence. I didn’t see the plaque on this outing, but I once passed it on a bike ride. Chaplin died in the Lake District village of Grasmere, formerly home to William Wordsworth, where he was attending a literary festival; a village to which I also have a personal attachment. I am getting married there August of next year.

There is a pub named after the mine, The Dean and Chapter. The café amusement building is located in the former Pavilion, a building which looks fairly old. The townhall is modest; not a patch of that of Ferryhill’s old rival Spennymoor. Though it does have the distinction of having some fine memorials on the lawn out front. One of the memorials commemorates the bravery of a local miner called William Walton, an overman at the Dean and Chapter colliery. In 1906, he was electrocuted trying to save two young men. His memorial was erected by comrades from the mine. On the other side of the townhall, behind the Methodist chapel is another monument, this one depicting a miner at the coal face in a semi-relaxed posture in the centre of a clock, surrounded by Roman numerals. On the monument’s marble foundation there are other mining depictions, one of the railway, another of a miner being dragged by a pit pony through a claustrophobic underground tunnel.

A few other sightings of note. I passed the Manor House, a hotel that is alleged to be haunted; indeed, it once appeared on the TV show Most Haunted. One of the foundational stones of the town’s aged person’s home was laid by the former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson on the 17^th of July 1970. This was a mere month after Wilson lost a general election to Edward Heath, after having served six years in office. He would be re-elected four years later to serve for just over two years.

Conscious of time, I made my way home. In search of the Cornish route, I took the public right of way at the Dean and Chapter industrial estate. The track looks similar to the one in Cornish’s drawings. In any case, it is one that leads from where the colliery is to Cornish’s hometown of Spennymoor. The landscape is scared by its industrial heritage, but looks peaceful enough in its new role as horse meadow. The track soon becomes very boggy, so boggy that I could not take it all the way. Instead, I turned right to enter the Woodland Trust’s Nature reserve, a young plantation with occasional strips of mature woodland and a pond in the corner, next to the housing estate. According to the Woodland Trust, this land, which it reclaimed from the Dean and Chapter Colliery, has evidence of coal mining dating back to the 14^th century.

I pass through the housing estate near Merrington Lane to the main road and turn left. On the other side of the road in front is the Winning Post pub. The term “winning” is a Victorian term relating to coal mining. It is found in the name of certain villages related to the industry, such as Esh Winning. I crossed the road just before the pub and followed a path alongside it leading to “daisy field.” A peculiar sight, the daisy field consists of a large field, then a steep embankment to another field, which in turn has an embankment surrounding it, offering a vantage point to observe the fields to the east of Spennymoor. I’m not entirely sure how the landscape ended up like this, but the old map of Spennymoor gives the impression that it was connected to the industry around it. My Grandad told me the other day that it was formed out of the slag heaps from the nearby iron works. Now, it is purely recreational. A place to walk the dog or go hill sprinting. I recall there once being a mock hilltop fort on the top of the embankment – “Cloppa castle”, as some people called it. Today, there is a child in the centre of the field operating his drone, most likely this year’s Christmas present. How times change.

Just alongside the daisy field there is an old railway path to Middlestone Moor, besides some horse meadows. Conveniently, the old map - on the link provided in the references – is superimposed upon a faint present-day map enabling the navigator to compare the two. On the new map, the red track’s path leads to what used to be the Rock and North Close Colliery (otherwise known as Merrington Park Colliery) to the east of Middlestone Moor. I used to go running along this path frequently. Though it would seem that others have more peculiar uses for the track. It is, for someone, a place for discarding used pornographic DVDs. On two occasions, the second occurring many years after the first, I saw said items strewn across the path. I wonder who the lewd fly tipper could be?

Bibliography

James J. Dodd, The History of the Urban District of Spennymoor. 1897.

Link to Woodland Trust pamphlet on the plantation at Dean and Chapter: https://www.durham.gov.uk/media/4392/Woodland-Trust-walk-Toad-Grove/pdf/WoodlandTrustToadGrove.pdf?m=636735642976830000.

Link to the old map of Spennymoor: http://www.archiuk.com/cgi-bin/build_nls_historic_map.pl?search_location=,%20Spennymoor,%20Dur&latitude=54.691425&longitude=-1.613684.

Maureen Anderson, Foul and Suspicious Deaths In and Around Durham. Wharncliffe Books. 2003.