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Review
"Crookston has constructed a potent tribute...he makes you feel deeply nostalgic for a way of life that was so dangerous and so brutal." --Mail on Sunday
"A very readable and enjoyable book." --Morning Star
"Peter Crookston's book is very remarkable. He knows the area well, and he's captured the spirit of the industry and the story of Gresford and has brought it together in a very skilled way. I think it is something that future generations will go back to, to understand the Gresford Hymn but also the industry it speaks about. A very, very remarkable book." --Tony Benn
"A very readable and enjoyable book." --Morning Star
"Peter Crookston's book is very remarkable. He knows the area well, and he's captured the spirit of the industry and the story of Gresford and has brought it together in a very skilled way. I think it is something that future generations will go back to, to understand the Gresford Hymn but also the industry it speaks about. A very, very remarkable book." --Tony Benn
Product Description
The Pitmen's Requiem movingly relates the stories and the hardships of the miners who worked in the Great Northern Coalfield. It tells, through interviews and investigative reporting, how Robert Saint's famous brass band composition Gresford the Miners Hymn became a requiem for mining communities and their way of life.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This reviewer once had the pleasure of meeting the subject of the book -- Robert Saint: pitman, musician, composer, amateur Vet.... all of his own meetings with this memorable man, are described entertainingly by Peter Crookston, despite a shortage of personal archives on the man himself. Robert Saint's life and times are interwoven with the moving story of the demise of coalmining in Britain in the 20th Century --- a story " needing to be told ".
Perhaps the 'Miners' Hymn' as the brass band tune called "GRESFORD" is known, is the real thread running through the book, connecting miners past and present, in this obviously heartfelt tribute.
Ron French.
Perhaps the 'Miners' Hymn' as the brass band tune called "GRESFORD" is known, is the real thread running through the book, connecting miners past and present, in this obviously heartfelt tribute.
Ron French.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Pitman's Requiem - a Requiem for a way of life
Unlike the previous reviewer, I never had the privilege of meeting the subject of this book, and gives the spine of the thread that binds it together - a thread that describes the now dead Great Northern Coalfield that stretched almost the length of the old traditional counties of Durham and Northumberland.
Saint, a pitman, a bit of a chancer (in the best sense of the word) and who augmented his wartime factory work as the leader of a small dance hall combo, is now only known (if that) as the composer of the Miner's Hymn 'Gresford' a tune named after the pit in the North Wales town of the same name that saw, in an ear of similar events, one of the greatest mine disasters of the 20th century. This tune, 70 years on is still in the play list of every silver band based in a former colliery area. Other than that, Robert Saint is a name utterly forgotten in the condescension of history.
The author, Peter Crookston, despite a life spent in London literary circles, comes from the North East and knew Saint as a boy. This is the peg for his portrait of the pit villages, the pitmen and their families. He shows for the benefit of those who do not know or understand this unique area, how totally septate these villages in the hills of Durham and the low lying lands of South East Northumberland (and their neighbouring communities in the East Cleveland Ironstone region) were from the big towns that outsiders might see as representing the region. Pitmen might visit Newcastle, Sunderland and the Teesside towns for shopping or to watch a big match, but for the rest of their life, they retreated to the certainties and close communal ties of the villages and small towns. Today, even after the closures and ordeal of the great last strike in defence of a wway of life in the mid 1980's, these villages are still there, and whilst many of the older residents still have their family ties to the pitmen who were their ancestors, the newer inhabitants - commuters to the big cities of Tyne and Tees or Durham students attracted to affordable housing - do not have that certainty and linkage. If they invest a small part of their earnings on this book, they will learn much about their new home. I hope they take my advice !
David Walsh
Unlike the previous reviewer, I never had the privilege of meeting the subject of this book, and gives the spine of the thread that binds it together - a thread that describes the now dead Great Northern Coalfield that stretched almost the length of the old traditional counties of Durham and Northumberland.
Saint, a pitman, a bit of a chancer (in the best sense of the word) and who augmented his wartime factory work as the leader of a small dance hall combo, is now only known (if that) as the composer of the Miner's Hymn 'Gresford' a tune named after the pit in the North Wales town of the same name that saw, in an ear of similar events, one of the greatest mine disasters of the 20th century. This tune, 70 years on is still in the play list of every silver band based in a former colliery area. Other than that, Robert Saint is a name utterly forgotten in the condescension of history.
The author, Peter Crookston, despite a life spent in London literary circles, comes from the North East and knew Saint as a boy. This is the peg for his portrait of the pit villages, the pitmen and their families. He shows for the benefit of those who do not know or understand this unique area, how totally septate these villages in the hills of Durham and the low lying lands of South East Northumberland (and their neighbouring communities in the East Cleveland Ironstone region) were from the big towns that outsiders might see as representing the region. Pitmen might visit Newcastle, Sunderland and the Teesside towns for shopping or to watch a big match, but for the rest of their life, they retreated to the certainties and close communal ties of the villages and small towns. Today, even after the closures and ordeal of the great last strike in defence of a wway of life in the mid 1980's, these villages are still there, and whilst many of the older residents still have their family ties to the pitmen who were their ancestors, the newer inhabitants - commuters to the big cities of Tyne and Tees or Durham students attracted to affordable housing - do not have that certainty and linkage. If they invest a small part of their earnings on this book, they will learn much about their new home. I hope they take my advice !
David Walsh
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Mining communities have long provided compelling backdrops to works of literature and drama, from Zola's Germinal to Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliott. They have also been exhaustively studied by sociologists and social anthropologists for insights into the working and social lives of men and women who survived against the odds in physically crippling jobs while maintaining both their individual dignity and their community spirit. Peter Crookston's book offers a beautifully written journalist's account of a Durham mining village woven around the life of Robert Saint, the composer of Gresford, a brass band composition commemorating an earlier mining disaster in which 256 workers died. Crookston brings his formidable observational qualities and writing skills as a journalist to produce a gripping narrative with utterly compelling characters and a heart-rending culmination in the demise of the mining industry under assault by Thatcher and her henchmen. The story is told in a gentle, unpretentious way, frequently giving voice to the characters themselves, many of whom the author knew personally or got to know in preparing the book. Apart from capturing a critical moment in a disappearing world, the book offers a vantage point from which to reflect on our own culture, what we have lost in a world of sensationalism, consumption and constant internet browsing: the loss of community which did so much to sustain and nurture those miners in their desperate plights.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Requiem for a lost era.
The Pitmen's Requiem is a book that encapsulates not only the life and devotion of Robert Saint, but of the life and times of every pitman. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Martyn
Lost....a Way of Life.
In truth, there may have been few who mourned the passing of an age that demanded large groups of men to be sent below the earth in order to draw coal from its depths. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Don Scott
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