Gill Rodgers (nee Coombe)
25.06.24
I was born at home in Peterlee in 1960, at the house that my mam and dad stayed in until I lost them. It’s
quite close to Community House, just on the other side of Essington Way, near to the shops on York
Road. I started at Acre Rigg Infant School in the back end of 1964 and went all the way through Acre
Rigg until I went to what was the Grammar School at the time, where I stayed through Sixth Form. It was
a selective school and there were people brought from surrounding areas and villages. Quite a few
people came from Murton, some of whom I’m still friends with to this day and I still know a lot of people
who I went through Infants and Juniors with. I see them knocking around Petelee because few people
have moved far away.
Peterlee was a great place to be as a kid. The house was nice. We lived in a traditional brick-built house
where we could escape onto the playing fields. A little sports centre was built on Lowhills Road with a
green, tennis courts and football pitches. We could roam around Peterlee without feeling threatened. And
once you got old enough, we didn’t have to play close to home. We spent a lot of school holidays playing
on the building sites where they were building new houses. You could make all kinds of camps with the
bricks piled there, particularly when the builders were on holiday. You could just do what you wanted for
the full fortnight of the school holidays.
By then, I’d gone up to Secondary School, and some people I’d gone to Junior School with went to
different schools. They then made new friends, and so did I, but we all used to meet up somewhere. Your
group of acquaintances grew exponentially as you kept in touch, and everyone made new friends. So
even when we got to the stage where we were going out and socialising, probably sooner than we ought
to have, there was always somebody in every group that you knew. It always felt great because there was
a good sense of community. And there wasn’t much trouble that I’m aware of. There wasn’t fighting
amongst ourselves. It was always relatively peaceful. I really loved living here, going to school and
making lifelong friends. I didn’t move very far away. I’m only six miles along the road. And I’ve always kept
some affection for the level of freedom we had and our ability to roam. It felt safe. But I certainly don’t feel
that you would have a sense of that today. Certainly not for my grandchildren.
Even though people had moved from the surrounding colliery villages, everybody knew each other
because we were working with the vast majority of people. Their parents either worked in the new
factories or worked at the colliery. And there was still a sense of colliery village community. It meant that
people looked after each other and went out of their way to make friends with each other. It was a good
atmosphere.
When I was a little girl, the town centre was just an L-shape of shops. And I can remember when the
Midland bank opened. Prior to that, we used to have walked down to Horden to collect my dad’s pay from
the Coal Board offices. Pushing my brother in a pram was quite a hefty walkout for me and my mam.
We’d call in and see our grandparents. But then, when the Midland bank opened, Dad would get his wage
paid into the bank and everything became that much easier because we just had to go down the town
centre instead of walking down Horden every week.
There were shops everywhere, and they were great. We used to meet up in the town centre. There was a
proper, old-fashioned coffee bar. And then the town centre grew as the town grew. It was a good place.
At one time we had three shoe shops and there were clothes shops. Doggarts was a department store
that we had which was really fascinating. Woolworths was fabulous as a kid, and there was a little
playground opposite. I can remember when the police station, the courts and the fire station were in the
town centre, where ASDA is now. In front of them, there were fountains and seats around it.
There was a sports shop that sold records. They weren’t proper record shops, but they had booths where
you could go in and ask them to listen to records. Obviously, those were the kind of places where once
you got to 12 or 13 years old, you would meet there and listen to whatever the latest album was. We’d
scrape our money together and see what we could afford to buy. I remember when somebody’s sister
bought Every Picture Tells The Story by Rod Stewart, it was amazing. We got the Ziggy Stardust album. I
think that must have been about 1973, and we practically wore it out in my friend’s sitting room. We didn’t
have loads of money, but everybody was in the same boat. It didn’t matter. And whatever you had, you
shared it with other people.
We had the run of the place; I remember being a bit daring. It must have been not long after the A19 was
opened as a dual-carriageway; there’s a bridge underneath the road before all those factory units were
built, and there’s a reservoir up there. It’s almost Easington. If you go under it at the top of Lowhills Road,
you can nip across the fields and we used to drive the man at the reservoir crazy. It had a square, a
lovely grassed area, and steps up on every corner. We used to dare each other to run up the steps and
diagonally across it before he’d got to us. The area between the end of the A19 and the start of Shotton
was just field after field after field, and the same going up to Easington Village, it was just all fields. So we
could play to our heart’s content. We sometimes had a fire, but you had to hope and pray that it didn’t get
out of hand.
My son grew up in a village. And he had the opportunity to roam because everybody in the village knew
who you were. But I’m not sure I would have felt the same if we were bringing him up in the town. And I
know that my grandchildren won’t have any of the freedoms that I had. Not at all. But hardly anybody had
a car when I was a kid, so there were hardly any cars on the road, and they were safe.
Peterlee Grammar School became Howletch Comprehensive (*1) for a short space of time. It’s where
East Durham College is now. Some people say they didn’t like it, but I really liked my time at school. But
as I said, I made friends on the first day that I arrived there, some of whom remain my best friends today.
When people came from different parts of Peterlee and Murton, that opened up a whole other kind of
opportunity. Because they used to come and stay. I had twin beds in my room; you could pull the
mattresses off and the bases were spooled. So four of us could kip down in my house and my mam just
used to let us stay there. Then I’d go to theirs for a week of the school holidays and stay at their houses in
Murton.
In Horden, there was a bus company called Select and they used to run day trips. The four of us daft
lasses booked ourselves on day trips, and you used to get picked up at The Argus Butterfly. We had
those opportunities. I don’t think others did. We got a well-rounded, basic education, and many of us went
to university. Some of us went to work and got qualified. At school, they were tough on us, and there was
quite a lot of discipline, but almost all the people I knew and knocked around with came out well-served
with their GCEs. We sat nine, and most of us came out with nine passes, which was good. But I’m sure
we were told that we were the worst year they’d ever had. Because we all wanted to push the boundary
and were tinkers.
We had some great school trips. We went all over. In my first year, I went to Amsterdam for 10 days on
the school trip at Easter, with a girl who is still my friend to this day. It was absolutely brilliant, the things
we were exposed to. We had a whale of a time. There were opportunities that my parents couldn’t
possibly have dreamt of because they were brought up during the war. And my dad would let me go on
any school trip except skiing. Because…‘men who worked down the pit for a living don’t send their kids
skiing, Gillian.’ I remember that. That was where the line was drawn. We could all have a holiday for what
it would cost me to go skiing. And I just took it on the chin because he didn’t say no to anything else.
There was no question if it was any educational trip whatsoever. We were pushed and actively
encouraged to go and participate. I’m not delusional about the fact that it wasn’t all perfect, but my
childhood was great, and I’m sad that other people didn’t or didn’t have those opportunities that I had.
But there were still things being rationed when they got married. Sometimes, I think it’s a little bit sad
because we did have that amazing period. My mam and dad probably were more comfortable financially
than they could ever have dreamed of, given that their dads worked down the pit and, unfortunately, died
really young. Both my grandmothers were left widows, and money was really tight. My dad ended up as
an engineer at the colliery, and my mam was a civil servant. We weren’t hard up by any stretch of the
imagination, but not spoiled.
I didn’t go to the Youth Club in the town centre because that was a little bit far away on an evening for my
parents’ liking. But I did go to the St Cuthbert’s Church Youth Club on a Friday night in the Church Hall,
and then every other Sunday, there was a smaller group of teenagers invited to the Vicar’s house or
another lady from the Church who was my mam’s cousin, who she’d known all her life. And that meant, I
met loads of people across a different age range. And even later, when people were away at university,
they would come back and pop in to see Margaret and the Vicar. There’s also something about the fact
that my mam and dad never moved. So you knew people well; they were settled in the houses and happy
with them.
At 16, you could go and work at the Tudor Crisp factory for four weeks during the holidays, and you’d
make loads of money. They used to take students on while everybody else had their time off, and it was
an absolute riot. Before that, I worked in Boots, the chemist in the town centre and worked at what was
Forbuoys; a paper and grocery shop at the Heart of Oak. I worked all day Saturday and Sunday morning
there, but then I got a job offer at Boots, which paid better. I got the same money for working one day
there as I got for doing a day and a half. It was when I was at Sixth Form, so obviously, I still wanted to be
able to go out on a Saturday night. When I went to Boots, I worked with a girl from Peterlee Grammar
School who I’m still in contact with. She’s now the Director of Children’s Services at Newcastle Council;
she did very well and is lovely. We had a laugh working at Boots.
It’s not where Boots is now. Out the back of what is now the ASDA car park, there was a grocery store
called Hintons, and then Boots was the next shop along. There was March, the tailors, and a painting and
wallpaper shop. There were two dry cleaners in the town centre when I was young, and a friend of mine
worked in one of them.
There were a lot of independent stores. And Mrs. Jakes, who had the shop down the bottom of Fulwell
Road, also had a little kiosk opposite Woolworths. I had a friend who worked at Woolworths. So we all
used to finish work on a Saturday night and we’d go home, get a quick bath, get changed, and then we’d
meet up. Sometimes, I could barely walk home if I’d been on my feet all day in the shop, but it didn’t stop
us from going out.
In the town centre, we went to The Gamecock or The Norseman. The Norseman had a nice bar. And then
The Sillver Dollar was more for young people. We used to have a disco on a Sunday night. But we used
to go to The Moorcock, The Black Bull, and upstairs at the Catholic Club but that was partly because we
knew people. Also, people’s parents were downstairs, and you knew you were never going to get any
bother.
On a Friday night, we’d walk to Easington Village to go to the village club, where they always had a rock
band. You’d pay the 20p cover charge, have four halves of beer and get the last bus home, all for a
pound. We used to go to the village club on Friday, the colliery club on Saturday and Tuesday, Thornley
sometimes on a Friday and Wheatley Hill on a Sunday. Sometimes, you’d see the same band twice
because they’d do the circuits. But we liked rock music, so that was what we used to do. But the buses
were really reliable in those days. We never once got stranded anywhere in those colliery villages trying
to get back to Peterlee. The last bus always turned up.
I did A Levels and actually set off to go to Leicester to do a degree. But I didn’t like it and came home very
quickly. My mam worked at National Savings in Durham. They were recruiting, so she brought an
application home. I went through for an interview and was offered a job at Peterlee. It was the Social
Security Office then and is the JobCentre now. It’s still in the same building. I started there in January
1979 and met my husband, who was the brother of a girl I worked with. We got married, had a baby, I got
promoted and worked for 10 years there.
I was invited to apply for a job outside of Peterlee but still in the department. Leaving Peterlee was
probably the best thing I ever did because I went on to do some really interesting work and they paid for
me to get significant qualifications. I made a good progression, had a great career and absolutely loved it.
I enjoyed almost all of my working life. I retired early when I didn’t agree with the Government Policy
because I was delivering change in DWP, but I then spent quite a bit of time back in Peterlee looking after
my mam, who has Alzheimer’s. It was meant to be and the right thing to do.
And then somehow or other, because I knew Graham (*2), I ended up coming to East Durham Trust for
six weeks to support as a Receptionist, and that was about 15 months ago. I was christened in the
building here, before East Durham Trust, because there was no church. I love the work and when I fully
retire, I’ll volunteer. I’ve always felt really conscientious, and we had a very strong work ethic instilled in us
by our parents. I want to do a good job.
I’ve seen Peterlee change over time. I can remember when the houses at the top of Lowhills Road
weren’t there. When they were first built, my nana’s sister moved into a little bungalow there, and we used
to walk up to visit her. The houses were a little bit otherworldly because they were all flat-roofed. I saw my
aunty move into a four-bedroom house up there. I’m really close with my cousins, we’re not too distant in
age. We’re close like sisters, really. One cousin is a twin cousin. I was born in Bedford Place, and she
was born in Manor Way on the same day. And it was the same midwife, shocked when they saw my
family going from one house to the other.
They moved into a house that had been occupied by someone who was supposedly involved in a murder,
and we got into bother because Panorama came to make a documentary about it all. Of course, they
were pulling a red Jaguar on and off the drive at my aunty’s house, and we were all in the bedroom
window, trying to get on the telly. We got in trouble. They knocked on the door and asked if they could get
us away. We just wanted to be famous and be on the telly, didn’t we?! There were little bits of scandal
that went on that ran rife through Peterlee. There was a girl who wasn’t much older than me and had lived
on our street in a two-bedroom house with her sister and parents. They moved to the new houses built on
the way down to Horden that were three-bedrooms. At some point, she claimed that a man had knocked
on the door and stabbed her. Despite a colossal manhunt, no one was ever identified around it. She
wasn’t badly hurt, but there were lots of theories. Of course, there was no social media, so it didn’t quite
get us out of hand. But that was a massive thing, absolutely huge. And for a while, nobody could go
anywhere. We weren’t allowed out of your own street. But then, after a while, nothing else happened, and
we just went back to living our lives as normal.
Lots of things about the place were just fun. I had friends who lived near Shotton Hall. We weren’t
supposed to go into Castle Eden Dene. My mam didn’t like us going into Dene, and as we were running
along the path, disappearing into the Dene, she’d be shouting…‘Helen, Vicky, Gillian, I told you, not the
Dene.’ But who doesn’t want to be in the Dene and swing across the ravine?! You took your life in your
hands, but we did all of those kinds of things.
I can remember the Apollo Pavilion (3*) when the pond that leads up to it, just looked like grass, but it was
obviously just green, algae on the top of it. We would dare each other to run through, but then it never
washed out of our clothing. It wasn’t deep, but we dared each other, and of course, we did because we
were stupid. But then the clothes were ruined, which obviously didn’t go down particularly well when we
got home. I wouldn’t say I like the Pavilion, but I don’t mind. I know it polarises some people’s opinions. It
was different. We weren’t ever allowed on it. It was always gated off when we were younger. It was just
something that was there.
Over the road from East Durham Trust, on the grass opposite, there was a paddling pool. There were
little paddling pools on most of the estates and little playgrounds. Only when people couldn’t behave and
it was all too noisy did all those playgrounds get taken out, which is such a shame.
The hotel that is now The Eden Bar was called The Norseman. When it was built and opened, it was
really quite upmarket. My wedding reception was in the little circular room out the back, overlooking
Castle Eden Dene. There were cascades, a lovely pond, and seats all around it. It rained all day at my
wedding, and my Dad didn’t like using the back door at home, so he carried me to the car.
We’d always go to The Norseman to sit and meet up because you could get straight through there with
access to Dene. We could genuinely just roam. And as long as you said where you were, who you were
going with, and what time you would be back, there wasn’t any hassle about it. Pretty much everyone
knew who you belonged to, so if you did anything wrong, you knew your parents were going to find out
about it.
My brother, David, is four years younger than me. There were quite a few lads living on our street and I
remember they organised the Bedford Place Olympics. Obviously, it must have been the year of the
Olympics, so it was probably 1972 when I was about 8. The houses faced each other and there was no
road in the middle, just a footpath. So racing, long jumping and various activities could occur in the street.
They made their own medals and kept themselves occupied for most of the six weeks of summer
holidays, having competitions of various descriptions.
When David was christened in 1964, St Cuthbert’s Church had already opened. He was born in June.
The christening may have been in September, and it was the biggest number of children who had ever
been christened in Peterlee. At that time, it made it into the Hartlepool Mail. There were literally loads and
loads of babies. It was a huge number all christened together. People still went to Church or to the
Methodist Chapel back then. It was always buzzing on a Sunday morning.
There was rivalry across schools in sports. Football or cricket. Our school was one of the first State
Schools to win a National Cricket Competition. And that was huge. We were just a coal mining area, and
most of them came from coal mining families. And off they went to London to play at a really posh school
and probably look down their noses at us. We absolutely tanked them. So that was massive. Everybody
still talks about it. It was a huge achievement. It was in 1982.
I can remember Peterlee Carnival, but not necessarily from being a child. When I worked in Peterlee at
the Social Security Office, we used to do an ‘It’s a Knockout’ competition and would always put a team in.
The money went to charity. So we always participated when I was working there, but not so much as a
child. I’m not sure why, but my dad was a rugby player, and that was at Horden. So often, we were at
rugby, or Dad would be working.
However, we always went to the Durham Miner’s Gala as a family. Our family was scattered across
Easington, Blackhall, as far as Newton Aycliffe, but we all agreed that we would go there. My
grandparents would come, and we all met under the Horden banner because that’s where they lived. My
nana would get the picnic out. In those days, the buses all stopped at the top of Gilesgate Bank, and you
had to march with the band all the way down Gilesgate Bank, round past the County Hotel and onto the
field. That was kind of an annual occurrence.
I remember being taken to Houghton-le-Spring, which felt like a long way away on the bus. We knew it
was only five minutes down the road, but as a little girl, it felt far. But the big trips were to Crimdon. I was
in the Brownies at school. The school also ran a Gynmastics club after. They were really good, and
people gave up time to organise stuff. As funny as it might seem, my friend and I used to play tennis over
at Lowhills Road. The old men would come to play bowls and they taught us to play. They would put the
kettle on and give us a cup of tea. They were our friends’ grandads and as we’d be playing tennis, they’d
shout over and say…‘we’ve got the kettle on; do you want to come around for a cup?’ The people were
lovely.
It’s sad to see Peterlee changed but I don’t think it’s a Peterlee thing; I think that’s a social thing across
the whole of the country. I saw the hardships that people went through during the ‘80s. In some of the
areas around here, male unemployment was at 45%. People had nothing and children were being
brought up in that. You had a fight to survive. And that creates a different culture altogether, doesn’t it? A
culture of not trusting people. A culture of being prepared to get one over on somebody because that was
the only way you were going to survive. And I see that across the villages that I deal with. So it’s not just
Peterlee.
Where things went wrong in Peterlee, I think, was when the Development Corporation got shut down
because it hadn’t been managed particularly well. All of the housing and stock was transferred to
Easington District Council, and they inherited loads of housing that was in a pretty deplorable condition;
flat-roofed houses were a disaster in this climate and huge amounts of money needed to be spent just to
keep the houses fit to be lived in, which meant that all of the lovely things that had gone into building a
lovely new town, there was no money to maintain it. So when things went wrong with them, they just shut
them down, bricked them over, removed them, and it’s such a shame, really.
I can’t necessarily blame anyone other than the central Government, which should have had a much
better succession plan. The money should have been there to fix the mess. There’s nothing wrong with
having new ideas and trying new things, but if they don’t work, you have to fix them because people
shouldn’t have to live in a house where the water runs down the inside every time it rains. I’ve seen that in
my friend’s and aunty’s houses.
My aunty moved the house where Panorama had been because they were pulling down the other house
that she lived in because of subsidence. The whole floor was lifted. It had only been up about ten years.
She got put into one in Westmoreland Rise, and when it rained heavily, where they were constructed with
pre-fabricated concrete blocks and then bricked up around the outside, the water just used to run down
the inside, where the internal walls met, literally bucketing down. She had towels all over the house,
mopping up the water. Obviously, it took a huge amount of money to put right, so all the niceties just went
by the wayside. We went into a recession, and some people might suggest that that was deliberate; we
were left to rot. But people lost their jobs, the Coal Mines closed, no one really cared about us, and at the
same time, all of the housing got transferred to a council that didn’t have the money to actually do
anything with it. That combination of horrible events meant that the Peterlee that we should have had kind
of disappeared before our eyes.
I worked in the Social Security Office during the Miner’s Strike and right through the late ‘80s. It was grim,
and people really struggled. What I find desperately sad is that it’s worse now than it was then. It feels so
wrong that we didn’t learn from that, just repeated the same mistakes repeatedly. It was a harder divide
than between the people who worked, who were pretty much okay, and those who were on benefits
struggled. However, we now see people working full-time and can barely keep their heads above water
because wages have been suppressed, which feels wrong. While that continues, Peterlee is never going
to get his head back up because I think there are amazing people, and with the right opportunities, it
could and would be a great place. There’s been no money to invest, so everyone is spending money to
stay still rather than improve things and create better prospects, which I think is such a crying shame.
Another thing that really needs addressing, if you want people to go and work, the public transport needs
to be much better. I know there’s a lot of frustration. It causes people a lot of trouble.
(*1) In September 1978, Acre Rigg Secondary School and Peterlee Grammar Technical School merged,
forming Howletch Comprehensive School, which spread across two sites.
(*2) Graham Easterlow, CEO of East Durham Trust
(3*) Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion