Life story of Tom Dobbin, the voice of King Coal in Durham

He was born in School Street in Tursdale, a classic Durham pit village made up of a couple of terraces in the shadow of a giant colliery.

When he was born, Tursdale pit employed very nearly 1,000 men. Now its site beside the A688 has been landscaped into a business park with a massive Amazon fulfilment centre nearby.

Both Tom’s father and grandfather were miners. In fact, his father, Matthew, was killed by the mine: his elbow was broken in a stonefall, infection set in, and in the days before antiobiotics, that was that.

Tom Dobbin in the DurhamGate care home, near SpennymoorWhen he was young, Tom was allowed a bath once a week, and he remembered how electricity came to Tursdale when he was 14 but he still he did his homework by the light of a candle. “A 25 watt bulb was considered too bright,” he said. “A 40 watt was just showing off.”

The first school Tom attended was at the bottom of his street, and he remembers nearly being thrown out of the 11+ examination for laughing when he was asked to punctuate the sentence: “The donkey said the driver needs some carrots.”

He passed, and went to Spennymoor Grammar.

Happy young couple: Tom and Norah Dobbin, both from south Durham mining familiesBut in those days, before you could start a career, you had to do your national service: he celebrated his 18th birthday in Ceylon where he was an air mechanic in the Royal Fleet Air Arm.

However, he only once flew in a plane and it crashlanded. He escaped unscathed, but never again did this air mechanic take to the air.

Instead, after three years national service, he returned to Durham and rather than follow in his family’s footsteps in search of coal, he became a journalist and went in search of stories.

Sam Watson and Prime Minister Clement Attlee on the Royal County balcony at the 1951 galaHe unearthed them through his contacts. Because of his mining heritage, he had a natural affinity for stories from the coalfield, and Sam Watson, the Durham miners’ leader, was one of his earliest sources.

Watson was one of the great figures of the coalfield, not only the agent for the Durham Miners’ Association but also a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, charged with working out the party’s policies after the Second World War. He was hugely influential, turning down Parliamentary seats and peerages because he preferred to stay in Durham.

We presume this is the Durham Miners’ Gala – all the banners in the background are from Durham collieries. Tom Dobbin is the reporter circled at the front, second from the leftOne day, he called up the young reporter and told him to come along to his home in Durham as there was someone for him to interview. Tom dutifully obliged, turned up at the house, and found Watson waving to him from the greenhouse. There, admiring Watson’s cuttings was Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who usually avoided journalists where possible but whom Watson had persuaded to give Tom an exclusive – a great scoop for Tom’s cuttings.

That was probably 1951, when Attlee and Watson addressed the miners’ gala – a gathering which Watson had turned into a great socialist occasion.

Labour grandees attend the 1951 gala: left is Herbert Morrison, deputy leader and grandfather of Peter Mandelson, centre is Prime Minister Clement Attlee with his wife, Violet. To her left is Sam Watson, the general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Associationr later, Tom married Norah, of Bishop Middleham, whom he had met at a dance. She, too, came from mining stock – her father, Hugh, had had to dig himself out from under a stonefall down Mainsforth Colliery and then it was discovered he had fractured his spin

Tom and Norah Dobbin on their wedding dayFifty-three years later, Tom and Norah are still side by side in the DurhamGate home, Norah still keeping him right. Indeed, she keeps everyone right, shouting out “gay-la” if anyone dare call the miners’ gathering a “gar-la”.

Norah Dobbin, in DurhamGate care home near Spennymoor. Picture: Sarah CaldecottTom’s journalistic career started with the Durham Advertiser, a sister paper of The Northern Echo, where he once had a story about an angry mayor of Durham. The editor penned an attractive front page headline to capture the dignitary’s fury: “My blood boils – Mayor”.

But by the time it reached the press, a compositor had altered it to make it look like the mayor had a very painful medical complaint: “My bloody boils – Mayor”.

From the Advertiser, Tom moved onto become the chief reporter for the Newcastle papers, the Journal and the Chronicle, based in Durham. A major part of his beat was the assizes, the court which four times a year heard the county’s most serious cases.

Couped up in the same courtroom for day after day, a relationship grew between the journalist and the judges. One judge was mad keen on the horses, and Tom had to slip him the latest result of races; another judge had Tom stand for an hour or more on top of the press box with his leg exposed so a doctor could explain exactly how a defendant had his knee injured.

And Judge Peter Taylor, who became Lord Chief Justice in the 1990s, would give Tom a lift home to Coxhoe on the back of his motorbike.

Brian Handley, the last person to hang at DurhamIn late 1958, Tom was at the assizes for his most sensational case: the trial of Brian Chandler, a 20-year-old soldier from Catterick, accused of murdering 83-year-old Martha Anne Dodds with a hammer for £4 in Victoria Road, Darlington.

READ MORE: THE LAST PERSON TO HANG AT DURHAM

Chandler was found guilty and Tom was there at the gaol when he was the last person to be hanged in Durham on December 17. He may even have been on the jury of civilians who inspected the body and agreed that the state had lawfully carried out its deadly business.

“At eight o’clock in the morning, when anybody was hanged, the city used to go dead quiet,” remembered Tom. “Dead quiet.”

Tom’s biggest scoop came that same year when his sister-in-law, a matron at Sedgefield General Hospital, rang him to tell him that they were operating on a man who had been eating coins for some years.

The full tally was 366 halfpennies, 11 pennies, 17 threepenny bits, 26 sixpences, four shillings and 27 bits of assorted wire. In total, there were 424 coins with a total value of £1 17s 5d, plus scrap weighing in at 5lb 1oz.

Two buckets were needed to carry the currency from the operating theatre.

“I remember her saying that you got all sorts of things in stomachs in those days,” said Tom.

In today’s terminology, the story went viral. In Tom’s day, this meant he flogged it to a couple of national newspapers and it made the Guinness Book of Records. Those were less squeam-ish times, and in recent decades this Sedgefield record has been dropped for fear of encourag-ing anyone to beat it. Still, as a medical condition, “pica” – compulsive eating of material that may or may not be foodstuff, taken from the Latin word for magpie – continues. In 2004, many news outlets reported how a 62-year-old man in Cholet in France had been surgically deprived of 350 coins, with a street value of 4,050 francs, from his stomach.

After more than a decade reporting Durham, Tom switched to the other side of the fence and became a press officer for the National Coal Board, rising to become head of his department in the North East.

Tom Dobbin, the voice of king coal, is centre

These, though, were challenging times for the coal industry as the inland collieries, which had been so important to Tom’s own family, were shutting.

“I had to announce when a pit was to be closed or when there had been a colliery accident, some of them fatal,” he said. “It broke my heart every time because I knew what the miner and his family would be going through.”

When he joined the NCB in 1961, one man a week was being killed in the country’s coalmines. Tom led a safety campaign in the North East that was rolled out across the country.

“Now,” he said 20 years later, “if there is one man killed over a period of three months, there is hell to pay and that is right.”

Tom was particularly keen in presenting miners in a positive light. His first by-line in the NCB’s in-house newspaper, Coal News, concerned the pitmen from Esh Colliery, near Durham, who had adopted two fox cubs that lived in the “bushy slopes overlooking Ragpath drift”.

The foxes played near the lamp cabin, so the miners brought in leftover food and even choco-lates so that the male fox became so tame that he answered to his name, Rennie.

Tom was also involved in a Candid Camera programme in the 1960s when presenter Jonathan Routh stationed an innocent-looking furniture van outside Ashington pit gate at knocking-off time and loaded it with free ale.

“The idea was to test the reaction of all those frightful miner chappies,” said Tom.

So he was quietly very pleased that the Ashington miners drank dry the lorry-load of beer within a couple of minutes before the candid camera had started rolling, so another lorry-load had to be drafted in, and it too soon disappeared and the TV crew left with just two minutes of foot-age.

For 25 years, Tom was the voice and the face of king coal in the North East, until he retired in 1987 just after the miners’ strike.

He said: “I still feel that the miners, to a large degree, have never had the recognition they de-serve as being really dedicated, intelligent, hard working men. They still work in very dangerous conditions but they always come up smiling. I take my hat off to them.”

Tom Dobbin and some of his golf trophiesHe retired to spend more time with Norah in their house in Springfield Road in Durham, and with his cars – their favourite, she says, was a limited edition John Player Special Ford Capri that was released in 1975 with gold pinstripes down the side so that it mimicked a Formula 1 car.

And to play golf at the Durham City club, where he was captain and publicity officer, and still playing off a single figure handicap into his eighties.

Still with Norah at his side in the new DurhamGate care home, near SpennymoorNor, he not only has one book in him but a whole shelf-full.

Norah and Tom Dobbin, in the DurhamGate care home, near Spennymoor

Lord Justice Peter TaylorTHE judge who used to give Tom a lift home to Coxhoe on the back of his motorbike was Peter Taylor, the son of a Newcastle GP who, in his youth, captained Northumberland at rugby and water polo.

Tom’s editor asked him to get a picture of the judge, in his wig and robes, to go with his report of a court case but the court staff refused to give him one, so instead the editor looked out a picture of Mr Taylor in his rugby gear. When Mr Taylor saw it in the paper, he agreed to pose for one for Tom.

Mr Taylor went on to prosecute the corrupt architect John Poulson and then, in 1979, Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party, for conspiracy to murder – one of the most extraordinary cases of that decade.

Mr Taylor was a keen Newcastle United fan and, as a senior judge, he was chosen to chair the official inquiry into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when 97 fans died in a crush at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground.

The Taylor Report quite literally changed the face of football. It booted out Margaret Thatcher’s plan and instead, it became the launch-pad for a revolution in football as a spectator sport, with clubs being forced to transform ancient, death-trap grounds into safer, all-seater stadia. There was resistance at first, with claims that it would kill off the passion of the traditional ter-races, but the new arenas that sprung up around the country heralded a new era for the game which has made the Premier League the best in the world.

In 1992, John Major made Mr Taylor the Lord Chief Justice, the head of the judiciary, and he be-came Lord Taylor of Gosforth. He stepped down in 1996 when he fell ill with a brain tumour, and used his final speech in the House of Lords to savage Home Secretary Michael Howard’s plans to introduce mandatory sentencing.

He died in 1997, but he never forgot his North East roots or, indeed, his time in Tom’s company.

“I was with Norah one day in Robb’s department store, in Hexham, when this well-dressed chap came up to me and asked if I was still writing for the newspapers,” said Tom. “I’d no idea who he was so I asked him, as you do, how he was getting on himself.

““Oh not bad,” said the stranger, “I’m still the Lord Chief Justice”.”