A BITTER industrial dispute when hundreds of miners and their families were forcibly evicted from their homes is to be brought back to life.
On Saturday visitors to Silksworth, Sunderland, will be given a tour by locals and a potted history of the time when the miners were evicted in January 1891.
And later this month the drama will be re-enacted at Beamish Open Air Museum near Stanley, County Durham.
The telling of the history of Silksworth, a closely-knit mining village until the pit closed in 1971, is part of a Heritage Lottery Fund project for Beamish Museum to explore the background of North East communities.
The project involves communities, schools and individuals in activities celebrating their own local heritage.
Museum outreach and access officer Michelle Ball said: “Silksworth’s history is unique and yet many of the younger generation living there knew nothing about this dispute.
“The miners went on strike to demand union recognition for the deputies. The coal owner Lord Londonderry, whose statue on horseback stands in Durham Market Place, decided that if they weren’t going to work in his mine, they weren’t going to live in his houses. He took steps to have them forcibly evicted.
