Man In His Place - Durham: 1: A Man's Life
In Durham, the coal mines dominate the people in the same way they dominate the landscape. In this first episode of a series looking to profile British society, Norman Dennis discovers a culture that is unique to the Durham pit villages, folk songs based on their own lives and experiences, and stories that reveal the hard facts of life in a mining community.
The song played over the end of this programme is the traditional folksong 'The Collier's Rant', first published in 1784 (though written much earlier), in which a collier and his workmate ('marra') encounter the Devil on the way to work. The song illustrates the deep-rooted superstition that was prevalent in mining communities where mining disasters were often thought to be the work of the Devil.
