MEET THE AUTHOR
In Women of the Durham Coalfield in the 20th Century: Hannah’s Daughter MARGARET HEDLEY tells the story of her family history
How did you come to write the book?
The first book in the series was Women of the Durham Coalfield in the 19th Century: Hannah’s Story, and I initially wrote that because there was nothing written down about those women. However, Hannah’s Story was so successful that people who read it were getting in touch with me and saying, “We need a sequel – we need to know what happened to Hannah’s family.”
Now, that was never on my agenda; I had never intended to go beyond that first book. But because of the requests for more information, I decided that I would write another book up to the death of Hannah’s youngest daughter, my great grandmother Susannah Jopling, in 1940. So that was the inspiration behind the second book: public demand.
Your family lived through some really interesting history.
Yes, didn’t they just. Obviously in the first book, set in the 19th century, they had a really tough time, but I don’t think it got very much better during the early part of the 20th century. They had the First World War, the colliery owners were causing big problems for the mining families, the accommodation was a problem, and in these isolated villages, the opportunities for women to become involved in work during the First World War just weren’t available.
How much of the material in the book is based on research, and how much did you use your imagination to reconstruct?
Everything I say that relates to incidents that happened I’ve got from newspapers, or I’ve got from textbooks about the trade unions, or about religion. The only thing that I’ve made up is the conversations. I interviewed my grandmother Isabella, Susannah’s daughter, in 1995 before she died, and she was able to tell me a lot of things that her mother had told her. So making the conversations up wasn’t very difficult. My granny had told me, “Oh, my sister died in 1919 of the Spanish flu, and my mother always said…” – you know, the sort of thing that relations say to each other. After the 1911 census there’s nothing much available online, so my granny’s memories were really great to have and I could build around them.
What advice would you give to anyone who wanted to write about their family history?
I think that the research has to be really thorough. It’s interesting what you can get from birth, marriage and death certificates – it’s a really good start – and the census records as well. Also I built up the story around local history by going through the newspapers. You’ve just got to be thorough, and don’t leave a stone unturned with regard to sources.