FROM REIVERS TO RAILWAYS – THE FORGOTTEN DODDS DYNASTY
In the early hours of the morning of 21st October 1805 a gas explosion ripped through the High Main seam of ‘C’ Pit at Hebburn Colliery, just south of the Tyne. 700ft underground 35 men died deaths as grim as any suffered at the Battle of Trafalgar, being fought far away that very same day. Among the dead in the mine was Thomas Dodds, the Viewer – the manager – of neighbouring Felling Colliery. Why Thomas was down the shaft of another Viewer’s mine that night is no longer known, but he left behind his widow Ann Weatherburn Dodds and their children Eleanor Dodds 7, Thomas Weatherburn Dodds 6, Isaac Dodds 4 and Ralph Dodds, 18 months.
George Stephenson is a name known to anyone with an interest in railways but, by contrast, virtually unknown are the names of four people who worked closely with him, right at the start, even before Stephenson’s first locomotive, the legendary Blucher, took to the rails in 1814: Ralph Dodds, George Dodds, Isaac Dodds and Robert Dodds. Two of those, Ralph and Isaac, both still youngsters then, were Thomas and Ann Dodds’s children, made fatherless ten years before.
The Dodds name has virtually been forgotten in this context, yet it is one that appears again and again, from those early pioneering days right through to the great era of Victorian engineering later in the century. These men were descended from a group of border reivers based in the Upper Tyne Valley, the formidable Dodds ‘grayne’, as the chief-less clans were known in Northumberland. Members of the ‘grayne’ had moved south at the start of the industrial revolution, transforming themselves into hardworking, successful members of the mining communities situated around Newcastle and Tyneside.
In the wake of the explosion at Hebburn Colliery, wives, workmates and children waited at the pithead for the wounded, the dying and the bodies. In the days before safety lamps, events like these were all too common. As was usual then, details of the explosion were withheld from the press, but word of the disaster spread rapidly through the mining communities of the Tyne, long before the news of Nelson’s victory off distant Cadiz reached England.
Messages about Hebburn would have been sent to the homes of the three brakesmen in charge of the pithead gear at West Moor colliery, a few miles north, on the other side of the Tyne. One was Robert Weatherburn, brother of the newly-widowed Ann Dodds. The second was George Dodds, not directly related to Thomas, but a kinsman nevertheless. The third brakesman was George Stephenson. George Stephenson, George Dodds and Robert Weatherburn were part of a group brought together by those perpetual accompaniments to coalmining: gas, rockfalls, accidents, injury and lung infections. They shared the same responsibilities for men’s lives. Miners had to trust themeslves to the skill of the brakesmen who controlled the lifting equipment, cables and braking systems of the mine-shafts; and the steam engines that powered them.
West Moor Colliery lay within sight of Killingworth Colliery, and a message would also have been carried there that night. The Viewer at Killingworth was Thomas Dodds’s brother, Ralph. Viewers of collieries were like ship captains. They needed to know how to do every job on site and they were responsible for everyone on – and under – the colliery. Brother-in-law Ralph Dodds
