Easington Colliery Disaster Memorial (including memorial screens, communal grave areas, raised beds and former colliery equipment)

The Easington Colliery Disaster Memorial, dating from 1953-4, commemorates the 1951 mining disaster. It consists of two memorial screens within a garden of remembrance located within the wider cemetery, adjacent to the Easington Colliery War Memorial.

The larger eastern screen is 0.82 metres high and 1.05 metres long and comprises two ashlar plaques set within a surround of coursed rubble. The main plaque features a life-sized bas-relief of a miner in profile, dressed in working clothes including a helmet and headlamp and carrying a Davy lamp; the sculptor is unrecorded. An adjacent plaque bears the inscription “REMEMBER BEFORE GOD THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR / LIVES IN THE EASINGTON COLLIERY DISASTER IN / MAY NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY ONE TO WHOM / THIS GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE IS DEDICATED”. A cross is mounted on a piece of coal at its base, and the screen is flanked by two coal trucks positioned on short lengths of track. The western screen is a rectangular plaque within an ashlar frame, flanked by bas-reliefs of Davy lamps and panels of coursed rubble. The plaque is inscribed in Roman capitals, commemorating the 83 men who died in the disaster of 29th May 1951, noting that 72 are buried within the communal graves in the garden, and nine elsewhere, listed by name. It also commemorates two rescue workers, John Young Wallace and Henry Burdess, who died in the course of their duties and are buried elsewhere.

The rectangular, east-west oriented garden of remembrance is enclosed by a low beech hedge and contains two rectangular lawns and a raised bed featuring a red, coal-cutting machine mounted on short lengths of track. Four raised flower beds constructed of squared and coursed rubble are centrally located. A cross fashioned from four miners’ picks rises from the south-western flower bed. To the west are two areas of communal graves, divided by stone borders into 72 individual grave spaces, each marked with a raked stone tablet recording the name and age at death in Roman capitals.