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Pictures of the winder at Wheatley Hill from Roy Lambeth (with a photo of the banner included)....notes from Roy's e-mail.........

In 1968, after the pit had closed but was still operating doing recovery work, I was invited to make a visit one Sunday morning while they were doing the brake testing to see both steam winders in action. I was lucky to be given the opportunity to be wound by steam going down the shaft wound by the vertical engine and coming up the shaft wound by the Robey Horizontal Tandem Compound. I also took some colour slides of the winding engines.

Regards, Roy Lambeth, Edinburgh

Notes on Roy's background.

Basically it goes back to when I was at school and got interested in steam rollers as an alternative to train-spotting, since I did not like the then new diesels that were coming onto the railways. With the steam rollers, I spent happy hours at Newbottle at the premises of Guy Potts, Road Rolling Contractors. There they introduced me to Jack Wakefield at Hetton-le-Hole who had ayard full of 30 odd redundant traction engines. It was one of his regular visitors who invited me to see another form of steam engine. That was my only link with Wheatley Hill. However, living in Durham near Belmont, when the wind was in the south-east I could hear a steam winder at work but I could never tell whether it was Thornley or Wheatley Hill, those 2 pits still having steam winders in the early 1960s.

My research is not with Wheatley Hill itself but of mining generally and have dabbled in Lead Mines, Ironstone Mines, Tin Mines as well as coal, in fact anywhere that had steam and/or banners.

My link with banners is only having missed 3 Durham Miner's Galas since 1955, and having played in a brass band, bringing in Kelloe Banner to the centenary Gala in 1983.

I now live and work in Edinburgh and am a friend of The Scottish Mining Museum at Newtongrange where we friends spend our spare time answering the public's questions about pits,ancestors,fatalities,disasters,railway links and opening/closing dates of mainly scottish pits, but there is some English/Welsh archive that I use for the Durham Mining Museum, and anyone else who cares to contact me.

Hope that explains the situation a little better.

Regards, Roy

The Pictures