This devastating mining accident killed a total of 204 men and boys and remains England's most catastrophic pit disaster.

[2] In order to break the boredom of the long hours in darkness, Skipsey taught himself to read and write by copying the text from discarded newspapers, adverts, playbills and other printed materials in chalk onto the wooden door he worked at.

In an interview he gave to The Pall Mall Gazette in 1889, Skipsey told the newspaper that his first attempts at creating verse came when the older boys in the pit would sing incomplete versions of popular songs.

[7] When told by Skipsey of his dire situation, Clephan obtained a job for him at Hawks, Crawshay and Sons ironworks in Gateshead.

Their loss has bowed their parents head down to dust of our reflections and their deaths have enlikened the belief that the dear jewels were wrongly treated.

Following this trip to London, and through the efforts of Burne-Jones, Skipsey was awarded a small annual pension from the Royal Bounty Fund for his services to literature by William Gladstone.

By 1882 he was 50 years old and starting to feel his age, and so when a position of caretaker became vacant at a new Board School at Mill Lane, Newcastle, he applied for, and won the post.

In September 1888, he moved to the position of porter at the newly extended Armstrong College, but even this was hardly the job for a man of letters.

Supported by some of the most important cultural figures of the late-nineteenth century, including Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, William Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Dowden, Edmund Gosse, and many others, Skipsey's application proved irresistible and he and his wife were appointed joint custodians.

[10] After less than two years he became disenchanted with the post which (he confided in a letter not to be opened until after his death) involved dealing with relics which had "no definite history" and having to "perpetuate error and fraud" on the visitors and general public.

Joseph Skipsey died in the house of his son Cuthbert at 5 Kells Gardens, Low Fell, Gateshead, on 3 September 1903, aged 71.