Thomas Coutts Lamb (3 May 1928 – 24 February 2016) was a British coal miner and artist in the North East of England.
Tom Lamb was one of many young coal miners, at the age of 14 he started working in Busty Pit at Craghead Colliery near Stanley, County Durham.
Tom lamb as a child had been hospitalised with diphtheria, whilst he recovered from this illness he discovered his ability to draw.
At the age of fourteen Lamb left school and started work in the mining trade.‘In 1942 there were over 130 pits in the County of Durham employing about 120,000 men and boys’.
[3] Lamb's first job was above ground as he was too young to start working underground, and he was an assistant attendant in the pit head baths from 1942 to 1946.
“There is life and movement in Tom’s work and yet he is able to suggest stillness and tranquillity in this enclosed, private and masculine world...We should all be very grateful to Tom for sharing a vision of a now vanished world in this important and timely exhibition" - Dr Dyson[5]It was in his later years that Lamb began to turn his sketches into the artwork one can see today in exhibitions.