Peter Crookston's book offers a beautifully written journalist's account of a Durham mining village and the Great Northern Coalfield woven around the life of Robert Saint, the composer of Gresford, a brass band composition commemorating an earlier mining disaster in which 256 workers died. Crookston brings his formidable observational qualities and writing skills as a journalist to produce a gripping narrative with utterly compelling characters and a heart-rending culmination in the demise of the mining industry under assault by Thatcher. The story is told in a gentle, unpretentious way, frequently giving voice to the characters themselves, many of whom the author knew personally or got to know in preparing the book. Apart from capturing a critical moment in a disappearing world, the book offers a vantage point from which to reflect on our own culture, and what we have lost in post-industrial Britain: the loss of community which did so much to sustain and nurture those miners in their desperate plights. This is as much a history of culture and place as much as it is biography, a book that is at once an elegy and a tribute.
‘Peter Crookston's book is very remarkable. He knows the area well, and he's captured the spirit of the industry and the story of Gresford and has brought it together in a very skilled way. I think it is something that future generations will go back to, to understand the Gresford Hymn but also the industry it speaks about. A very, very remarkable book.’ Tony Benn