The Pitmen Poets – East Riding Theatre, Beverley

This welcome return to the East Riding Theatre is slightly different for the Pitmen Poets: the fourth member, Benny Graham, is missing through ill-health. The remaining three pay a genuine, if irreverent, tribute to him in the song, Stanley Market, where, after Bob Fox has humorously listed all the goods obtainable at the market, Jez Lowe adds a few new verses about the omniscient Benny.

This song is the work of the original Pitman Poet, Tommy Armstrong, and his spirit prevails for much of the evening over a century after he wrote his songs. The South Medomsley Strike is a bitterly satirical take on a strike of the 1880s, with the bosses caricatured as household objects. Many of the songs are originals by the Pitmen Poets, with one or two totally unexpected surprises, but the life of a miner in the North East underlies most of them, sometimes presented in a humorous light.

The Poets have been together for 15 years, three (originally four) of the finest singer/songwriters on the North Eastern scene: Billy Mitchell, Bob Fox and Jez Lowe. All are from the first generation when going down the pit was not a certain career and their political stance is obvious, in the songs and the chat in between, always relatively restrained, but you can sense the effort involved in keeping it so! Singing solo or in rousing choruses, they bring three distinctive voices to bear, plus an array of guitars and mandolins, giving a surprising variety of instrumental sound – the odd bit of harmonica or pipe helps, too.

Pretty much all bases are touched. Ewan MacColl’s Schooldays Over presents the days of no choice, the pit the only option, the prophetic Farewell to Johnny Miner casts its eye around the coalfields that are soon to disappear and Billy Mitchell’s Shifting to the Toon spells out the consequences of closure to a lad from a pit village. The anger against betrayal shows more forcibly in The Judas Bus about the impossibility of black leg miners being able to hold their heads up in the community. Rather off the main theme is a beautiful version of Mark Knopfler’s saga of Mason and Dixon, Sailing to Philadelphia – well, one of them was the son of a colliery manager, as Bob Fox apologetically points out.

The theme of most of the songs is sombre enough, but the tone of the evening never is. Apart from revisiting childhood in Dance to Your Daddy, the Poets hilariously recount a day at the Durham Miners’ Gala in Big Meeting Day and, even more hilariously, recast pub quizzes as an outlaw ballad, complete with audience “Yeehaws”. That’s not the only time we rune into the American country scene (Country and North Eastern?), with a tremendous union song from Wales via the United States.

Reviewed on 18 June 2026. On tour.