2018

Minnie Pit Memorial

January 2018 saw the centennial of the Minnie Pit Disaster in Halmer End in which 155 boys and men were killed. War poet Wilfred Owen when recovering from shell-shock wrote his poem Miners about the explosion. It was his first published poem.

New Vic Borderlines and Minnie Pit Centenary Group were successful in achieving funding from the WW1 Heritage Lottery Fund. The project included research into the public inquiry and the links between Wilfred Owen and Staffordshire, community workshops to share knowledge, developing skills with local people to  record oral history of miners descendants, and writing and performing a community play.

A Sigh of the Coal

Toured schools in November 2018

A Sigh of the Coal was told through the eyes of Nancy Tipper a young girl from Halmer End at the time of the Minnie Pit disaster, looking for her missing father, when she meets Wilfred Owen. The play is about their imagined conversations.

The play was part of Miners, a Heritage Lottery project exploring the Minnie Pit Disaster and WW1 poet Wilfred Owen. The performance was approximately 30 minutes long and followed by an interactive poetry writing workshop where young people chose a favourite line from the poem Miners and wrote a new piece in response to the Minnie Pit Disaster, WW1 and the play they have just seen.

Part of a series of events that took place marking 100 years since the disaster.