Out of the Old Earth

Harold Heslop was born in 1898 in the mining village of New Hunwick, near Bishop Auckland in the heart of the Durham coalfield. He started work underground at the age of 13 and worked for fifteen years at Harton Colliery in South Shields before winning a union scholarship to the Central Labour College in London. His first novel was published in the Soviet Union in 1925, where it sold over half a million copies. His second, The Gate of a Strange Field, was about the General Strike and the six-month lock-out of the miners. Harold Heslop published seven books in all, including a thriller much admired by Dorothy Sayers, a book about the abdication of Edward VIII, and The Earth Beneath, a historical novel about the struggles to build the miners' unions in the nineteenth century. When he died in 1983 he left a mass of unpublished manuscripts, including this memoir. Out of the Old Earth is a classic of working-class autobiography, rich in its portrayal of growing up and starting work in a Durham pit village. Its first-hand descriptions of work underground are among the most vivid and detailed ever published. But this is also a book about his travels and adventures as a writer in the 1930s. Harold Heslop was the only British writer invited to speak at the International Conference of Revolutionary and Proletarian Writers held in Kharkov in the Ukraine in 1930. He witnessed a show trial and watched the epic building of a dam on the Dnieper; he drank with the Nobel prizewinning novelist Mikhail Sholokov in the bar of the Moscow Writers' Union; and in Leningrad he met Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the banned novel We, who had lived on Tyneside during the First World War.