Dispatches from the North: North East Wedding Traditions

I actually started out yesterday wanting to blog about something completely different. Then last night at my choir rehearsal my friend Valerie shared a fascinating story with me and I just had to share it.

Valerie is a retired school teacher and she sits next to me in choir practice. She has the most delightfully cooky personality and always has something entertaining to share. Last night we were talking about the difference between American and English cakes and it got her to talking about traditional weddings where she is from. (If you are wondering, instead of the sponge cake like American cakes, traditional English cakes are fruit cake with dense fondant or marzipan frosting. Wedding cakes are still made of fruit cake to this this day.)

Valerie grew up in a Durham Colliery, a colliery is a community of miners that is usually adjacent to the mine itself. They are very close knit communities where everyone kind of helps everyone else and most of the North East was made up of collieries well into the mid 20th Century. Valerie shared this fascinating story about weddings in the colliery and I will do my best to relate it back to you.

Example of a 1913 Durham Colliery at Beamish Museum. The mine can be seen at the back, the colliery homes at the far left and the church and other community buildings on the right.

Traditionally the reception for the wedding is held in the colliery church hall. Instead of like most modern or more upscale weddings where a caterer usually prepares the food for the event, in traditional colliery weddings the mother of the bride usually prepares all of the food for all of the guests. Not only does she cook all of the food, but the guest list for one of these events was usually around 200 to 300 people! 

Because the mother of the bride cooks food for 300 people, all of the close neighbors pitch in and play the part of waitresses. All of the neighbor women would wear their “best pinny” or pinafore (apron) and would serve the guests at the wedding. Also, because the church hall didn’t usually have their own crockery or cutlery, the neighbors also lent their own sets for the day. In those times everyone had similar cutlery, usually a bone handle with a metal utensil on the top. In order to distinguish whose cutlery was whose, each neighbor would identify her own cutlery by attaching a piece of cotton of a certain color around the handle of her cutlery so at the end of the night they could return the proper cutlery to its owner. 

There usually weren’t enough seats in the church hall for everyone to eat at once so they would usually set up a few long tables and then the head of the neighbor waitressing staff would call for the family of the bride and groom to take a seat and they would eat their meal. Once they had finished their meal they would clear the table and reset it and call for friends and neighbors to take their turn at the table. 

There was also always a band which consisted of an accordion, drums and a piano and everyone would dance.

This sounds like a delightful wedding, but it also sounds like something out of Little House on the Prairie. The thing that struck me the most about this story is that Valerie is probably in her late 60s or early 70s and this is something that happened regularly in her lifetime. This kind of wedding was the norm in this area up until the mid 20th century! It seems like a quaint story from generations ago when really its a fairly recent practice. 

There seem to be a lot of stories like this which I have a hard to time placing as happening within the last 50 or 60 years. For example, I have heard my husband talk about using the bathroom in an outhouse within the last 30 years. Also, in the 70s men in this town used to tattoo themselves during school using the ink wells in their desks. If you come to this town you will notice many men in their late 40s and early 50s still have roughly drawn tattoos on their hands and arms or even face that they tattooed on themselves in school using the ink wells in their desks. 

It isn’t that this is a backwards town, some old practices just die very hard. Even though new technologies and trends are available and in use, it seems to take decades longer for the old to phase out. 

Bringing it back to Valerie, she of course had to end her story about traditional weddings with a surprise. She added “I was a bit snooty you see, so I insisted on having a 3 course knife and fork meal for about 60 people.” Leave it to Valerie to break the mold of the traditional colliery wedding and demand only the best!