Joseph Skipsey (17 March 1832 – 3 September 1903) was a Northumbrian poet during the Victorian period and one of a number of literary coal miners to be known as 'The Pitman Poet'. Among his best known works is the ballad "The Hartley Calamity", which imagined the last hours of several of those trapped underground during the Hartley Colliery Disaster of January 1862. This devastating mining accident killed a total of 204 men and boys and remains England's most catastrophic pit disaster. Birth and early life Joseph Skipsey was born in Percy Village (generally known after the name of the colliery Percy Main), in the Parish of Tynemouth on 17 March 1832. He was the eighth and final child of Cuthbert, an overman at Percy Main Colliery, and Isabella Skipsey. Joseph Skipsey's life was touched by tragedy at an early age when his father, Cuthbert, was shot dead on 8 July 1832. In the wake of a long and bitter miners' strike tensions in the Great Northern Coalfield were running high and on the Sunday evening, an affray occurred between a group of miners and armed special constables. Cuthbert Skipsey, a man of influence within the community, stepped forward in an attempt to defuse the situation. One of the special constables, George Weddell, pushed him away and shot him with his pistol, Cuthbert died immediately. Weddell was arrested, tried, found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to six months hard labour. Like many children of that era, Joseph Skipsey started work in the local pit at the age of seven as a trapper. In order to break the boredom of the long hours in darkness, Skipsey taught himself to read and write by copying the text from discarded newspapers, adverts, playbills and other printed materials in chalk onto the wooden door he worked at. As his abilities grew Skipsey began, like many other working-class writers, to read canonical writers and was deeply influenced by Shakespeare, Robert Burns, John Milton and Goethe, with Milton's Paradise Lost having a profound influence over him. In an interview he gave to The Pall Mall Gazette in 1889, Skipsey told the newspaper that his first attempts at creating verse came when the older boys in the pit would sing incomplete versions of popular songs. Feeling frustration at these half-remembered songs, Skipsey would fill them out with his own words to match the rhythms and the rhymes