Getting to grips with gripes, graips, greips and dungforks

“People think of mining as a man’s world but female artists have portrayed it as well,” said assistant curator Anne Sutherland, pointing to a noisily colourful painting of women protesting with placards against pit closures in the 1980s by Marjorie Arnfield.

Women Protesting, by Marjorie Arnfield in the new exhibition at the Mining Art Gallery in Bishop Auckland. Picture courtesy of the artist's estate

However, this was not the only piece of trivia we learned. The exhibition is a selection from the 460 items of mining art collected over the years by Bob McManners and Gillian Wales – the Gemini Collection. When we’d finished discussing the meaning of mining, Bob revealed his latest gripe: he’d been looking in the dictionary for “gripe”, which is the local word for dungfork – it is first recorded being used in Durham in 1459.

He eventually found “graip”, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as a “three- or four-pronged fork used as a dung-fork”.

So the correct pronunciation of gripe is “grape”.

This is because it comes from an Old Norse word, “greip”, which refers to the space between the thumb and the fingers. You can see how the wide shape of a “greip” became ideal for digging into a dungy-strawy mess.

A Second World War Women's Land Army poster featuring a pitchfork

To this day, in Swedish and Danish, they use the word “greb” to mean “pitchfork” – although in English, there is a big difference between a graip and a pitchfork.

A graip, or dungfork, has four tines, or prongs, and a waist-high handle so it can be dug into the dung, whereas a pitchfork usually has two tines and a longer handle so it is ideal for pitching straw.

However, you should never confuse a pitchfork with a pitch-fork, as the latter is used in music for getting the correct pitch.

It was all very confusing, so we returned to studying a striking picture in the exhibition, by Tom McGuinness, entitled Women Waiting at the Pithead. With their faces expressing horror similar to that seen in Edvard Munch’s Scream, we assumed they were fearing the worst for their husbands who had been caught below in a disaster.

Women Waiting at the Pithead, by Tom McGuinness in the new exhibition at the Mining Art Gallery in Bishop Auckland

But it goes deeper than that. It’s also about the death of the industry.

“It is part of Tom’s ‘lost generation’ series,” said Bob. “He railed against the closure of the mines in the Thatcher years, although over time his ire turned to sadness, so these are wandering souls who have no focus to their lives – there’s even a woman without a face looking at the derelict pithead.”

The mining art gallery, like Auckland Castle and the Spanish Gallery, is open to the public from Wednesdays to Sundays from 10.30am to 4pm.