Sharon attended the Third Annual Thomas Hepburn Memorial Lecture, this year at St Mary's Heritage Centre Gateshead.  The address was given by the Rt Hon Baroness Joyce Quin of Gateshead.

Caption: Proud of our Mining and Trade Union Heritage.  Left to right: Sharon Hodgson MP, the Rt Hon Baroness Joyce Quin, and Mr Derrick Scott, retired Mining Safety Officer from Springwell Village.

Baroness Quin - who was the MP for Gateshead East and Washington West til 2005, when she stepped down and was elevated to the House of Lords - spoke on "Politics and the Citizen".

The Lectures are in celebration of the legacy of Thomas Hepburn the father of the Trade Union Movement.  Thomas Hepburn is buried in St Mary's churchyard in Heworth.

Previous speakers at the lecture have been Newcastle University’s Professor of Energy and Environment Paul Younger, and the NUM president Ian Lavery, who have spoken on clean coal technologies and modern methods for coal extraction.

From Newcastle Journal: In memory of a renowned leader of coal miners (by Tony Henderson)

..."Thomas Hepburn, who was born at Pelton in County Durham and died in 1864, was a renowned miners’ leader who helped form a union to fight for the rights of the workers he represented. He began work at the age of eight at Fatfield Colliery, and moved to Jarrow and then Hetton Colliery before forming the Northern Union of Pitmen around 1830-31. He later worked in Felling in Gateshead.

Thanks to the legacy of 150 years of the struggle initiated by Thomas Hepburn and his fellow trade unionists, the UK deep coal mining sector came to lead the world in safety standards."

(Copyright Newcastle Journal 2007)

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Sharon Hodgson MP
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E-mail: hodgsons@parliament.uk

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