Born in 1919 in Oxford Street, Spennymoor Norman Cornish began working in the mines on Boxing day in 1933 and not long after he was accepted as a member of the Spennymoor Settlement, at just the age of 15. It was here that he met the author Sid Chaplin and later fellow mining artist Tom McGuinness. The resident warden of the Settlement Bill Farrell encouraged Cornish to ''paint the life he knew''. The artists of the Settlement exhibited regularly at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and directly after the war Cornish held his first solo exhibition at the People's Theatre in Newcastle. The sale of five of his works at the exhibition resulted in him being asked to curate an exhibition on Oxford Street in London...