“In 1884, during the eviction of miners from their homes in Silksworth, Lord Londonderry said: ‘I want to teach a lesson to the deluded and obstinate victims of designing men and crafty Attorneys and to defeat the insane Union!’ On 10 March 1985, after the year-long strike, Ian MacGregor, chairman of the then National Coal Board, said” ‘People are now discovering the price of insubordination and insurrection and, boy, are we going to make it stick!'” (Dave Guy, President of the Durham Miners Association, quoting Londonderry and MacGregor in his Preface to Norman Emery’s 1992 book, The Coalminers of Durham)
But against that official history in County Durham is the story of the miners’ persistent rebellion against and resistance to exploitation, denigration and outright cruelty toward them. Here we discuss the highlights of County Durham’s miners’ refusal to be defined and constrained by outside forces, to the best of their ability which often was exceptional.
source: Backbone of the Nation by Robert Gildea
A notable strength in the Durham pit villages was their sense and performance of community. Communal spirit and mutual support in Durham’s mining towns is well known in the region and spoken of to this day. As well, in County Durham a specific word exists to describe the camaraderie of men working in the mine: marra. This ethos of brotherhood is explained by the Durham Miners Association:
Illinois miners also speak about the bond among men working underground, but the specific concept of “marra” does not exist. But the same pride in work is expressed by all former miners express and perhaps captured by this vernacular phrase, “If you ain’t a miner, you ain’t shit.”
An interesting point of comparison and contrast concerns the pit (colliery) village, for instance in County Durham, and the company town in America. Happily, in the Illinois coalfield true coal towns were rare (as in Zeigler) and did not conform to the notorious situation elsewhere, as in the famous lyrics “I owe my soul to the company store“. To the contrary, Gillespie had the first miners’ co-op.
But elsewhere in America –such as in West Virginia – to go on strike was to immediately reap eviction in a. company town. Residential tenancy in a Durham pit village played out differently. In earlier days when a working male miner in a household died it would mean eviction if a substitute could not be provided to the mine owner, thus accounting for rapid remarriages and the sending of young sons prematurely into the mine. But usually a substitute was found.
Interestingly, as another comparison with County Durham, in Illinois coal towns the miners’ sense of identity was not the town in which they lived but rather the specific mine in which they worked. This is because one mine did not necessarily define a settlement. There could be several mines and in the post-WWII period when miners’ pay was good, miners might be driving their cars to work in a mine away from the town/coal town in which they lived.
In the Illinois Coal Museum in Gillespie we feature a poster comparing County Durham and Macoupin County in terms of the coal mining history:
Largely missing in Illinois and in the U.S. among coal miners or playing a minor role were banners. Here are three examples from Macoupin County, each pertaining to the Progressives’ union (note the name change from the original Progressive Miners of America to Progressive Mine Workers of America in 1938).
This contrasts to the ubiquitous presence of banners in England since medieval times on, certainly in recent times with the trade union banners, and most gloriously with the banners paraded in the Durham Miners Gala.
In Durham, miners and their families lived in their pit villages and that was their sense of identity and locality. This was manifested by banners, unique to each community’s lodge in the Durham Miners Association and a community treasure. Those banners were and still are proudly displayed in schools or halls in the various towns of the county. And they are the most visual element of renowned Durham Miners’ Gala.
The Gala is an outgrowth of the establishment of the Durham Miners Association in 1869. Two years later miners celebrated their new union with a “Big Meeting”, organized by the delegates of the newly created union. 1871. All of the pit villages were invited to come to Wharton Park overlooking the dramatic peninsula on which the historic city is located and where the ecclesiastical, mercantile, political and social elite lived. The Sunderland Times stated in 1871 that the miners used the day “to bond themselves more closely … and to show the country at large that the Durham Miners Association was not a myth … but a stupendous fact.” The Big Meeting (as it was originally called) was also a day of recreation and the opportunity for the residents of the otherwise isolated pit villages to meet each other, which in turn generated social solidarity and shared political awareness. The first Big Meeting was so successful that the next year it moved into the city with pit village members carrying their remarkable banners and proceeding to the racecourse, which was (and still is) large enough to accommodate all.In a way the Gala can be compared to Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival when the poor residents of the city take over Rio’s center, claiming space with their community/identity-affirming celebration. Similarly, it might be said, the miners (demeaned and disparaged by the City of Durham’s elites) claimed their space in the city for one day: the second Saturday of July.
As the DMA explains, “The culture of mining communities is embedded in these Lodge banners; they are the physical manifestation of a deeply rooted occupational identity. The entire history – social, political and economic- of the Durham coalfield can be seen through the imagery of the banners.” Andreas Pantazatos and Helaine Silverman have argued that since the closing of the mines and, indeed, the destruction of the mining infrastructure that used to be visible in every pit village, the banners have become the landscape of the once great industry. Scholars concur that Gala celebrates people’s identity and identification with the pit villages and carry forward the memory of that life, replete with the political context of the event.
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The joyous occasion of the Gala has remained highly political with speeches by DMA leaders and sympathetic politicians.
Less than ten years after the Durham Miners Association formed and the first Gala was held, its 50,000 miners decided to assert a permanent place in the city by building the Miners’ Hall (still present on North Road but no longer serving the DMA).
Between 1913-1915 with 120,000 miners organized in 200 lodges the DMA was able to build the magnificent Red Hills, further up the road. It is not a coincidence that 1913 was the year of Britain’s greatest coal production.
And inside Red Hills the most extraordinary expression of counter-culture to Britain’s Parliament was the creation of a fully democratic Pitmen’s Parliament. As described in the Visitor Guide: “This impressive debating chamber was built in the style of a chapel in keeping with the Primitive Methodist tradition of the [DMA] leadership… In common with the rest of the building, it as constructed using the best materials and the finest workmanship. The seats with writing desks are made from Austrian oak. It features ornate plater work, and the windows are made frm fine quality stained cathedral glass. All [as] piad for by the individual contributions of the Durham miners. Each miners’ Lodge sent an elected delegate to speak on behalf of the men frm that colliery and every Lodge had its own seat. It as in the room that all of the important issues would be debated and voted on – decisions that would affect the lives of many thousands of many thousands of Durham mining families. The banners displayed around the chamber carry the political and trade union messags of unity and solidarity and portray the hopes, aspiration and achievements of the coalfield.”
In addition to the ongoing political work of the DMA, Red Hills is an active cultural center with a calendar of activities intended to maintain alive the spirit and knowledge of the working class through its varied programs. It promotes political engagement through education. Red Hills also has permanent exhibition of a selection of banners, Durham related paintings and artifacts. As such, it also functions as a museum.
Consideration of Red Hills and the Pitmen’s Parliament of course brings us to the 1984-85 miners strike which, in County Durham, was arguably the greatest act of rebellion in the region in centuries. The decision to strike must have been finalized at Red Hills and in the Pitmen’s Parliament.
Striking Durham communities suffered gravely as they desperately sought to prevent more mine closures. The phrase “coal not dole” should have been understood (but was not) by the British public as laudable – people wanting to work rather than receive government unemployment support. Strikers were also fighting for the social sustainability of their communities, knowing that these would be devastated by the loss of mining. Easington became the “poster child” of the miners’ rebellion against the deliberate and uncaring determination of the Thatcher government to dismantle trade unions and of its aftermath.
Easington was occupied by the police
Easington survived the trauma of police occupation and then the end of the strike. In addition to the heroism of the striking miners, it is essential to acknowledge the role of Easington’s rebellious women led by a 33-year-old housewife, Heather Wood. As described by Robert Gildea, author of Backbone of the Nation. Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 (pp. 121-122), she was “highly combative … formed a union at a mail order firm in Sunderland when she was eighteen, and later became chair f the Constituency Labour Party. In October 1983, the year before the strike, she chaired a meeting at the Easington Miners’ Welfare Hall which set up Save Easington Area Mines… ‘We need to get the women’ declared Heather since their support for the strike was crucial. She took matters into her own hands, mobilising friends and family to leaflet all the homes in the Easington district in order to contact miners’ wives. … at the beginning of May 1984 … the immediate task was to set up a soup kitchen in the Easington Working Men’s Club, for the striking miners first, then for their families…. miners’ wives were assuming responsibilities outside the home … This began to challenge the traditional rule of men in the public sphere … The message was that pit closures would lead to school closures, shop closures and no jobs for their children as they grew up.” Unfortunately, Heather was prescient and all this and more came to pass when Easington Colliery closed.
Billy Elliot was filmed here
Easington Colliery closed in 1993 – the last in the Durham coalfield – and with that loss of employment came devastating social problems, represented on the town’s landscape by shuttered shops along the main street and a once thriving and architecturally beautiful Grade-II listed school that by 1997 had no students and was deteriorating, vandalized, vermin-infested and used for drugs activities. Indeed, by 2010 some residents in Easington were petitioning to have the building demolished. It was still standing in 2018, the last time we visited. But the physical-social-and-economic condition of Easington post-mine closure demonstrates the dire consequences and insufficiently remediated impact of Thatcher’s government on England’s northeast pit villages.
Yet Easington along with dozens of other pit villages continued to participate in the Durham Miners Gala, the event assuming new importance as an assertion of community spirit. And in July 2017 teachers at the new primary school organized the students to perform a student Gala in town and wrote lesson plans to teach and encourage the youngsters to engage with Easington’s history and conduct oral history interviews at home with their older relatives who had been in the mine and remembered the strike. The day of their parade was cold and rainy but students, assisted by parents and teachers, strode through town with coal-smudged cheeks, wearing miners hats, carrying picks, singing a song created by teachers (“Working In A Coal Mine”) and carrying the new banner they had made for the school: Easington Colliery Primary School. with its slogan (“Dream – Aspire – Achieve”) and iconography that includes the mine cage on the hill above town, the only remaining surface evidence of the once great mine operation. But it is important to indicate that this year was a one-off that fortuitously coincided with our fieldwork. The theme for the parade in the previous year was “under the water” – all about the ocean. When we returned in 2018 the primary school teachers said they were still including Easington’s history in the curriculum but that year’s parade would not be coal-based either. The point is theoretically interesting about how heritage is created and perpetuated, by whom, for whom, and when. From our perspective, we hope that these young students did gain an understanding of Easington and the words they were writing on posterboards. Importantly, Easington’s original banner that the town’s banner group carries every year in the Durham Miners Gala is displayed prominently in the gymnasium with an explanatory plaque. The Durham Miners Association, in Redhills, has been involved in the school to present information and to encourage memory and appreciation.
A final form of rebellion – and a very happy one – in County Durham is the Spennymoor Settlement which played a revolutionary role in the lives of many miners. The Settlement took on the official art world, public attitudes toward coal miners, and the miners’ beliefs about themselves as working men to create an extraordinary art school (among its other activities). The Settlement produced what are now recognized to be major artists such as Norman Cornish and Tom McGuinness. As described by various advocates, the Settlement offered opportunity and served as catalyst for realizing new directions in one’s routine life, the opportunity to reach one’s full potential. The Settlement was driven by the vision of a theater enthusiast from Liverpool, Bill Farrell, who also engaged in voluntary social work in between acting obligations. In 1930 he arrived in Spennymoor, which already had lost its coal industry, and became interested in the high number of unemployed miners without purpose and stimulation in their lives. He opened the Settlement in 1931. He wanted the Settlement to “encourage tolerant neighborliness and voluntary social service and give its members opportunities for increasing their knowledge, widening their interests and cultivating their creative powers in a friendly atmosphere” (p. 16 in Way To The Better. The Spennymoor Settlement, by Robert McManners and Gillian Wales). The upshot is that miners started wandering in out of curiosity and because they had nothing else to do. Various avocational groups formed – to read plays, to sketch, a choir, to further one’s education including about current affairs and government. A newspaper article in 1936 heralded the Spennymoor Settlement as “The Pitmen’s Academy.”
Nothing comparable to the Gala or Red Hills exists in the United States. The closest we come is Miners Day and May Day/Mother Jones Festival celebrated in Mt. Olive and at the Union Miners Cemetery by a small but passionate group of former miners, local UMWA representatives, labor activists and supporters, and the dedicated members of Perpetual Care Association of the cemetery and Board of the small Mother Jones Museum.
The headquarters of the United Mine Workers of America in Washington, D.C. does not exist in a landscape of former coal towns and it serves a very different purpose than Red Hills, as it seeks to pressure remaining coal companies and the U.S. Congress to live up to their obligation to former miners, particularly in terms of their pensions and health benefits.
