On Thursday evening (11 September) I was delighted to represent the Durham Miners' Association at the closing ceremony of a mining-themed exhibition held at the Dead Dog Gallery in Durham City. The event drew to a close a display of images taken in and around our colliery villages by well-known photographer Mark Pinder, and the closing event last night was combined with news from a couple of banner groups in Langley Park and Bearpark.
As for the exhibition itself, anyone who has been along to see it will have been hugely impressed by Mark's beautiful and evocative images, many in black and white, taken in the pit villages of County Durham, and with a significant emphasis on the communities along the coast between Easington and Blackhall Colliery. Mark also has a significant back-catalogue of images stretching back to the 1980s. The quality of his work has never faltered.
Also on display at the exhibition was the new Bearpark miners' banner which had been blessed in the Cathedral earlier this year during the Big Meeting. It's a magnificent piece of work, completed by the peerless Durham Bannermakers after the community raised funds through a series of campaigns.
Incidentally, Durham Bannermakers will be well known to members of the Blackhall Banner Group who invited Emma Shankland to help us design and then create the current Blackhall DMA banner back in 2019. Emma's Mam and Dad, Lotte and Hugh, were also involved with our banner group 25 years ago when we had a near replica of the 1977 banner made. The sublime quality of the Durham Bannermakers artwork, both past and present, remains unsurpassed, and if you'd like to see their work the 2002 Blackhall banner adorns the wall of the concert hall in Blackhall Community Centre, while the 1977 version is on display in the Hardwick Hotel in Middle Street.
Although until last night I'd never been to the Dead Dog Gallery in the grounds of Durham Sixth Form college down by the river, I was struck by the design of the building, and particularly the exhibition space which stands as a testament to the hard work and dedication of the staff and students at the college. Initiatives like the gallery play a key role in bringing the story of our mining heritage to a wider audience across County Durham and beyond, and I was pleased to hear from the college staff that they have other exhibitions in the pipeline.
Over many years the Durham Miners' Association, the Durham Big Meeting and the Pitmen's Parliament at the magnificently restored Redhills Miners' Hall have played a vital role in preserving and promoting the rich history, culture and heritage of our proud pit communities. Together with exhibitions like the one at the Dead Dog Gallery they are as vital today as they've ever been in standing as a bulwark against a rising tide of division and discord in our communities, generated largely by a decade and a half of government austerity, pernicious economic disparity between rich and poor and the concentration of wealth at the top 1% of society to the detriment of the rest of us. Combined with a feeling that no one is listening to our communities, this creates a resentment that needs to be addressed.
In troubled times like this the messages and slogans on our banners are a timely reminder of how we've always stood together in times of adversity: 'Need Before Greed', 'For the Many, Not the Few' and perhaps above all at the moment 'Unity is Strength'. Those epithets on so many of our wonderful banners send out a powerful message and teach us lessons from past struggles. They show us that if we're going to fight back, standing together as one community is the only realistic way forward.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of last night's exhibition was to see that many young people are organising in our communities to promote the unique culture and heritage of our pit villages. Jack Pringle is a young lad from Langley Park who attended the Big Meeting recently and realised that the village didn't have a banner to take into Durham. He could have just shrugged it off and left it to someone else to sort out. But he didn't. He got a group of local people together and formed the Langley Park Miners' Banner Campaign, with the aim of raising enough money to commission a new banner for the village. Amazingly the group has managed to raise almost £15k in double-quick time, and are now preparing to design their new banner in the hope it'll be ready for the big day next July.
Jack's experience is an almost identical reflection of my own a few years ago. At the Big Meeting in 2000 I was approached by a number of people asking why the Blackhall banner wasn't at the event. The truth is, the banner had become a bit tattered from over-use during the 1984-85 Miners' Strike and many other events including an appearance on the picket lines in 1986 during the print workers strike at Wapping, so it wasn't really in any condition for a day in Durham. So to put this right, within days of the 2000 Big Meeting, the nucleus of a banner committee had been pulled together ready to hold its first meeting in August of that year. The rest, as they say, is history.
I wish Jack and the Langley Park campaign members every success in commissioning their new banner and I look forward to seeing them all on the bustling streets of Durham next year on the second Saturday in July.
The Durham Miners' Association has a motto: 'The Past we Inherit. The Future we Build', and to me that short slogan neatly epitomises everything that our pit communities are about. They were founded, fought for and sustained by past generations, and young people from our villages are now building on their heritage and culture to pass on to the next generation.
They are breathing colour and life into our DMA slogan because they understand that if we lose sight of our connection with the past, we risk losing hope for the future.
