Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Robert Moore’s detailed analysis of the development of the Deerness Valley area to the west of Durham, during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book Pitmen, Preachers and Politics is specifically dedicated to examining the role of the Methodist community in the valley, but it has a wider resonance as the Methodists were so influential in Deerness Valley at the time. As we are faced with such uncertainty at present it seemed useful to return to Pitmen, Preachers and Politics, to see what lessons can be learned from those far off days for today and tomorrow.
Deerness Valley is situated to the west of Durham City and the area contained in Moore’s study is centred around old pit villages such as Quebec, Cornsay and Ushaw Moor.
One of the clearest messages from the book regards immigration into Deerness Valley, as the coal industry there expanded. This was a community built, from the 1860s onwards, upon inward migration. Some of this was fairly local, with lead miners coming down the Pennine valleys to turn their hand to a trade which was similar to their work in places like Upper Weardale. Meanwhile others came from as far away as Ireland. Deerness Valley is said to have seen the “the intersection of religion, politics and community action and development”.
As the title suggests, Moore doesn’t limit his analysis of this community to simply matters concerning the coal trade. He was also very interested in the influence of religion in the community and particularly the dominant creed; Methodism.
Among other things noted by Moore, Primitive Methodists saw fluctuations in Methodist members which coincided with local economic circumstances, while the Primitive Methodists outnumbered the more traditional Wesleyan Methodists by a ratio of two-to-one. Meanwhile it is also stated that, so closely was Methodism of whichever branch associated with mining that chapel building followed the coal trade.
Moore also examined the occupation of Methodists, finding that many of them were miners, although not exclusively so.
Although Methodism was the dominant creed, there was some religious conflict between Protestant and Catholics, mots if not all of whom had come from Ireland, particularly after the Potato Famine of the 1840’s. However Moore reports that there “few conflicts in the valley” Meanwhile, village life was said to be rich, with cultural activities, with their being so much music that Deerness Valley earned the name of the ‘singing valley’ while members of the community benefited from the paternalism of the local mine owners.
In this paternalism we see the influence of owners who showed their concern for their people with the company patronage of chapels, as Methodism was something which was often shared between the miners and their bosses. That is not to say, however, that there was never any industrial strife as Moore notes that some men were blacklisted although he also noted that colliery owners helped to pay for support for children’s breakfasts during an industrial dispute.
The Methodist leaders were often seen as leaders of the men at the pit and the community in general and this sometimes caused a tension between their beliefs in problems being caused by individual sin and societal issues, such as the working and general environment in which people lived. Despite their concern for social issues, the Methodist was still seen as someone who was ‘in the world. not of it’, yet he was very much a man active in his community. Interestingly, Moore also relates how some saw Christ as a Socialist. That said in the 19th century, the Methodist trade union leaders in the valley tended to believe in the peaceful advancement of men’s interests by trade unionists through negotiation rather than confrontation.
Moore also noted that, “the Methodist miner was in many ways an independent man; he worked as a skilled and adaptable craftsman at the coal-face, doing a difficult and at times dangerous job in frequently-changing conditions. He purchased his tools at the store, where his wife also purchased food and household goods. The store was the men’s own store, the miner could voice an opinion at a meeting or directly participate in its running. He helped to choose the local minister, to examine the local preachers, himself perhaps either teaching at Sunday school or preaching in the circuit. As we gave seen above he was also a man of some standing, commanding respect in local society.”
Moore stated that miners were well represented in the leadership of the Durham Miners at both county and local level. It is noted that “between 1890 and 1920 out of 29 leading local Methodists whose careers we have been able to reconstruct in detail, 21 held between them 42 trade union offices, another 21 held 28 posts in political parties also as councillors and as J.P.s and approximately 13 held Cooperative Society offices. The overlap and interlocking of roles is obviously considerable. Methodists were said to be active in both Liberal and Labour parties and “we would not therefore expect to find attitudes of deference towards the owners and managers of the collieries”.
The unions were seen as representatives of the m who were winning coal in partnership with the masters and “respectable Methodist leadership was in a position to exercise substantial influence on industrial relations in the villages”.
Lessons for today and tomorrow
The first lesson that comes to mind is related to the importance of an enterprise to bring people together. As Moore and many others have demonstrated, miners came into the North East from many parts of Britain, from Cornwall and from Ireland, from Scotland and from other parts of the north of England. It wasn’t always sweetness and light between these disparate groups, but they learnt to work together. What they had to help them to come together was a common enterprise, which put them all on the same side. This might be the mine in a pit village, or a shipyard in a town such as Wallsend. Or it might be the union that defended the rights of the workers at those enterprises. Either way, people were able to come together through their unions and their cooperatives and build a community.
These common enterprises are in many ways now missing. No longer do we have the large employers of men, such as coalmines or shipyards in our region. Many of the newer large employers employ people on a casual basis and it is hard for workers to get to know each other and feel part of a common enterprise. Also, these large employers are often trans-national corporations, such as Amazon to the south of Durham, with little or no real links to the locality or the people. We need to develop common enterprises again and if they are not to be directly commercial then they need to be issues which concern us all, such health, education and the environment, where people can work together and feel part of a team, regardless of background.
Another lesson to be learnt is that immigration can build communities and not divide them. Immigrants can bring new skills, or new cultural assets such as food or music, which can benefit the community already there and enhance it. If they are given the chance that is.
The period which Moore wrote about was one when the Methodist church was very powerful and influential in a place like Deerness Valley. That is no longer the case of course. In many ways this seems a pity, as the importance of a positive belief system in developing pride and self-respect in Deerness valley shines through Moore’s work like a beacon. Whatever the future might hold for places such as Deerness Valley and all the other similar places in the North East and across the North in general, a positive and unifying belief system would seem to be a prerequisite for community development and renewal. Yet we live in very cynical and fragmented times, so it is not at all clear what that might be. What Methodism did for many of the miners in Deerness Valley and their families, as to give them a feeling of self-respect and something that bound them together, even in some respects with the employers.
Another lesson for community development is the importance of cultural activities. In Deerness Valley, ‘the singing valley’ as it was known, cultural activities played a major role in the life of the community as they did in other parts of the North East, whether it be sports, art, music or anything else. These activities performed a number of roles. They helped people retain their pride and self-respect through what were often very hard times. They were a creative outlet for those who worked long hours either down a mine or in the house. And they helped to bring people together. While cultural activities still take place, there is a tendency in modern life for people to live fragmented lives, pursuing individual interests on the internet and to be consumers of culture rather than producers. Therefore, many of the benefits of the cultural activities in days gone by have been lost.
What Moore perhaps represents best is the self-confidence of the people in the valley. The concept of the what Colls has called the ‘true-bred pitman’, that it was a special job, for special men with special skills, linked to the confidence that came from the Methodist faith of many of the inhabitants meant that they could negotiate with the masters almost as equals and that they could demand to be taken seriously. Much of this seems to have been lost, with people now seeming to feel a lot more isolated and lacking the confidence of their forefathers.
This confidence was also shown in the way that people shared responsibilities and looked after each other. Whilst I would never agree that community spirit is completely dead in the North East, I do wonder to what extent this shared responsibility, the sense that, as educator Sean Harris has put it, it takes a village to raise a child with “an ecosystem, schools, families, communities, media, and policy, to guide them, and to consistently reinforce the values we want to see in our society”, is still alive and kicking as we live increasingly separate lives from our neighbours.
Summing up
There is much talk about rebuilding community, just as community cohesion was the buzzword phrase 20 years ago, yet many of the problems seem as intractable as ever. It is of course, impossible to simply transplant ideas from 200 years ago and expect them to work exactly as they fid then in helping people to rebuild community and sense of belonging. The past really is in many ways a different country.
However, it is useful to look back at how things were done and see what worked and what didn’t and try to apply those that worked in new ways in new settings in the 21st century. In this respect Moore’s detailed guide to the life of Methodist pitmen in Deerness Valley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries can gives us some signposts as to which direction we might go in, in the future if we want strong and stable communities. Methodism provided a unifying moral force which gave rise to the prominence of reconciliation, respect and communal values. As Moore himself put it in the conclusion: “The unintended consequences of the dominance of communal values has been to make the chapels wholly communal bodies, with communal benefit taking precedence over every consideration”.
The question for us is how do we rebuild those communal values, in our time in places like Deerness Valley?
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