“Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18)
The Gala Day
Saturday 12 July was another second Saturday in July and therefore the date of yet another Durham Miners Gala or Big Meeting as it is sometimes referred to. It is now 154 years since the first such Gala took place in 1871. Glorious summer weather saw about 200,000 people descend upon the beautiful ancient city of Durham, for the usual day of commemoration and celebration.
Arriving in Durham at just after 10.30 in the morning, I predictably found the streets already crammed with people, with banners and of course with bands. Music filled the air, mostly in the form of North East brass band music, but with a smattering of contributions from north of the border in the form of Scottish pipe bands as well. Having been involved in organising things so many times in the past, it was a pleasure to just be able to be part of the crowd and stand at the junction near the Royal County Hotel watching the bands go past and appreciating the hard work that others had put into this year’s gala.
I made my way down to the Riverside to be part of a huge crowd, listening to speeches from people like Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite, who has family roots on the old Durham coalfield and a particularly poignant and passionate speech from Husam S. Zomlot, the Head of the Palestinian Mission to the United Kingdom.
I then made my way up the steep paths to the beautiful Durham Cathedral, for the dedication of new banners and the annual service commemorating both the hard work and the sacrifice of the County Durham miners. It was a very moving service, including the traditional, stirring rendition of ‘Jerusalem’.
Inheriting the past
It was notable that a number of speakers had commented that the Gala should not just become a museum event. This seems to me to be correct. It is absolutely right and proper to commemorate the hard work and sacrifice of the Durham miners. After all, around 20,000 County Durham miners lost their lives down the pits.
And, it is also fair to say, that North East England would be a very different place today had the mining of coal not taken place. Indeed, just prior to the outbreak of the First World War, there were some 200,000 miners in the region and consequently around the one fifth or even perhaps one quarter of the people in the North East were from mining families. Some 2.6 million people live in the North East at present, and despite the fact that all the mines are now closed, it is hard to envisage much more than about a million people living here had there not been the coal mining. The industrial cities of Newcastle and Sunderland and their conurbations were built on the foundations of the coal mining on the connected industries, such as iron and steel and shipbuilding.
Additionally, the heritage is not just of the mining itself. There are two other major features of the heritage, which we can proudly take into the future. There is the great community spirit of the mining villages as evidenced by the trade unions on the cooperative movement a group so rapidly on the coalfield.
Secondly there is the great spirit of innovation. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the founding of the railways in the North East of England and our region is home to many other important inventions, such as the light bulb (and light switch!) and the first turbines in the world which could light up a city. It was the coal mining which acted as a spark in the development of many of these inventions.
Building the future
It is these two features of the mining heritage that we must take forward if we are to build another New Jerusalem of justice and hope in the North East. We should also remember our heritage of energy production as we go forward further and further into the 21st century.
That is why it was great to see among the many banners at the gala, one in particular, boldly stating, “Coal is our heritage, Green jobs our future”. We must say that we are an energy producing region and that in the past we produced much of the energy that was needed in the country as a whole, going back at least as far as the supply of coal to shivering Londoners in the Little Ice Age of this 16th and 17th centuries.
Consequently, we deserve investment, and our young people deserve the opportunity for good green energy jobs in the future.
By promoting a green energy future for the region, along with the history and heritage, the Gala can take the heritage forward into this century with pride, for the search for justice and real meaning. We are yet again at the cutting edge of another industrial revolution, with innovative heating energy coming from the hot water in coal mines in Gateshead and east Durham, while turbines are being built in Port of Tyne for the Dogger Bank windfarm, which will be the biggest in the windfarm in the world. With more investment, we could do so much more…
At the crossroads with the lights permanently on red
For a long time, the North East seems to have been at a crossroads, as we have lost our traditional industries but not really found a satisfactory way forward. Consequently, we have seen four decades of stagnation and uncertainty, since the 1980s.
It is right that we inherit our past and that we remember it. It is also correct that we need now to build a future, especially for our young people. We need to develop the kind of technical baccalaureate, that Andy Burnham is looking to develop in Manchester, so that while on the one hand, academically minded children can continue with the traditional path through to university, technically minded students could have a similar path, leading to appropriate further education that can see them gaining the skills that will be needed for the North East to become a green energy superpower, in the way that it was a very important coalfield in the past.
Attachment to a sense of place, not ethnicity
An important part of the heritage of the Durham coalfield and indeed the whole region is the heritage of inward migration. As I said earlier without the coal mining the population of the North East would be far less even today than it is. That is because of the huge inward migration, into what has been called the Yukon of the north, with people coming into the North East from as far afield as Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland and other parts of the north of England.
Therefore, the heritage that we celebrate at the Gala is one of attachment to a sense of place and work, not to a particular ethnicity. As the Scottish poet and philosopher, Alastair McIntosh has put it:
“A person belongs
inasmuch as they are willing
to cherish and be cherished
by a place
and its peoples"
Let us have a region where everyone is cherished and in turn everyone cherishes our land.
It has been said that, “where there is no vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). This seems to sum up just how important it is that we have a positive vision of the future of Northumbria, to go with our pride in our heritage and as a major annual cultural event, the Durham Miners Gala has a large role to play in the development and promotion of that vision. Without it, our culture and heritage will surely perish.
The view of children from Sacriston
Talking of building the future, I will leave the last words to the children of Sacristan who read a wonderful poem, during the cathedral service. The poem saw them telling us how they see the world today and how they also see the future. Here is a snippet of what they said:
“We don’t mourn the loss of cruel conditions The air’s cleaner now without smog and carbon emissions But don’t mistake progress for some kind of permission. We are not here to ask for the mines to be brought back We are here to ask for proper payback”.
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