Emotional regeneration through community action in post-industrial mining communities: the new Herrington Miners' banner partnership.
Capital & Class › Nbr. 2005, March 2005
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Emotional regeneration through community action in post-industrial mining communities: the new Herrington Miners' banner partnership.
The essential is not what life has done to people, but what people do with what life has done to them.
Jean-Paul Sartre Introduction The failure of the miners' strike in 1984-5, which was a strike over the preservation of jobs and communities, resulted in an acceleration of the ongoing process of mining closures across the national coalfield. Since those closures, high levels of long-term unemployment, poverty, social exclusion and a decline in community resources have left the now post-industrial mining communities devastated. Both voluntary and government agencies have long recognised a significant increase both in youth crime and in the abuse of drugs and alcohol generally (Coalfield Taskforce, 1998; Waddington et al., 2001; Waddington, 2003). When, in 1993, Wearmouth Colliery--the last deep mine in County Durham--closed, it brought to an end centuries of coal production in what was one of the largest coalfields in the world (Beynon & Austrin: 1994). The social consequences of the closures for the mining communities in Co. [County] Durham have been such that they are judged to be among the most deprived communities in Europe (Coalfield Taskforce, 1998). Interviews with union officers (1) reveal that the closure of Wearmouth Colliery left the Durham Miners' Association (DMA) fearing that the influence of mining culture and politics in Durham would meet a similar end. Hudson (1995) claimed that mining communities were already becoming apathetic towards the annual Durham Miners' Gala prior to the 1984-5 strike. By the mid-1990s, those early fears appeared to have been justified, with the numbers attending the Gala declining year on year. Once the most visible expression of the power and influence of the DMA, with attendance exceeding 200,000 in some years, by the early 1990s, Gala attendance had fallen to less than 10,000 (DNA). Despite this initial decline, the Gala is now experiencing a resurgence that those centrally involved in its organisation are at a loss to fully understand. According to reports from the DMA and the police, the 2004 Gala was the largest since 1960, with in excess of 70,000 people attending. A significant factor in this resurgence has been the commissioning of new lodge banners (2), at no little cost (3) , emanating from the most recently-closed collieries as well as from collieries that closed well before the Second World War. The DMA reports that a further nine replica lodge banners are under commission, to be carried for the first time at the Gala in 2005. The main focus of the research for this paper has been to discover the motivating factors encouraging community groups in these post-industrial mining communities to return to the Gala, often with new banners, and in increasing nu...See the full content of this document
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