Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 20524 (Master Record)
Title | Year | Date |
THE BIG MEETING | 1951-1955 | 1951-01-01 |
Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Colour Sound: Silent Duration: 30 mins 28 secs Credits: Edward Roberts Genre: Amateur Subject: Politics Coal |
Summary A complete catalogue of Durham Miners’ Gala events and activities recorded in and around the City of Durham by Edward Roberts: the film includes footage from Big Meetings between 1951 and 1955, and shows the miners’ banners, bands, speeches, and fun fair revelry. |
Description
A complete catalogue of Durham Miners’ Gala events and activities recorded in and around the City of Durham by Edward Roberts: the film includes footage from Big Meetings between 1951 and 1955, and shows the miners’ banners, bands, speeches, and fun fair revelry.
Credit: Durham County Education Committee
Title: Durham Miners’ Gala 1951-1955
Credit: Filmed and Produced by E. Roberts County Inspector of Schools
Title: “The Big Meeting”
Title: On the eve of the gala new banners are unveiled...
A complete catalogue of Durham Miners’ Gala events and activities recorded in and around the City of Durham by Edward Roberts: the film includes footage from Big Meetings between 1951 and 1955, and shows the miners’ banners, bands, speeches, and fun fair revelry.
Credit: Durham County Education Committee
Title: Durham Miners’ Gala 1951-1955
Credit: Filmed and Produced by E. Roberts County Inspector of Schools
Title: “The Big Meeting”
Title: On the eve of the gala new banners are unveiled
Title: At Ferryhill Mr Sam Watson unveils a new banner for Dean and Chapter Miners’ Lodge.
View of the official banner unveiling ceremony, performed in front of a big crowd on top of a stage. In the background, a banner stands, “Workers of the World Unite”. View of the banner as it is unrolled: “National Union of Miner Workers / Durham Area Dean and Chapter Lodge”, depicting a white and a black worker shaking hands.
A uniformed brass band plays.
Title: Miners’ representatives from the SOVIET UNION present a token of greetings and receive presents.
A small red velvet banner is unveiled. Speeches are presented.
Title: Local M.Ps. are present.
Close-up on the newly unveiled banner, at the bottom is painted, “Fellowship is Life, Fellowship for All”. People pose for the photographer around the banner. The small banner gifted by the miners’ representatives from the Soviet Union is held up beneath the larger one. It reads, “Fraternal greetings to the miners of Durham from the miners of the Soviet Union”.
Title: Scenes in the streets as bands and banners arrive.
A procession of miners gather alongside a road; they stand in line behind a banner. A policeman directs the scene.
Views of the marching groups through Durham’s city streets. A huge crowd is gathered at Alexander’s Corner. Amongst the crowds, groups of people dance, arms linked together.
Close-up of a banner, “Universal Brotherhood”, “Help in time of need”.
Title: At the County Hotel
View of the balcony of the County Hotel as speeches are made. A huge crowd is gathered beneath.
The march continues: brass bands, dancing.
Title: On the racecourse.
Panoramic view of the huge crowd assembled on the racecourse.
Views of the march at the Waterloo Hotel. Aneurin “Nye” Bevan stands on the hotel balcony and waves.
The procession continues below: bagpipers, banners.
Clement Atlee stands on the balcony of the County Hotel.
Down in the march, revellers wear party hats.
View of Herbert Morrison on the balcony of the County Hotel; also Hugh Gaitskell.
A group of men in drag costume lead a group of marchers. They wave balloons.
Morris dancers.
Scenes of the crowds at the racecourse.
Dancing.
Crowds are gathered at racecourse food stalls, “WATCHEER, the Gala’s favourite drink sold here”, “Ham sandwiches”, “Hot pies, chips, pasties, sausage R[…]”.
View of the “Mobile Chip Van” selling chips for “6d per bag”. View of Over’s Snack bar, where there are pies, teas, and hot dogs for sale.
Three men pose of the camera wearing plastic party hats.
Scenes at the racecourse. Huge crowds, picnickers. A Rea’s Ice Cream van in the background.
Title: Typical lodge banners
Close-up views of miners’ lodge banners from: Peterlee, Brandon, Thornly, Mainsforth, Chilton, Philadelphia, Usworth, Easington (depicting Keir Hardie and Robert Smillie), Chopwell (depicting Karl Marx, Lenin, Keil Hardie, a hammer and sickle emblem, and a Labour Party emblem), Ryhope, Tudhoe, and Crookhall.
View of the lost children area, where children play together on the grass with toys. Each child has a blue paper label pinned to their back.
At the ‘AMBULANCE’ station, nurses stand outside a tent in uniform. View of St John’s Ambulance staff.
Portrait shot of a girl wearing a “SQUEEZE ME TIGHT” plastic party hat.
Title: Many visit the Gala to hear speeches
Views of speeches being presented from a platform: Nye Bevan, Herbert Morrison.
Views of picnicking on the racecourse. An airship-style helium balloon is for sale.
Views of Clement Atlee, Barbara Castle.
Title: Massed bands play “Gresford” a memorial hymn for those who lost their lives in the mines.
Views of uniformed brass bands.
Speeches are given, stood next to a BBC microphone: Barbara Castle, Herbert Morrison, Clement Atlee.
A family sit on the grass: their two children wear plastic party hats, and one plays with a toy bow and arrow.
Title: The Fun Fair
Views of the various rides, attractions, and side-shows: dodgems, a waltzer, a coconut shy. Side shows include, “The Wonder Horse”, “A dog with 5 feet”, “Cockerel with 4 legs”, “Eve the living sleeping beauty”, “Palace of Continental Dreams: The Nude Look”.
Portrait shot of a little girl wearing a party hat, “Kiss me quick, say what a smasher”.
Children ride on a roundabout carousel: one in a miniature traction engine, “GOING TO THE FAIR”; another on a Northern Bus.
Title: Along the Banks
Views of rowing and boating on the River Wear.
Title: The City Cricket Club arrange a home fixture for Gala Day (Durham batting against Boldon)
Panoramic view of the cricket pitch, and brief views of the match in play.
Title: A special service is held at the cathedral.
Crowds walk towards the cathedral: banners, brass bands. Choristers process into the cathedral.
Title: Going home
View of a banner being rolled up.
Title: THE END
Context
This film was made by gifted amateur filmmaker Edward Roberts (1893-1975) who grew up in a colliery village in County Durham and held a passion for its landscape and people. He was born on 30th July 1893, the fourth of ten children, to Thomas and Rachel Roberts of Weardale Street, Mount Pleasant, on the edge of Spennymoor. As a youth he won a scholarship to King James Grammar School in Bishop Auckland and in 1912 attended Westminster School in London to train as a school teacher.
When World...
This film was made by gifted amateur filmmaker Edward Roberts (1893-1975) who grew up in a colliery village in County Durham and held a passion for its landscape and people. He was born on 30th July 1893, the fourth of ten children, to Thomas and Rachel Roberts of Weardale Street, Mount Pleasant, on the edge of Spennymoor. As a youth he won a scholarship to King James Grammar School in Bishop Auckland and in 1912 attended Westminster School in London to train as a school teacher.
When World War One broke out Edward joined the Royal Army Medical Corp and was later transferred to the newly formed Royal Flying Corp in 1918. On demobilisation he returned to County Durham and took up his first teaching post at East Howle in Cornforth, later moving to North Road School, Spennymoor, where he had once been a pupil. During this time he continued his education and obtained a BSc and MSc in Economics from London University. In 1930 he was appointed Headmaster of Broom School in Ferryhill, where he remained for 15 years. In the same year he also became a County Inspector for Schools in Durham City, Spennymoor and Weardale areas. He pioneered the use of visual aids in the County Durham classroom and, in his spare time, made several films including this beautiful colour documentary of Durham Miners’ Galas in the 1950s entitled The Big Meeting. Other Roberts teaching films include a celebration of age-old rural skills, now a record of a vanishing way of life in the Durham Dales and a river travelogue, Teesdale and the Tees. The films were made for the Audio-Visual Library he was creating for the Durham County Council Education Committee. Throughout his life Edward enjoyed many leisure activities including filmmaking, and he contributed a number of articles to “Sight & Sound” magazine. On his retirement, he wrote the memoir Across the Green about his early life in the mining community of Mount Pleasant around the Spennymoor area and the sacrifices his parents made for him, sensitively expressing ‘the pathos of everyday life amidst the harsh realities of a mining village in the beginning of the 20th century'. Every second Saturday in July one of the great traditions of the North East takes place. A proud parade of brass bands and banners, “as big and ornate as stained-glass windows”, wends its way through the streets of Durham City to the Old Racecourse as part of a special celebration and spectacle that grew out of the trade unionism of miners in the region, the first Union established in 1869. The first Gala was held on 12 August, 1871, in Wharton Park, Durham, above the railway station. The Durham Miners' Association hired 40 police to encourage shop-keepers in the town centre to stay open. The event began as a campaign by Northern mine workers to lobby pit bosses, who met regularly at the Royal County Hotel to set mining wages. In 1872, 40,000 people attended the Gala at Durham racecourse. The Gala was always a political rally as well as a celebration for the families of men who dug up the coal, deep underground, which created the nation’s wealth. Left-wing politicians and trades union leaders customarily cheer on the parade from the balcony of the County Hotel and deliver speeches at the racecourse picnic where the mass of banners still create a ‘colourful tapestry of working class history”. Wonderfully illustrated in this film are the miners’ banners, which consist of imaginative painted and embroidered designs, many containing socialist iconography, political slogans and the folklore of individual collieries and pit communities. As a decorative and performative symbol of the identity and aspirations of organisations who had a tradition of marching, it’s contradictory that the origin of nineteenth and twentieth century banners can be traced back to a time when membership of trade societies was illegal and meetings highly secretive. This film opens with the ceremonial unfurling of a new banner for the Dean and Chapter Lodge in the Ferryhill Market Place before the 1955 Gala by trade unionist and former coalminer Sam Watson (1898 – 1967), the banner now on display in Ferryhill Town Hall. He had started work at the age of 14 at Bolden Colliery for 1s. 4d. a shift. In 1947 Watson became General Secretary of the recently reorganised National Union of Mineworkers (Durham Area) and he was also chairman of the Labour party for the years 1949-1950. However, he refused to pursue his political career in London, choosing to remain in Durham. He was known to many as 'Mr Big Meeting' for his relentless promotion of the Gala. Amongst the roll call of banners, Chopwell’s ‘Red Banner’ was a new replacement based on the original depicting portraits of Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and James Keir Hardie, a hammer and sickle emblem, as well as the Labour Party emblem. The design of the banner dated back to the 1920s, when 2,000 men and boys were working three mine shafts at the pit. The ageing original was gifted to a delegation led by the president of the central committee of Soviet mineworkers in the early 1950s to thank them for their support during the pit strikes. It now hangs proudly in Moscow Trades Hall. Newspapers had called Chopwell the “reddest village in England”. Chopwell's Communist Club, established in December 1913, a fortnight into a strike at the pit, was funded by pictorialistic photographer and Kodak UK managing director George Davison who was interested in social reform, and whose possible links to anarchists lost him his job. Chopwell colliery finally closed on 25 November 1966, the year England won the World Cup, but streets remain that are named after Hardie, Marx and Lenin, and people who remember the village by its former nickname: Little Moscow. Pictured in Roberts’ film at the 70th Gala on 18 July 1953, in sumptuous Kodachrome colour, are Labour politicians Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and, for the first time, Barbara Castle, ‘Labour's Red Queen, the woman Michael Foot called "the best socialist minister we've ever had". Castle, who had a reputation as a rousing speaker, secured her place as a parliamentary candidate for Blackburn when the women of the Blackburn Labour Party threatened to quit unless she was added to the all-male shortlist. Durham Miners Gala was “bigger than Christmas” at its peak in the 1950s and 60s, attracting over a quarter of a million people, (as evidenced in the endless waves of men, women and children pictured here in the 1950s). The busy, jostling physicality of the Gala parade is a working class street theatre made for the camera, carnivalesque in its exuberance. In 2013, the then Bishop of Durham called the meeting “the one thing in this country as iconic as this building”, speaking of the magnificent Cathedral where the banners are blessed during the traditional miners’ service, miners who were “producers of culture as well as coal”. Durham Miners’ Gala continues (precariously). For some, the event is not just a dialogue with the past since the disappearance of the British coal industry and its cleansing from the cultural and physical landscape. In 2012 Dave Hopper, Secretary of the Durham Miners Association (until his death in 2016), said: “The Gala is still as relevant as it’s ever been. It’s the only mass working class demonstration left in the country.” References: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/chopwell-miners-banner-officially-retired-1404005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Davison_(photographer) http://www.dmm.org.uk/history/gala.htm http://theaccidentalgroundhopper.blogspot.com/2012/03/chopwell-soviets-fc-and-county-durhams.html http://www.dmm.org.uk/colliery/d001.htm http://www.thejournal.co.uk/news/north-east-news/debunking-bishop-myth---history-4418862 North East History, Volume 44 2013 |