Rich Seams

I was pondering going along to the Big Meeting tomorrow. My mind has been made up by the fact that the Burnhope banner is going to be blessed, which I had thought had happened last year when I was too ill to attend, but that is what it says on the Durham Cathedral website.

On one occasion in the 1980s, my late father was the only Incumbent of a pit village to robe and sit in the sanctuary for the Miners' Gala Service. The village in question, though not actually the name of the parish, was Burnhope, where he also conducted the service in 1986 for the sixtieth anniversary of the time when the Big Meeting had had to be moved there, the only occasion on which it has ever been held outside the City of Durham, from which it had been banned during the General Strike. Arthur Scargill not only attended, but he sang the hymns and everything.

Meanwhile, down the hill, the Fenhall Drift banner, with the historic Lanchester Parish Church on one side, and with a Roman soldier and a miner on the other, hangs in the room where the meetings of Lanchester Parish Council are held. The banner is still owned by the NUM, but it has been leased in perpetuity to the Parish Council and it will eventually hang, at the union's own suggestion, in that very church.

Everything in that last sentence is perfect. It even harks back to the old problem of keeping the C of E on board; when the effort was made, that body provided a rich seam of upper and middle-class people whose involvement in it had made them aware of the importance of civic participation and of State action to remedy social evils, and who used Labour as a means against the disestablishmentarian tendencies of the Liberals.

Hence the fact that the Durham Miners' Gala has always featured a service in the Cathedral. One might have expected the service to have been a Methodist one. But it never has been. It is ecumenical enough these days, of course. But there is no doubt where it is held. Or who is hosting it.