The Big Meeting

Brass bands, banners and big crowds. Picnics, pubs and passionate politics. The cathedral fills, the time approaches, and a respectful silence takes hold. Then we catch the distant sound of drumbeat and slow march. The bands make their entrances, and the place is filled with music and colour. Village communities like regiments, marching their colours up to St Cuthbert’s shrine for blessing at the Miners’ Festival Service.

The pits may have closed long ago, but their spirit lives on in the Durham Miners’ Gala for all to enjoy. But if you go down to the Big Meeting from the land of The Telegraph, The Guardian, or The Twenty First Century, you’re in for a big surprise. Put on your holiday gear and prepare to be swept along in an extraordinary carnival, like a visitor to that foreign country we call the past.

The harsh facts of geology and the economics of a skewed market plucked families from their land and threw them together, far from green fields of home, at the mercy of The Owners, to hew ancient energy from the deep past. Survival of the fittest and dread of that siren demanded community, mutuality and solidarity. Methodism linked arms with Marxism and gave us, - The Gala.

We now know that coal was a strategic error, we should have stuck with windmills and waterwheels. But like all human errors, coal will be consigned to history, and as one of the banners reminds us, “the past we inherit, the future we forge”. Carbon can be recaptured, and a just society can be built, but only if we learn from the experience of those mining communities, - that it is by the strength of our common endeavour that we build community and real wealth that lasts.                                                                              Bob Turner