The Great Labour Unrest

Mates, Lewis H.

doi:10.7228/manchester/9780719090684.001.0001

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Born into a coal mining family in 1885, in the Durham pit village of Beamish, itself close to the militant heart of the Durham coalfield, Harvey was active in Socialist politics by the age of seventeen. 23 James Connolly's banner portrait represented the radicalization of Harvey's politics that came only five years later, after he secured a full-time scholarship to study at the trade union-sponsored Ruskin College, Oxford, 1907-1908. 24 Connolly, born to working-class Irish immigrant parents in Edinburgh in 1868, became, like Harvey, involved in the ILP before emigrating to America in 1903.…”

Section: The First "Red" Follonsby Banner: Contexts and Protagonistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harvey also began working with Will Lawther, another leading Durham miner syndicalist and also recently radicalized while studying at Central Labour College, the Marxist off-shoot of Ruskin. 30 Harvey's profile rose further when he appeared in court in November 1912, accused of libeling DMA general secretary and Liberal MP John Wilson in his second propaganda pamphlet. 31 Harvey defended himself and the judge found in favor of Wilson, awarding £200 in damages.…”

Section: The First "Red" Follonsby Banner: Contexts and Protagonistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the “red” Follonsby miners’ banner

Mates

2021

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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The history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.

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Section: The First "Red" Follonsby Banner: Contexts and Protagonistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The First "Red" Follonsby Banner: Contexts and Protagonistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the “red” Follonsby miners’ banner

Mates

2021

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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“…In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Gala was a place to air the great political and industrial issues of the day, including the relationship with the Labor Party, the advancement of trade union rights and the case for the nationalization of the coal industry (Temple, 2011;Mates, 2016 Shapurji Saklatvala (1928). While the presence of radical speakers enlivened the Gala, they did not shift the traditions of moderation of the DMA as a whole.…”

Section: Industry Community and Place Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

After Coal: Meanings of the Durham Miners' Gala

Tomaney

2020

Front. Sociol.

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The annual Durham Miners' Gala (or "Big Meeting"), first held in 1871, was a distinctive feature of the coalfield throughout its productive life. It became an important date in the calendar of national labor movement. But it was also a festival of music and banners. The Durham Miners' Association represented a crucial component of the British working class and a cornerstone of Laborism. But its distinctive class practices also marked out a region (see Cooke, 1985) with particular political traditions. The last mine closed in 1994. Yet the Gala has survived the demise of industry and the conflicts and struggles which it produced. In July 2019, the 135th Gala attracted tens of thousands of people. This paper reviews the existing academic literature on the Gala and draws on a range of sources (including memoirs, novels, paintings, films, and biographies) to chart the shifting cultural history of the Gala. I show that the form and content of the Gala has changed throughout its history and has been freighted with a range of meanings. The Gala can be seen as an example of "intangible cultural heritage" in which knowledge of the past aspects of working class and communal life are reproduced and reimagined even when the material basis for them has apparently disappeared.

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“…Neither had much to lose. 111 After a three-day hearing, the Chancellor ruled the DMA executive's action null and void as it had refused the plaintiffs a fair hearing. 112 46 The ruling vindicated Bolton (and Jeffrey) but, by April 1942, the geo-political landscape had altered dramatically.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…116 He contrasted, too, with his pre-Great war radical Methodist contemporary Jack Lawson, who adopted much more moderate politics after 1918, on being elected an MP and becoming an Attlee government minister. 117 The strains that communist atheism might have placed on Bolton's evident commitment to communist causes were never apparent in his political interventions; quite the opposite, in fact. If Bolton's socialism was unusual it was not entirely aberrant, nor even particularly oldfashioned.…”

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confidence: 99%

La Vie engagée d’un mineur de Durham, Henry Bolton

Mates¹

2017

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The Great Labour Unrest

Cited by 5 publications

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The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the “red” Follonsby miners’ banner

The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the “red” Follonsby miners’ banner

After Coal: Meanings of the Durham Miners' Gala

La Vie engagée d’un mineur de Durham, Henry Bolton

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