There is nothing so magnificent within Christendom that compares with the loveliness of Durham's cathedral. Ordinary vision, for they left it where it stands encompassing and encompassed by, its own earth, rising upwards to immortality like a prayer passing the lips of a woman suckling her babe.
It is in this cathedral which has softened the harsh lines of the men of coal every time they have ventured into the city to listen to the orators.
It is never forgiving, never minatory. It watches them marching to their venue, and when all is over it beckons them back to their possession of their own lives. It is this half-church, half-refuge that softens the spirit after the pains of unremitting toil, and tempers the thundering of exhortation into croonings and beliefs no page given. Wonderful old city! Glorious Vista! One day every year that gray old city is lit by the people. The miners. Their wives.
Their children. To taste the deep drafts of endeavor one must journey to Darlstone on the day of the Gala. It is the day of the mineworkers. They come in their hundreds of thousands. They come as the people of separate villages, separate pits. They clutter proudly about their banners and follow their brass bands with a willingness born of great love. The relationship of the city and the Gala is a recurring theme of the poet William Martin Campbell, Cuthbert was a symbol of the region's identity and autonomy in the Middle Ages and responsible for numerous miracles.
The relationship between the mining communities and the ancient city, however, customarily was ambiguous. Leading families in the county who were coal owners traditionally had homes there.
The Church of England was itself a major coal owner, although typically it leased its mineral rights. The invitation established an annual tradition and became another part of the performance. Ikey, the Lodge secretary and main character, has a love-hate relationship with the city at the center of the coalfield,.
A Cathedral and University city. A middle-class city looped off on three sides by a meander of its river, insulated from the world of miners by that same water and by the steep rocky banks which in its ancient founding time has insulated it from raiding armies.
The place the monks bore St Cuthbert's corpse to for safety against the Danes. A more spectacular city than Heidelberg or Avignon, some had said. Well, Ikey had never been to either, had never set foot outside his own country, hardly outside his own county if it came to that, but he took the second-hand comparison for gospel and loved the tumbling, winding street and the stone bridges and the little sudden darting alleyways and flights of steps which would snatch you up from the main streets, from the traffic of the twentieth century, and wind you, fling you, up and up and up in spirals, back into the Middle Ages.
But most of all he loved it on Gala Day, Big Meeting Day, because than the city was thrown open like a secret and the miners marched in and took over, made it their own Bean, , p. The recent rapid growth of Durham University has produced new local tensions. The DMA objected. More broadly, the university's expansion plans generate tensions with the local communities that feel their needs are being overlooked Northern Echo, The Gala is deeply emplaced in Durham.
It cannot be relocated in the way that investment, jobs and even people can be. To have meaning it can only take place within the confines of the medieval city. It has come to symbolize place and give expression to the identity of the communities than live in and around the city and to conflicts that are attached to these. This essay has adopted an inductive approach in which the cultural record has been quarried in order to identify meanings of the Durham Gala.
The central question has concerned why the Gala persists as a social and cultural phenomenon long after its apparent material basis has vanished. The preceding account has highlighted the complex, mutable and contested nature of the Gala.
The Gala has been reinvented several times and has been dealing with the reality of industrial decline for half a century. The most recent reinvention—and resurgence—of the Gala signals another chapter in an ongoing story. Making sense of it requires us to think about the sociology of nostalgia, memory, heritage and place. For some observers the Gala is an exercise in nostalgia for a world that should be left behind. It performs an outmoded ritual that should be laid to rest. But this is to misunderstand the nature and importance of nostalgia.
Nostalgia affects longing for a home that no longer exists Boym, and is a response to the pain and isolation produced by modernity. It is universal and permanent. Progressive critics conflate nostalgia with conservatism and display hostility to signs of yearning and loss and counterpose it to the values of cosmopolitanism.
Nostalgia, however, is not the antithesis of progress but its twin; it narrates modernity Fritzsche, Sociology as a discipline has its origins in the search for lost organic communities. Modernity affects a more intensive and urgent relationship with loss Davis, Nostalgia emerges from awareness of new eras, lost pasts, roads not taken. A yearning for better pasts recurs across times and cultures.
Nineteenth century English radicals such as William Morris, Thomas Spence, and Robert Blatchford promoted, above all, a patriotic politics of conservation and resistance in the face of disruptive modernization that had far greater contemporary appeal than Marxism Bonnett, Spence called for a return to the parish as the focus of a politics of mutual ownership Knox, Twentieth century post-colonial struggles similarly focused on the rediscovery of traditions that had been swept aside by a western project of modernity Nandy, But the local struggles that are dismissed as regressive may also be in defense of hard-won, if partial and limited, social achievements Tomaney, For the Left, according to Bonnett , failure to acknowledge the power of nostalgia underlies its inability to connect with ordinary life and its concerns.
Nostalgia gives expression to a sense of loss in communities that have experienced the demise of their traditional industries, loss of civic infrastructure and deteriorating social conditions. The failure to grasp these insights underpins the crisis of left-wing political parties across the Global North and the rise of the populist Right.
Collective memory is crucial to the mobilization of civic resources Olick et al. It is a social construction, shaped in part by the concerns of the present, and involves both continuity and change.
Forgetting and erasure form components of the process. While it is individuals who remember they typically draw upon the social context to recollect and recreate the past. Hwalbachs asserts that it is in society that individuals recall, recognize, and localize their memories. Collective memories are emplaced and kept alive through activities that reproduce social bonds Hebbert, ; Rowlands, ; Bennett, , Periodic celebrations serve as focal points for the drama of civic remembrance.
Rituals and representations establish connections between individuals and their cultural history and help form attachments to earlier periods Davis, As autobiographical memory fades, historical memory involving reading, listening, and commemoration becomes more important.
The past is stored and interpreted by social institutions with each generation counterposing its present to its own constructed past. Commemoration imaginatively enacts divergent historical paths. The way the past is memorialized is always changing.
Durkheim understood that collective memory has a life of its own. Individuals cannot escape its consequences, hence the persistence of myth, ritual, tradition, heritage, although these rituals express exclusions and conflicts as well as organic solidarities. Heritage conventionally is conceived in terms of physical objects, and academic debates have concerned the processes by which it is commodified.
But underpinning the interest in heritage are basic human concerns. Hewison , p. Heritage is the foundation of individual and collective identity.
Objects from the past are the source of significance as cultural symbols. The worth of heritage is determined by cultural elites that value objects, while popular understandings are more likely to value memories, occasions, traditions.
The promotion of intangible cultural heritage is often freighted with insurgent ambitions. The intangible aspects of a social formation have an evanescent character, traces of which linger long after the material basis for them has apparently disappeared. Intangible cultural heritage is tied up with a sense of place. Place attachments—affective connections to a particular place—are a source of meaning for individuals and groups.
Emotional connections invest meaning in places and shape behaviors. Place attachment reflects less longevity of residence and more the intensions to which a place gives rise. A sense of local belonging can be expressed individually or collectively but affects commitment to place.
It can be attached to narratives of identity, but it may reflect practical commitments, investments, as well as longings and aspirations. Expressions of local belonging may embody a performative dimension which links individual and collective behavior and contributes to the formation of narratives of identity and the realization of attachments.
Place is implicated in the formation of belonging in both its affective and political dimensions and is a focus for mutually constitutive relationships of attachment, loyalty, solidarity and sense of affinity which frame the processes by which a person becomes included in or, excluded from a socio-territorial collective and identified with it.
Belonging affects matters of place through modes of boundary making, interwoven with symbolic and material spatialities Tomaney, The Gala speaks of a sense of loss on the part of communities in Durham in the aftermath of the end of coal mining.
As Gordon attests, sociologists reckon with ghosts whose presence is painful, difficult and unsettling—the former coalfield haunts contemporary Durham. Losses go beyond immediate material dispossession to the realm of affective absences. Culture and heritage are retained in the process of staging them. The Gala gives expression to communal identities at the scale of the village and the county.
The city of Durham provides the stage for the performance of this identity. The identities of Durham were always complex, contested, and subject to continuous transformation. Hard won solidarities and attendant social gains were challenged by the contraction of the coalfield but also by broader social changes, including shifting gender relations. Much of the nostalgia associated with the Gala concerns not so much the loss of industry and political power but a broader way of life and attachments that formed an affective infrastructure and imply cultural resistance in the face of processes of individualism, atomization, and privatization.
The search for community rather than a stage for revolutionary politics has always been the more important theme of the Gala. What is the future of the Durham Miners' Gala? Its cultural afterlife is evident but the political context in which it occurs has changed radically. Once an arena for the Laborism of the Durham coalfield, this politics is in crisis. As a region which voted strongly in favor of Brexit, in the General Election of , traditional Labor-voting seats in the heart of the former coalfield returned Conservative MPs for the first time.
Explaining this outcome is beyond the scope of this paper. Structural and contingent factors are both important to any credible account, but it is clear that the old Labor tropes are losing their electoral appeal. The political infrastructure built up in villages over generations has gone, while social conditions have worsened for many.
What is left of Laborism in County Durham draws on diminishing moral and civic capital accumulated during earlier generations. Yet, the contemporary political offer from a radicalized left-wing politics appears to have limited appeal in these communities. Today, the region abounds in unmet human needs and there is a yearning for community and belonging, and a space for a politics that recognizes this.
The extraordinary contemporary revival of the Miners' Gala is powerful testament to this, even if its future is far from assured. The world that created the Gala was more divided internally, along religious, cultural and material lines, and more susceptible to competing narratives, than we realize today.
Workplace solidarity and community cohesion were not bequeathed but were hard won, fragile, and partial. The achievements celebrated at past Galas were the product of compromise about political priorities that reconciled different interests and identities. The Gala, whatever its future, symbolizes almost years of working-class endeavor in Durham. The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Thanks to the editors of this special issue for invitation to contribute this paper and to ML and JH for their comments. Thanks also the McGuinness and Cornish families for permission to reproduce images. Special thanks are due to Helen Stevens for her attentive reading, criticism, and insights. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Front Sociol v.
Front Sociol. Published online May Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This article was submitted to Work, Employment and Organizations, a section of the journal Frontiers in Sociology. Received Jan 18; Accepted Apr The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author s and the copyright owner s are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Keywords: coal mining, place, class, Durham, miners. Prolog The Durham Miners' Gala presents a contemporary paradox. As early as , the then director of the Northern Arts Association, responding to claims that cultural policy should reflect regional identity, declaimed: I'm not from these parts.
Industry, Community, and Place Industry The original purpose of the Miners' Gala was to express the nascent power of the Durham miners. Reporting on the second Gala, which took place on 15 June , the Durham Advertiser praised the discipline and respectability of the event: As they left the field there was one striking circumstance, in connection with which was apparent to everyone, as these men — some of them far advanced in life, others in the prime of manhood, and young boys who could not have been long from school — passed through crowded thoroughfares, and that was their orderly conduct throughout.
Reporting on the Gala, the Durham Chronicle described how, The display of banners was a very prominent and pleasing feature of the demonstration. In his novel, The Big Meeting , David Bean evokes the scene at New Elvet, stressing the centrality of the parading of banners, Banner followed banner. According to Watson's widow, Jenny, The Gala was the highlight of the year. Where are the rebels bold That marched behind the banner on Gala days of old? The silken banners summon up the tears, The men who march beneath them touch the soul.
I have not known the pitmen's hopes and fears, I learnt them from the books I read at school. But I shall cry again, and not know why again.
Community According to Cohen , p. Reflecting on his first visit to the Gala in the s, he wrote, In those days there were about pits, of course, bands, banners, and it was a great and glorious sight. In Peter Lee , his biography of the interwar miners' leader, Lawson suggested that great political speeches were now less important than the celebratory aspects of the Gala, It is to gather round these platforms the vast mass is supposed to have come. Dave Douglass recalls: …once a lodge reached a meeting place, the mams picked a corner of the field which was theirs, and picnics were begun, and throughout the day it was a rallying point for the dads coming back from the pubs and the committee men coming back from the speeches Douglass, , p.
Place An important dimension of the performance of the Gala concerns its siting in the city of Durham. In his memoir, A Man's Life , Jack Lawson locates the spectacle in the topography of the landscape and the morphology of the city Above the fluttering banners, the old square Castle, on its foundation of rock, rises clear cut against the sky.
Open in a separate window. Figure 1. Figure 2. Nostalgia, Memory, Heritage, Place This essay has adopted an inductive approach in which the cultural record has been quarried in order to identify meanings of the Durham Gala.
Coda The Gala speaks of a sense of loss on the part of communities in Durham in the aftermath of the end of coal mining. Author Contributions The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.
Conflict of Interest The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Acknowledgments Thanks to the editors of this special issue for invitation to contribute this paper and to ML and JH for their comments. References Amin A. Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place.
B 86 , 33— Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Big Meeting. Oxford: Berg. Gifted places: the inalienable nature of belonging in place. D Soc. Space 32 , — Telling tales: nostalgia, collective identity and an ex-mining village , in Emotion, Place and Culture , eds Smith M. Abingdon: Routledge; , — Charity Main.
A Coalfield Chronicle. London: Allen and Unwin. He should be easy to find. Small chap, moustache, dove tatoos on the wrists, and usually wears a baseball hat. If you find him, tell him the ex-members of Yorkshire co-op wish him and the folks around the banner all the very best. LittleEuph said:. I have heard that there has been a time limit imposed this year on bands playing at the County of no more than 4 minutes Anyone else heard that or anything similar?
DaveBBb Member. What a fantastic day. At 65 years old this was my first and hopefully not my last participation in this gala.
At some stage in their banding career every bandsperson should take part in this event. Supportive locals and excellent hosts.
Bravo to the Durham Miners a memorable day. It's now Monday and I am only just recovering ;-. DaveBBb said:. Well what a day The atmosphere was supurb and to listen to all the bands enjoying themselves was fantastic. It was a proud moment for me and one I wont forget for a longtime. If anybody has never done the gala before, make sure you do next year You must log in or register to reply here.
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Hardie, A. Cook and C. Photograph of a black draped D. Photograph of banners on Elvet Bridge including D.
Esh Winning Lodge banner with a view of D. Esh Winning Lodge banner and D. Eldon Drift Lodge banner with portraits of A. Cook, J. Keir Hardie, J. Thornley Lodge banner with a view of the colliery and the facts it was sunk in and closed in , together with D. Chopwell Lodge banner with portraits of Marx, Lenin and J.
Photograph of the banners of N. M Chopwell Lodge, N. Durham Area and N. Photograph of the reverse side of the N. Photograph of the D. Monkwearmouth Lodge banner with portraits of A.
Photograph of Yorkshire Area and N.
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