Bands And Banners was made by filmmaker Judi Alston, who set up One to One Productions in 1988 after winning the Barclays Bank award for the "Most Innovative Business Idea in Yorkshire and the Humber".   The funding for the film came out of winning a bursary from the Joe Feiweles Memorial Trust which was established the year before in 1990. Judi has stated that, "winning the bursary gave me a feeling of enormous pride”, and that it was, “a significant occasion in my development...

Bands And Banners was made by filmmaker Judi Alston, who set up One to One Productions in 1988 after winning the Barclays Bank award for the "Most Innovative Business Idea in Yorkshire and the Humber".   The funding for the film came out of winning a bursary from the Joe Feiweles Memorial Trust which was established the year before in 1990. Judi has stated that, "winning the bursary gave me a feeling of enormous pride”, and that it was, “a significant occasion in my development as a film maker.”

 

Both Judi and One to One Productions have gone on from strength to strength. Between 1998 and 2001 they were part of the Yorkshire Media Consortium Partnership and made 38 films which are also held at the YFA. Three of these, also made in conjunction with Steve Richards, Taming the Tigers (1999), Home Grown (1999) and The Bradford Festival Melee (1998) can be seen on YFA Online. Many of the films of One to One Productions can also be seen on their website (see Context). The YFA also holds detailed background files on the films produced as part of Yorkshire Media Consortium.

 

The films made by Judi and One to One Productions focus on the Wakefield and South Yorkshire area, and are characterised by a concern to document the lives of ordinary people from the area, and to ensure that all those involved are able to participate in the projects.  In all the films the participants are allowed to speak for themselves.  This is clearly seen in this film which was made at an extremely difficult, and historical, time in the history of mining communities. Just six years previously the National Union of Miners, with Yorkshire very much in the lead, had lost a colossal battle with the Thatcher Government over the closure of pits.  Before the dust had been allowed to settle, 23 pits were closed in 1985.  In the years following that year up until the end of 1991 a further 80 pits had closed, a substantial number in Yorkshire. And as the film testifies, the collieries featured in the film either closed that year, Denby; the next, Allerton; or the year following that, Sharlston in 1993. 

 

The strike and the subsequent closures brought a great deal of bitterness that remains with many to this day: as well it might with so many mining communities reliant on the colliery for employment. But the film reveals the stoicism of the miners during highly emotional times: showing some of that emotion being channelled into the making of brass band music, and the preservation of solidarity in the symbolic form of the colliery banner.

 

Brass bands are of course strongly associated with mining, and have now taken on an additional function in keeping alive the memory of mining communities after the closures of pits. This was well brought to life in the 1995 film Brassed Off which portrayed real events at Grimethorpe Colliery in South Yorkshire, when the Grimethorpe Colliery Band won the National Brass Band Championships at the Royal Albert Hall just five days after it was announced that the pit was to close.

 

As one might expect, the brass bands have military origins, before being taken up in working class communities.  Often they were formed as church and temperance bands.  Arguments still rage as to which civilian brass band was first, with, as usual, strong rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire. This dispute is given added complication because the first bands included woodwind as well as brass. Perhaps the oldest surviving civilian band is Stalybridge Old Band, now in Greater Manchester, who were formed in 1809. Brass only bands began in the 1830s, with both brass bands and brass band competitions really taking off in the 1850s – by 1860 there were over 750 brass bands in England.   The bands were often formed in industrial workplaces, and not just collieries.  With more free time many were formed between the wars. It has been said that brass instruments are more suited for those who labour with their hands.

 

Unfortunately the Sharlston Colliery Band did not survive: merging with the Yorkshire Evening Post Band in 1995, it disbanded in 2002.  But the cornet player , Bob Walker – for 16 years the Sharlston Colliery Band Musical Director –  interviewed in the film, went on to become a prominent member of the Leeds based Kippax Band, one of the oldest brass bands in Britain.  Another film held at the YFA, Where Th's Muck Th's Brass (1968), also gives a good picture of life in a Yorkshire brass band.

 

The ex-miner Harry Malkin also went on to make a successful career as an artist, exhibiting nationally and creating many public works in Yorkshire. One of these is a series of works depicting the history of Castleford in association with Ian Clayton who worked on the ITV The Way We Were television series featuring films from the YFA.

 

Miner’s banners sprang out of mining galas, which in turn originally emerged out of the demonstrations that would occasionally spring up against the mine owners. The first gala is claimed to be the Durham one, which grew into a national annual event, and which celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2009. The socialist realist style that the artist John Holt discusses in the film is not unusual in the history of miner’s, or other trade union, banners. The Communist Party of Great Britain had a large presence in the National Union of Mineworkers – both Arthur Scargill and his father were one time members – and it is not surprising that this style, deriving from the Soviet Union, should be quite prominent, especially with the militancy generated in the wake of the 1984/5 strike. 

 

In fact the term "Socialist Realism" wasn’t adopted officially until 1934, at the height of Stalinism, when the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers made it a part of their manifesto. The constructivist images shown in the film reflect an earlier avant garde movement in Soviet art that became incorporated into elements of socialist realist art – which was primarily ideological in intent, rather than ‘realistic’. Yet the idealisation involved in highlighting the heroism of workers might be thought as in keeping with the iconic status the banners have taken on.

 

But banners come in many varieties, and have been used in many circumstances, not just marches and galas: they have been brought out for mining disasters, funerals, and in theatre productions such as Alan Platter’s play Close the Coal House Door.  The slogans of solidarity – like those taken from the Communist Manifesto such as ‘Workers of the World Unite’ – are personified in Clive Corwell, then Branch Secretary of Allerton Silkston NUM, interviewed in the film. It is perhaps unusual now to see someone speaking so openly about socialism when this word has almost disappeared from the public political landscape. Perhaps it is an awareness of the eclipse of this vision that fuels his desire to have it symbolised in the form of a banner that can remain for all to see.

 

Many of the banners can now be seen at the National Coal Mining Museum, renamed in 1995 from the Yorkshire Mining Museum which was opened in 1988 at Caphouse Colliery. Rosemary Preece is still there (in July 2009) as the Museum's Curatorial Director, and still putting on exhibitions that reflect the rich history of mining communities.   However, most coal produced in Britain is now from open cast mines. At the time of writing, July 2009, only 11 – 4 in Yorkshire – deep coal mines remain, when there were once 170. With the new technology for carbon capture and removal of other pollutants, producing so-called ‘clean coal’, the prospect of re-opening some deep coal mines isn’t as far fetched as it once was. But although Arthur Scargill, now Honorary President of the NUM and leader of the Socialist Labour Party, still campaigns for this, others oppose it on environmental grounds – see the debate in the Guardian between Arthur Scargill and George Monbiot (cited in References).

 

One significant aspect of the great Miner’s Strike was the emergence of Women Against Pit Closures, formed from the women of the mining communities. These women are still trying to hold on to their communities in the face of high unemployment. The desperation of this goal is apparent from the passion and effort that has gone into preserving an industry which has become synonymous with brutal and dangerous work. Women were the centre of this conflict between the need for work and the realities of life down the pit, so starkly put in the lyrics of Alex Glasgow’s haunting song that become the title for Alan Platter’s play: ‘Close the coalhouse door, lad, there's blood inside. There's bones inside. There's bairns inside, so stay outside.’ 

 

References

 

Allen, V.L. The militancy of British miners, the Moor Press, Shipley, West Yorkshire, 1981.

Arthur Taylor, Brass Bands, Granada Publishing, London, 1979.

One to One Productions

The Internet Bandsman’s Everything Within

This the most comprehensive source of information on brass bands on the internet.

Loretta Loach, ‘We’ll be here right to the end’, Spare Rib, issue 147, October 1984:

Women against pit closures

South Yorkshire Women against pit closures on the BBC

Arthur Scargill and George Monbiot debate coal in the Guardian

Dave Douglass’s Miner’s Advice Centre

British Library bibliography on coalmining

Socialist realism

 

Further Information

 

Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures. Women against pit closures, BWAPC, 1984.

Seamus Milne, The Enemy within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners, Verso, 2004.

Triona Holden, Queen coal: women of the miners' strike, Sutton, Stroud, 2005

Jedrzejczyk, I. Striking women: communities and coal. Pluto Press, London, 1986.