A day of pride

By text and by mobile telephone, early morning arrangements are being made to cross tracks with fellow travellers. "As a means of communication," someone says, "it beats the hell out of homing pigeons".

Maybe 15 are in the Volti, named after a 19th century Derby winner by the chap who won a fortune on its success, built a pub with the profits and became evermore known as Volti Robinson.

Among the crowd is the column's old friend Paul Hodgson, unchallenged holder of the Durham County All Comers' Dole Drawing record and wearing a cap in which the owl and the pussycat might very well have gone to sea.

"I came out in sympathy with the miners in 1984 and never went back," he says. "I'm the only person who's had white finger from signing on."

Chris Hill, the landlord, makes a tremendous bacon sandwich. Once snakebitten twice shy, we wash it down with Nescafe.

THE bus leaves Spennymoor Town Hall shortly after 8am, not for Durham but for Byers Green Workmen's Club, in the opposite direction. Another bus ferries the town band, and a contingent of Inner London teachers who supported the 1984 miners' strike.

"It's a canny way to have walked, mind," says Bishop Auckland MP Derek Foster, attending his 30th successive Big Meeting.

(Derek isn't wearing a pin striped suit. It is as remarkable, as Sherlock Holmes once observed, as the dog which failed to bark in the night.)

Also there is Spennymoor town mayor John Culine, northern organiser of the Showman's Guild and decidedly on the wagon. "I might have two pints this afternoon but that'll be it," he says.

"Apparently it makes other people want to be a bit naughty. It only makes me want to sleep."

After another quick livener they follow band and banner through the stirring village, Byers Green up early as it has been every Gala for the last 120 years. Young mothers jiggle bairns to the drum beat, old men wipe away a memory.

A big lad carrying the Whitworth Lodge banner wears a T-shirt with the message that unity is strength, but it's something to do with local government re-organisation. Jobs for the boys, they haven't re-organised local government for months.

At the war memorial the band plays Gresford, the miners' hymn. The Durham Miners' Association stewards solemnly remove their baseball caps.

The place, seemingly the whole village, falls silent, the chill down the spine not just evidence of a July morning in County Durham. A drinking man's day may still be a thinking man's day, an' all.

AFTER the short bus trip back to Spennymoor, they're dropped outside Ken Warne's supermarket and off-licence. The second bit doesn't pass entirely unnoticed.

It's 11 years since the last Durham pit closed, 30 since the coalfield crumbled. Times have changed. In Spennymoor town centre they walk past the Quicktan studio, the Northern Academy of Martial Arts and the Namaste Caf and Holistic Centre.

Outside the Saturday morning paper shop a Northern Echo contents bill proclaims: "Customs officers: we will seize your booze." The Volti lads look at it askance, decide it can't possibly apply to them and march on with hope in their heart and chinking carrier bags in their hand.

They may no longer line the streets five deep, but people still wave proudly to the marchers, as if in solidarity with a cause long lost.

Derek Foster marches heel to toe, like the cornet carrying Salvationist he is. "It's still a great day," he says.

THE buses wait outside the Salvin Arms, far end of Spennymoor town centre, where others join the pilgrimage. The town band plays Cherry Pink before embarking, Hodgy's missus sees them off but he's banned her sine die from the Gala - an incident on last year's helter-skelter, it's whispered.

We're dropped off outside the New Inn in Durham, where the Sacriston banner also awaits. Doubtless coincidentally, the band plays Death or Glory as it approaches the Royal County Hotel but is stopped to allow others through from the opposite direction.

It's 10.20am, a bit reminiscent of the way that Redcar station used to be on the day of the workmen's club trip and annual egg sandwich extravaganza.

The band gets its pipe, or rather its Marlboro Light, the lads have a little refresher. The first of the day's newspaper sellers appears, Socialist Worker clutched like a hug-me-tight to his chest.

The main front page article is headlined "Labour's politics of the gutter." A chap with a Carlsberg can in his hand tells the vendor that he doesn't want a copy, because he has a social worker already.

None of the Labour Party hierarchy is on the Royal County balcony, or within many a mile of Durham. The Gala programme talks tellingly not of the Prime Minister or the MP for Sedgefield but of "certain people" who decline to attend.

There are one or two half-recognised faces, many more which are wholly anonymous and a few who'd get in where methane gas couldn't. A band somewhere in front is playing Singing in the Rain. The rain's stopped.

Finally given the green light, the Spennymoor band - our old friend Bill Scarlett on cymbals, clashing on as always - plays Hey Look Me Over (not for the first time) and salutes the balcony with the one that goes Derarararara-ra-ra.

Many other unions have banners, too. It's a bit like the passage in the Bible, where the best wine is topped up with the other stuff.

Once it would have taken an hour to get from the Royal County to Her Majesty's five star prison at the other end of Elvet. Within 25 yards of the hotel, it's now possible not only to have a game of football but to employ the offside trap as well.

The bands play a blinder, the camp followers rattle along behind. The Spennymoor lads are "in", as they always say, by 11am. The banner isn't due to be lifted for another three and three quarter hours.

THE lads head for the Dun Cow, the column for the Gala field. Though it's overcast, raining once or twice, a pair of young ladies saunter past in bikini tops.

"Poor things," says an old Brussleton miner, "they're tied to be frozzen".

The fun fair's putting a necessarily happy face on it, the ice cream vans are as redundant as a Coxhoe collier, the fast food stalls side by side with those from the Socialist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain.

Others are left, behind. Only the Conservatives and the Monster Raving Loony Party seem, sensibly, to have stayed away.

Mr Billy Bragg essays a song called Power Without Accountability - not even the young Bob Dylan would have tried to rhyme that one - which contains the couplet:

I lost my car, my job, my house

But ten thousand miles away someone clicked on a mouse.

Vendors sell newspapers with names like Militant, and Resistance. The Morning Star is being given away because the Durham Miners' Association has sponsored it. Some might have considered Relevance also to be appropriate, others that it were neither here nor there.

Some might ponder the difference between tradition and anachronism, between community (which is everything) and continuity, which may not be.

A lot of those at Durham Big Meeting might still suppose ideology to be something which the grammar school kids did for O-level, and hopefully failed three times.

HODGY'S had a pint of orange and water in the Court Inn but, resolve undiluted, is quickly back on the cider.

In the Passenger Bar, across the road, the girls in bikinis are pulling pints. Far from frozzen, there are several who consider them red hot.

Whether the lads in the adjoining jail make much of the merriment is uncertain, but the worst offence on the free side of the wall is assault with a two foot inflatable hammer. The spirit's buoyant, not a ha'porth of bother.

The Volti lads head back to the Royal County, without doubt the least busy licensed premises in Durham city centre and (not altogether coincidentally) the most expensive.

Hodgy, who's had a drink (as they say) finds his way to the balcony and finds himself waving at the departing bands. "They probably think I'm Tony Blair with a big cap on," he says.

Several dozen copies of the Morning Star lie, unread, around the adjacent guest room.

Spennymoor Town Band heads back for the New Inn, plays Hey Look Me Over two more times, is back home by 4pm. On the bus, Hodgy's discussing advanced inebriation with the Inner London NUT before returning to the Volti for a top-up.

It's his 49th birthday and he's out for a curry at night. "I tell you," he says, "this has been the best Durham Big Meeting in years."

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