THE MINERS MARCH
By MAURICE WEBB M.P.
IRESPECTFULLY make Mr. Gerald Barry a suggestion for his Festival of Britain in 1951. He must try to include a miners' march—with their banners, brass bands, their wives and their children. A festival which sets out to give a picture of the multitu- dinous pattern of our national life would be incomplete without such an event. A march by British miners is of the very stuff which makes the warp and woof of our way of life. I want every foreign visitor to see one. Above all, I want the blase, sophisticated inhabitants of the metropolis to see one. Nothing could give them so acute, so moving, a picture of the industry on which our entire economic stability depends.
I have just been to Wakefield to see the annual march and demon- stration of the miners of the West Riding. I sat on the balcony of the Town Hall to watch it pass by. It was no colourful pageant. There was nothing which aroused bursts of applause. Alongside the vivid Lord Mayor's procession which we see once a year in London it would look tame and insipid. There were no comic turns, no battles of flowers, no cleverly-designed tableaux ; just banners, brass hands and men, women and children marching—marching proudly and happily behind the symbol of their local lodge. That is all it was. Yet, I confess to having experienced an emotion, a tingling of the spine and an elevation of the spirit more complete than any- thing I have ever known.
The Mayor of Wakefield, a stolid auctioneer and valuer with all the hardy qualities of his country, who stood beside me, had, he con- fessed, much the same feeling. And I suspect that his Town Clerk, more discreet in handling his emotions, did not watch the spectacle unmoved. There we stood for an hour or so, just watching these men and their families on the march to their annual demonstration. The Press said there were forty thousand in the procession. Local police officials, more cautious, put it at much fewer. But it might have been forty million for all we knew, as we stood on the civic balcony of Wakefield. As far as we could see there stretched bands, banners and people. As fast as they moved along, others, a mighty tramping host, came in' from side streets to march towards their demonstra- tion venue. The route of the procession was lined some six to four deep with local folk and outside visitors, some of whom had taken their places before breakfast-time so the Chief Constable told me.
They did not cheer. They raised no buzz of approval as did the crowds of Liege when I myself marched between them in a similar procession in 1934. They were as quiet, but as concentrated and gripped, as they would be at Bramall Lane watching Yorkshire putting it across Lancashire on Bank Holiday. Even when they recognised an old friend or relative in the lines of marchers, the spectators indulged in little more than a surreptitious, almost apologetic, nod of recognition. Somehow there was agreement on all sides to avoid any action which would break the spell. There must be no noise, it seemed, to disturb the massive concentration of the brass bands.
And what brass bands thty were ! Thirty-five of them took part. Yes thirty-five—playing for dear life ; playing, each of them, with
the knowledge that fore and aft, not more than fifty yards away, were equally determined competitors for the public ear, blazing out their own version of Sousa's masterpieces. I must confess that there was a trifle too much band. Here, clearly, was superfluity of riches. After all it is difficult, even from the special vantage-point of a town-hall balcony, to sort out the complicated rhythm of the " Colonel Bogey " march as played by the band immediately below if, two cricket pitches' length in front, the " Miners' March " is in full spate, whilst, coming into ear-range the same distance -behind, is another talented team with a spirited rendering of " Washington Grey"
When I put this point to a Yorkshireman more experienced in these affairs he said to me, with a touch of asperity, " But what's a procession without bands ? " What indeed ? Obviously, if one band is good, thirty-five bands must be thirty-five times as good. And there's an end to it. My most vivid recollection of the bands, however, was not their diversity of performance but the lady trombone player who marched proudly in the front row of an otherwise all- male ensemble. What a majestic figure she was. She made the Trojan women look a tepid lot. In and out, " suck" and " blow " with admirable precision, faultlessly in step, she was the cause of the one bit of animated talk along Wakefield's streets. How sad I was to discover that, after all, she was only the second trombone player. At least I assumed so, since every now and then, she ceased to blow whilst the man alongside her kept up an unbroken performance.
But if it was the bands which assailed the ear it was the banners which caught the eye. More than a hundred of them had been brought from their places of honour in miners' lodges to be unfurled on this grand occasion. Some of them had been making this annual journey since the middle of the last century. Many, even in those days, had cost over Lioo to produce. All of them were borne aloft with a conscious pride which had to be seen to be comprehended. There was the picture of the Good Samaritan, beautifully embroidered in silk. " Unity is strength," proclaimed another. One banner, stitched by sorrowing widows in the 'eighties, was the sad relic of an ancient pit disaster which brought death to almost every home of an entire mining village. So they went by, these variegated symbols of the deep-rooted sense of community which is the outstanding quality of our mining areas. In most cases they were man-handled- no small job with a high wind treating your banner like a galleon sail. It took two tough men on each strut to keep some of them aloft, with teams of reserves, solicitously and nervously just behind, waiting to take over or to assist in case of mishap.
But even in this field of banner-carrying the machine has over- taken man. Mechanisation has not only come to the pits ; it has reached the miners' banners. Some of the lodges, with bitter- memories of storms which have brought their banners low in marches of the past, have spent their " brass " and ingenuity on building tubular trollies, complete with pneumatic tyres and springs, to carry their banners for them. One was a majestic affair, with eight wheels and a criss-cross of gold-painted bars and tubes, which ran along like a stream-lined tank of the future going into action. How superior did its guardians look, as they watched their less-enlightened comrades behind struggling to keep their man-borne flags flying.
Through the centre of Wakefield this mining cavalcade marched to the park where all was ready for their day of celebration. Every thing had been planned with precision. Food ? Yes, that could be got at prescribed Tents—one meat sandwich, one savoury sand- wich, one salad sandwich, two cakes and a cup of tea, all for is. 6d. Beer ? Yes, indeed. Beer, most of all. And each district's favourite brew. No repetition this time of that dread day when the men of Barnsley refused to march because their local beer had not been provided. Of course, it does not matter much in these times, as one miner said to me. " It all tastes alike nowadays. It's all cherniced waiter." Then there were what I was told were the "acerabats "—lithe men who did strange things on ropes and made the miner who crawls around in a two-foot seam feel very small fry after all. And, to crown it all, a massed brass bands' concert, with the " Hallelujah Chorus," " Poet and Peasant," " The Unfinished Symphony " and everything—a great upsurge of stirring, mighty sound, in which the pulsing, honest, grand heart of the miners of Yorkshire beat faster with hope and happiness.
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