Famous Follonsby Banner

On Wednesday 6 March, visitors to the National Coal Mining Museum for England will have a chance to see the famous Follonsby (Wardley) Lodge banner of the Durham Miners’ Association. Also on display will be a banner made by the children of Lingey House Primary School, Felling upon Tyne, who are making the trip to Yorkshire to visit the Museum and will bring with them not just the historic Follonsby banner, but also their own school banner. This banner represents their present and future hopes, in the way that the Follonsby Lodge banner represents the proud past of their area.

The Follonsby banner was an important symbol for the miners and their families around Wardley, Tyne and Wear. It shows the faces of Lenin, James Connolly (hero of Ireland’s Easter Uprising), J. Keir Hardie, A.J. Cook (General Secretary, Miners’ Federation) and local pitman Bolshevik George Harvey, and on the reverse shows an idealised view of ‘A World for the Workers’. The original historic banner was destroyed in a fire during the 1930s, and this banner has been remade to allow local families to march proudly behind it once again at the Durham Miners’ Gala.

There will be a free talk on the history of the banner and its symbolism at 3.00pm by Dave Douglass, a miner from Wardley, who worked for many years at Hatfield Main Colliery, South Yorkshire. Before the talk, at around 2.15pm, the children and teachers from Lingey House School will outline the story of their banner and perform a selection of mining songs for an audience from Horbury Primary School.