Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘Firm as A Rock We Stand the banner sings / but a limestone arch thrown up in the year dot / collapsed in pity after the last door / was slammed shut – a marooned stack now sulks’. This stanza from Simon Armitage’s lyric for the song by LYR, ‘Marsden By The Sea’ challenges us to understand how our feelings in response to loss impact on the sense of communal or ‘congregational’ identity. This blog asks therefore whether, when working class history becomes attuned to loss, it can remain a story that must be urgently told and repeated or whether it will sulk in its marooned and alienated state and disappear. This blog reflects on an event held in Durham Cathedral on the 15^th July 2022 in which a work commissioned from Armitage and LYR by the Durham Brass Festival 2022 was performed by them with the Easington Colliery Brass Band

In Simon Armitage’s spoken introduction, at an event held in Durham Cathedral on the 15^th July, to a work commissioned from him and LYR by the Durham Brass Festival 2022 (performed with the Easington Colliery Brass Band), Armitage used the word ‘congregational’ to name, I think, the principle which structures feeling, thought and sociality in public art. I explain that now because the word is in my title but we can consider the notion of ‘congregation’ (as it applies to public art) more fully later. The work performed takes its title, Firm As A Rock I Stand, from the motto on the Marsden Lodge of the National Union of Mineworkers. That motto can be seen on the various images of the banner in my collage above, together with an icon used to explicate its relevance to the once-proud mining village of Marsden; the representation of the arched sea stack that was the geological rock formation called Marsden Rock. Marsden village is now obliterated apart from the rectangular shapes on the grass left by its modest housing. To hear the story of that, you can watch the film on You Tube made to commemorate the event rather than hear me retell it; for that film preceded the performance of the suite of songs with the title Firm As A Rock I Stand.

But Marsden Rock was not as firm as it was predicted to be. I first saw that sad sight of a rock that failed to stand in Marsden Bay personally, without knowing the history of iconic usage by the Miners Lodge it concealed, just after I moved to the North East in 1990.  I wonder now at the lack of intellectual curiosity I must have shown then, for I had visited the site with my now husband and now deceased parents merely to view the arched stack (as it was still in 1995) of Marsden Rock in the sea rather than learn its added social significance to a local community of which, sad to say, I know very little: nor knew the extent of my ignorance.

I do however remember feeling sad when early in the year of 1996 I heard on the local BBC TV news of the fall of the arch in the stack, so that the stack became two independent forms. I remember too a subsequent revisit, later on in 1996 when the weather was beautiful to see both parts of the stack which still stood, to see it as it was then before the smaller stack was demolished in 1997. The whole process seemed quite sad but now, again, I wonder at the superficiality (I forgive myself) of the feeling I had then.

Armitage uses the collapse in 1996 as an emblem of the loss of things on which you have depended and believed through the processes of time in the piece of the song lyric I quote in my title from Marsden By The Sea. Here it is again:

Firm as A Rock We Stand the banner sings

but a limestone arch thrown up in the year dot

collapsed in pity after the last door

was slammed shut – a marooned stack now sulks.[1]

The burden of this stanza is surely to query whether anything ever stands firm forever; whatever the strength of our wishes, for the very rock cited in the banner’s motto is a structure that, despite its former endurance, has ‘collapsed’. But the story told is not that simple for the rock is personified in ways that makes it seem an agent in its own collapse – as if it were in some vague way responsible for its own isolation, perhaps for over-reactive ‘pity’ for the fate of Marsden village perhaps and certainly for its failure to feel any nuanced maturity in its emotional responses, since only the immature and merely self-regarding are usually said to ‘sulk’ rather than feel, say, sadness or melancholy. The effect of this characterisation of the rock is to rob it even further of an association with rigour and constancy of emotional purpose.

I find this seemingly critical approach (I say seemingly for I may entirely get the wrong associations from the words I mention above) to the emotions which the rock represents very problematic in terms of the attitudes it represents to the loss of specific communities during periods of immense social, cultural and economic change. So much so that I wonder if the issue is not just the loss of specific communities – such as those in the Category D villages in the North East in the 1950s and 1060s. That loss occurred in the context of then government policy to assist, and perhaps even actively encourage the decline of the vast mining industry and the infrastructures supporting it on the Great Northern Coalfield. Even Labour leaders in the 1960s in Durham, unlike South Wales, implicitly supported closure programmes for the industry in that they, according to Benyon and Hudson ‘avoided resistance, and suppressed it where it occurred.  Here the emphasis was on cooperation with what seemed an inevitable process’.[2]

Moreover cross-party Government policies (in different ways) also supported ideological changes to shift the burden of response to economic and social decline onto the individual rather than the state. Even the duty of planning for the support and health of communities and community development changed its nature from the days, say, of The Plan for Coal in 1950: ‘from a driving, reforming state to individuals looking after themselves’. It was a sad period in which to begin observing the world politically as I did, even though I could not have predicted the present state of visceral selfishness in national policies and Brexit ideology.

The period in which the working class began to be blamed for its own failure to thrive – a failure that was the direct consequences of the economic cycles of capitalism – is brilliantly conveyed in the song Category D, which shows how elective grading (even in education) dismisses vast swathes of the disinherited of the earth – the delinquent, demolished or demoralised. It also shows how the labelling of persons as ‘failing’ facilitates self-blame by those failed by society for thatr ‘failure’:

I’m Tweedle Dumb ‘cause I’m Tweedle D

…

I got a D

I got a D

There must be something structurally wrong with me.

Before we turn and sulk here let us think about whom is the ‘me’ that has something structurally wrong with it: my best bet is that Armitage says it is the very society responsible for structuring persons by the use of such marginalising labels.

It is in this context that I read Armitage’s metaphor. The attitude to the ‘limestone arch thrown up in the year dot’ is very like the attitude that emerged in those years to the individuals who failed to take responsibility for ‘“playing their part” in the plan for a healthier nation’ or region and who remained locked in the values of a past which was being constantly seen as no longer possible to sustain.[3] If I read this correctly then What Armitage does is show us that it is not the motto of the Marsden Lodge that is being critiqued by the sulking rock but the failure to make that firmness a rigorously applied reality. For the villagers of Marsden have been ‘shipwrecked’ we lean in the final lens, where the ship might also be the ‘ship of state’. But they also still hold the potential for fight and resistance to that which oversees and tries to maintain their political passivity. Tigers must sleep, but if and when they awake, they are still tigers:

It’s dark between pulses, though every five seconds

a red light catches shipwrecked villagers

playing sleeping tigers under the great lens.

The sense of something reviving to life in the whole poem is unavoidable, something aligned to the imagery of the release of pollen spores, the return by a kittiwake to an old ‘nesting site’ to produce new life and also the slow geological-time formation of a new hard magnetite out of solidified memories which will animate a compass of the way forward to the future.

I sense that in the grave of community of Marsden, Addison, and too many other villages to name (though one song sung did just that) there is the hope of a new congregation (that which meets to hear this song) finding its place, at least psycho-culturally, in Marsden By The Sea. I hope I am not over hopeful, or grossly over-reading. I think the issue for all of us in these sad political times is moving beyond sullen lonely sulking to discovering the sense of buried pride in our sleeping strength in communities; something similar in spirit, if not the same, to more assertive 2013 lyrics to this rewriting of the Marsden banner motto. This version, of course, imagines itself sung in the past because no-one thinks underground work ought to be or is ‘ceaseless’ now. What will endure is the strength of a community of many against the few:

Standing tall by Northern shores the clifftops are our home
With everything we need we’ll never roam
Steadfast pride in temperance, church and family
We’ll ne’er be forgot by history
 
Chorus 
Sons of Marsden and the Tyne, Firm as a rock we stand
Our work is ceaseless down the mine, Firm as a rock we stand
Sons of Marsden and the Tyne, Firm as a rock we stand[4]

Easington Colliery Band in first set of evening in the Cathedral setting

Other songs in this collection imagine the complexities of mining communities and their expression in brass bands, as in the wonderful song Alchemy, wherein only performance can show how revival is intended. The first use of the word ‘brass’ in its lyrics connotes the Yorkshire idiom for wealth (‘And out of the fire came brass’). The constant repetitive play in the second stanza of the ‘out of the brass’ phrase refers to the heard revival, by a live audience, that bursts into the performed song by the the swell of its working class community brass band backing – on this evening provided by Easington Colliery Band. This ‘accompaniment’ and deepening of the word ‘brass’ seems to breed symbols of power within the poem; a power won by a class of workers instinct with vision and dreams as well as a new revolution of cleansing fire that had first created it. The song becomes a version of the Creation or Re-Creation myth but not one performed top-down by a God but bottom up from the Earth:

Out of the earth came light.

Out of the earth came breath.

The second most beautiful lyric in this suite (the first being Marsden By The Sea) is I think Addison Drifts, wherein the evacuated and obliterated village of Addison is imagined as a Catherine-like waif like that in Wuthering Heights, but constantly recalls the imagery of coal, even as it burns on a domestic hearth. You need to see the film on You Tube to fully appreciate it (follow the link in this sentence to do so).

But the import of this evening hangs not in the margins haunted by the ghosts in the lyrics but in the congregation which sat in Durham Cathedral and revived that communal hope I believe. This is what I understand therefore by Armitage’s pronouncement that the goal of LYR is the making of ‘congregation’. And this meaning lived not only in the suite of songs described above (though they were its greatest moment) but in the joy in music across a range of genres in a complete and enthusiastic audience. For congregated in this show were not only large numbers of performers but of genres and experiences. A set of early LYR songs set the radical tone showing how voice spoken, chanted and sung (the voice of singer-songwriter Richard Walters like that of an archangel heard from its mansion in heaven) congregates to one purpose with musicians of the highest quality. But they rang as if in a line from pieces – popular, religious and political from Easington Brass Band and its various soloists, including a saxophonist who, having done his music degree in Salford, returned to be part of the community at Easington Colliery village (a village that is with that name now – just a place not a colliery).

If you ever have a chance of hearing this show live (possibly with a different community brass band accompanying) do. It is a fulfilling if overwhelming evening. One star of the show you may not see is Durham Cathedral, whose noble but also communally sound Romanesque pillars and arches were lit with varying colours and metamorphosing lights. In the playing of Stardust the beautiful ceiling was covered with the stars that recalled not only the celestial but the ballroom. The issue was that the communal space was transformed so that it housed not only a congregation of the religious but congregations of the arts in every form including folk, popular and even populist ones.

But wherever you see it, you SHOULD!

All the best

Steve

---

[1] Simon Armitage (2022: 8) Marsden By The Sea (lines 11- 14) in programme titled Durham Brass Festival & Durham Miners Association Present Firm As A Rock I Stand (9 pages in total).

[2]Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson’s (2021: 57f.) ‘The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain’ London and New York, Verso Books. For my blog on this see:  ‘… the importance of rescuing the defeated, the silenced and the dispossessed from the “enormous condescension of posterity”’.[1]  This is a blog on reading local histories in the context of modern constructions of global economics. It reviews (although with an autobiographical stress) Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson’s (2021) ‘The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain’. – Steve_Bamlett_blog (home.blog)

[3] Ibid: 271

[4] Cited in Marsden Banner Group website: https://marsdenbannergroup.chessck.co.uk/banners

---