ALTHOUGH I have lived in the Forth valley for many years now, at the time of the Miners' Strike I did not know Sauchie and Fallin. One of my best contacts for the sort of human interest stories my employer wanted, however, was a very community-minded miner from Sauchie, so the area featured regularly in the work I filed from a small office off Leith Walk in Edinburgh. And Polmaise Colliery in Fallin was one of the names that featured regularly in news reports I worked on about the bitter dispute – about which I was of a very different opinion than the organisation that paid my wages.
This month it is the thirtieth anniversary of the closure of Polmaise, throwing out of work over 100 men in a village where over a third of the community were unemployed and two-thirds of families were in receipt of housing benefit. It is a long time ago, and many of those who now live in Sauchie and Fallin have lived their entire lives or at least moved into the area since. This weekend, however, the striking miners and the women who were so loyal and vociferous in their support will be remembered as Stirling's Macrobert Arts Centre gets out and about in its hinterland with events in Sauchie Hall on Saturday and Fallin Miners Welfare and Social Club on Sunday. For the arts centre and its artistic director Julie Ellen there is an obvious purpose in extending its reach from the centre's rarified location on the campus of Stirling University, and the programme of work slots neatly into Historic Environment Scotland's History Live initiative. It also dovetails with Macbob's performance programme, which receives a visit from Gary Clarke's dance company at the end of September with the show, Coal. Clarke comes from Grimethorpe in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a village whose name comes coupled to the word "colliery" thanks to the national fame of its prize-winning brass band. The choreographer's show, which is a dance narrative of the Miner's Strike, visited Tramway in Glasgow in the autumn of last year, when The Herald's Mary Brennan reported that the community input included brass players from the Kirkintilloch band and local women "as wives who marched out of the kitchen and onto the picket lines in support of their menfolk." She continued: "Clarke’s urgent call to remember those times is a reminder of how the politics of those events affected the whole country then, and since."
The Macrobert has commissioned Yorkshire-born, Glasgow School of Art educated Pulse prize-winning artist Philip Gurrey to create an exhibition which will run from a month before the performances of Coal by the Gary Clarke Company. As well as his own work, Gurrey's show, Under-Mined, will include work created now in the communities that were devastated by the dispute, as well as some appropriate brass band music on its opening night. Over the coming weekend, the families attending the sessions in Sauchie and Fallin will be able to take part in art workshops led by Gurrey that will produce banners and placards inspired by images from the strike in the 1980s. There will also be drama workshops in the two afternoons, which will culminate in mock demonstrations. And all of this will be recorded and curated for Gurrey to use in his exhibition, opening just under a month from now.
It would be easy to raise cynical objections to some of this. What happened during the Miners' Strike at Orgreave, for example, is still a hot topic. But it is a subject that means little to a generation that have been born since the dispute ended three decades ago. The Macbob team will be trying to ensure the young people have fun at their workshops, but also that they learn a crucial part of the history of the area in which they live. As a carrot to entice families through the door, the programme on both days kicks off with a screening of Disney's recent reboot of Beauty and the Beast. If there is an allegorical message intended, some might say that the redemptive ending of that fabulous story has yet to be reached.
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