Artist reunited with miners’ banner – after 40 years
CANAL-based artist Kathryn Webley has been reunited with a silk union banner she painted during the miners’ strike 40 years ago.
Created for the Bolsover branch of the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) it features miners’ leader Arthur Scargill being arrested following the ‘battle’ of Orgreave Colliery in May 1984 and could be based on a contemporary photograph by Peter Arkle.
Kathryn is now better known for the painted glassware and window designs she creates on board her floating studio The Pod moored on the Chesterfield Canal and regularly attends waterways events and craft markets. She was also a winner of BBC’s Home is Where the Art Is.
She had been asked by union members to create the banner when she was an 18-year-old student and told Towpath Talk: “Even now I don’t really talk about the strike so it was quite emotional seeing the banner again after 40 years. My dad was on strike when I made it and we couldn’t afford any film so I have no record of it until now. I remember painting it in our back garden stretched over a frame that was leaning against our coal house.
“I met one of the other miners who also stayed out on strike and he was telling me stories of how they rallied around the banner. When you make something you don’t always appreciate how much it would mean to people. Forty years on you could still hear the pride in his voice.”
Kathryn was traced after the Derbyshire Times featured an appeal from the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centres (DUWC) which is staging an exhibition in Chesterfield throughout March.
One of the organisers, Colin Hampton, who joined DUWC in 1984, said: “We would like to acknowledge her work as we are expecting a large number of visitors to the Assembly Rooms for the 40th anniversary commemoration and want to be in a position to answer all the questions from the public.”
He explained that the banner was used at pickets and demonstrations up and down the country but had to be hidden away in an outbuilding by the secretary of the Trades Council so it couldn’t be confiscated by the court.
When the former secretary moved house he said he had all these old banners and Colin agreed to make sure they all went back to the right union branches but decided to keep this one for the exhibition.