Saving Britain's proud brass band legacy
Practice night for Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band, one of the oldest brass bands in Britain. History lines the walls of the Yorkshire band’s practice room: gleaming trophies of past victories, a banner for Best of Brass Champions 1983 and, on one wall, a poster: “The Yorkshire Coalfield — Memories.” It shows a miner, face blackened from the pit, and names every closed Yorkshire colliery.
Only three former miners play for Carlton Main these days; the band has survived without the pit, its ranks swelled by young male and female professionals and five members under 20. This is the typical, new, middle-class face of brass bands. Yet their links to a bygone mining tradition persist.
Twenty-five years after brass bands marched during the miners’ strike, this underground music is in the spotlight again. A new compilation, The Music Lives on Now the Mines Have Gone, brings 11 colliery bands together, including Carlton Main. They will line up against another colliery brass album, by the Dinnington Colliery Band, from Sheffield, the stars of the BBC show A Band for Britain, which follows Sue Perkins’s efforts to save Dinnington. And next month, the Leeds-based Opera North commemorates the year-long miners’ strike with Songs at the Year’s End, a song cycle for brass band.
But what future do these historic groups have? Most brass bands today have outlived their mining communities, and the effects are profound. When collieries and their bands were the heart of a close-knit, thriving village, bands played for pleasure and pride.
The Yorkshire-born Stan Lippeatt, 60, is a former Grimethorpe bandsman who started playing when he was 10 years old. His father played, so did his grandfathers, his uncles and his two brothers. “Bands became the pillars of the village; they turned out to march on Armistice Sunday, they would play the Christmas carols. They were something for villagers to go to when there wasn’t much TV about,” he says. Lippeatt founded the annual Butlins Mineworkers Open Brass Band Championships. “A guy would be on his holidays in Torquay and he’d be proud to boast he came from the home town of a band.”
The Barnsley poet Ian McMillan, who has written the words for Opera North’s Songs at the Year’s End, believes that brass bands still play a role in their communities. “They are an image for how collectivism can survive. And when you have an area that’s had the collectivism knocked out of it [such as Grimethorpe] any image of that collectivism and community activity is a good thing.”
