The red Follonsby lodge banner

The lodge banner of the Follonsby miners at Wardley, on the northern edge of the Durham coalfield, unfurled in 1928 with Lenin at its centre beside James Connolly, A. J. Cook, Keir Hardie and the lodge secretary George Harvey. Burned in 1938, remade the same year, later painted over, it was reproduced in 2011 and has been carried at the Durham Miners' Gala ever since.

The mining history in this record

The first red Follonsby banner was unfurled in 1928, two years after the defeat of the 1926 lockout, the third of three red Durham miners' banners of the interwar years. Its centrepiece was a portrait of Lenin, with a line from William Morris's poem 'The Day is Coming' beneath: 'Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail'. Around him were A. J. Cook, then the miners' leader, Keir Hardie, James Connolly, executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, and George Harvey, the lodge secretary and Follonsby miners' leader since 1913, whose politics the choice of faces traced from Hardie's Labour cause to Connolly's revolutionary socialism after his years at Ruskin College.

In January 1938 a fire that began in the upper storey of the timber Follonsby miners' hall razed it and Harvey's adjoining house, and the banner was destroyed with the lodge's papers and Harvey's books. Six months later a replacement in red, gold and white, costing £60, was unfurled at an open-air meeting on Wardley welfare ground on 17 July 1938, with the South Wales miners' president Arthur Horner as speaker. Some time before Harvey died in July 1949 its red imagery was painted over, and later Follonsby banners carried local officials instead.

People

George Harvey (1885-1949), Follonsby lodge secretary; Arthur Horner; Dave Douglass, who formed the Follonsby Banner Association.

Legacy today

In 2011 a Follonsby Banner Association of local people and activists, funded by Gateshead councillors' community grants, commissioned a reproduction of the red banner from the makers Chippenhams, the back copied exactly from the surviving original. It has been carried at the Durham Miners' Gala every year since, and the banner is often called the most revolutionary in British trade union history, a claim the historian Lewis Mates examines and finds strong though contestable. The last, 1960 Follonsby banner hangs in Gateshead Council Chamber.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each tagged with how solidly it's grounded and attached to the source(s) that support it. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• The first red Follonsby banner was unfurled in 1928, with a portrait of Lenin at its centre. (documented fact) ^1,2
• The banner bore portraits of Lenin, A. J. Cook, Keir Hardie, James Connolly and George Harvey, with a line from William Morris's 'The Day is Coming'. (documented fact) ¹
• In January 1938 the banner was destroyed when fire razed the Follonsby miners' hall and Harvey's house. (documented fact) ¹
• A replacement red banner was unfurled at Wardley welfare ground on 17 July 1938, with Arthur Horner as speaker. (documented fact) ¹
• A reproduction has been carried at the Durham Miners' Gala since 2011. (documented fact) ¹
• The banner gained the reputation of being the most revolutionary banner in the world. (tradition/folklore) ^1,2
• Wardley, home of the Follonsby lodge, was known as the 'Red Village'. (tradition/folklore) ²

Mines

• Follonsby Colliery — Tyne and Wear
  The banner of the Follonsby miners' lodge at Wardley, made by and for the colliery's union branch in 1928 and 1938 (Mates, ILWCH 2021; Tribune 2025).

Sources

1. (secondary) The 'most revolutionary' banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the 'red' Follonsby miners' banner (Lewis Mates, International Labor and Working-Class History, 2021) — Cambridge University Press
2. (secondary) DMG 2025: Communism in the Coalfields — Tribune

Record created: 30 September 2026 · Last researched: 3 October 2026