Embedded Files
Below is a brief summary of information about Bowburn’s 1920 banner. For a fuller account, see The Bowburn Miners’ Edith Cavell Banner.
After the fragments of the 1920 banner were “discovered” in 2005, conservators cleaned the paintwork and sewed the fragments on to fabrics of the original colours. The first photo shows the result.
The banner uniquely portrays Nurse Edith Cavell. She had remained in Brussells after Belgium was occupied by Germany at the start of World War I. She was arrested about a year later and executed on 25th October 1915 for assisting the escape of Allied servicemen from behind enemy lines.
There is a story that the decision to portray Nurse Edith Cavell on Bowburn Miners’ lodge banner was not popular. This May Day parade through Coxhoe, probably in 1920, could suggest that the other side, with a portrait of Durham Miners’ Association Agent John Wilson MP (who had also died in 1915) was considered to be the front or “A” side.
However, not long afterwards, Nurse Cavell’s portrait was clearly the “front” in this picture of Bowburn lodge members at the Durham Miners’ Gala in the early-1920s.
And it was clearly the A side, during the 1921 lock-out, in this picture of the soup kitchen in the Bowburn Institute.
It was the A side in this 1935 Gala photograph and had presumably remained so during the preceding decade.
Return and conservation
Return and conservation
Two large fragments of the Cavell banner were returned to Bowburn in February 2005. Here members of the Bowburn Banner Group see them for the first time.
Thanks to funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the fragments were cleaned and sewn to a backcloth.
Today the banner is prominently displayed in the foyer of Bowburn Community Centre.
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