Retrospective

The ninety-year-old Norman Cornish, last surviving pitman painter, has a retrospective in Newcastle, at the Northumbria University Gallery. It is moving to London next year, if that matters.

The pitmen painters and the pitmen poets, the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the brass and silver bands, the unions and the workingmens’ clubs, the co-operatives and the credit unions, among so very much else: a civilisation - civilised and civilising - destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair.