He worked as an electrician at Murton colliery, county Durham, and played a leading part in the mineworkers’ union for several decades. We worked closely together for much of that time, and Dave’s family asked me to write part of the eulogy read out at his funeral on 7 October by the celebrant, Nichola Reeder. With their agreement, I am posting it here Simon Pirani.
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| Dave Temple |
Dave was known for his organising work in the mining communities, before and during the 1984-85 strike, defending the union and its members in the aftermath, and working to renew labour movement traditions through the Durham miners’ gala, the Redhills project and other activities.
Dave had a strong framework of ideas that underpinned his approach: socialist beliefs, that humanity could go past capitalism and establish social relations based not on exploitation and violence but on human needs and desires; that change had to be international and internationalist; that the movement needed to do things in a collective, constructive way that reflected the future we look to.
And he had a sense of history and the way society changes over time – a context within which to understand the immediate.
In the 2024 gala programme, Dave wrote an article marking the anniversary of the big strike, which ended:
This sense of history went well with Dave’s natural personal optimism. It was especially important in tough times, such as the years after the 1984-85 strike, when he understand how the difficulties and tragedies were part of a larger process, that had the potential both for progress and for reaction.
It’s very significant that in those hard times he put so much energy into developing the Durham miners’ international links.
Dave’s socialism was influenced by his family background, and by the Trotskyist organisation that he joined in the 1960s, and remained in, until it broke up in the 1990s. That’s where I got to know him.
He well understood that the ideas we talked about in small circles – often exaggerated, sometimes deluded, for a long time held together by an approach to party organisation that proved to be wrong – had to be tested out in the wider movement. And if they didn’t pass the test, they needed to be rethought.
In the years after the miners’ strike, in a labour movement milieu with more than its fair share of careerists and big egos, Dave was the very opposite. He undertook huge organisational tasks – such as with his printing company, with the Friends of the Miners Gala and Redhills – without a word being said on big public stages that others enjoyed appearing on.
Dave had a strong framework of ideas that underpinned his approach: socialist beliefs, that humanity could go past capitalism and establish social relations based not on exploitation and violence but on human needs and desires; that change had to be international and internationalist; that the movement needed to do things in a collective, constructive way that reflected the future we look to.
And he had a sense of history and the way society changes over time – a context within which to understand the immediate.
In the 2024 gala programme, Dave wrote an article marking the anniversary of the big strike, which ended:
For over two centuries, miners fought for justice – to free themselves from the servitude of the yearly bond, feed their families, establish safer working conditions and abolish the private ownership of the mines. To achieve these goals, they made demands of government and developed socialist principles. But they also sought to solve the immediate problems in their communities.
They built cooperative store to escape the exploitation of the company “tommy shops”, and reading rooms to inform and educate. They inspired doctors’ panels to socialise health care. They built homes for the old and infirm, long before there were council houses. Their sports grounds and welfare halls were the envy of the working class.
It was this tradition of creating a caring society that was invigorated during the miners’ strike. We need it now more than ever.
This sense of history went well with Dave’s natural personal optimism. It was especially important in tough times, such as the years after the 1984-85 strike, when he understand how the difficulties and tragedies were part of a larger process, that had the potential both for progress and for reaction.
It’s very significant that in those hard times he put so much energy into developing the Durham miners’ international links.
Dave’s socialism was influenced by his family background, and by the Trotskyist organisation that he joined in the 1960s, and remained in, until it broke up in the 1990s. That’s where I got to know him.
He well understood that the ideas we talked about in small circles – often exaggerated, sometimes deluded, for a long time held together by an approach to party organisation that proved to be wrong – had to be tested out in the wider movement. And if they didn’t pass the test, they needed to be rethought.
In the years after the miners’ strike, in a labour movement milieu with more than its fair share of careerists and big egos, Dave was the very opposite. He undertook huge organisational tasks – such as with his printing company, with the Friends of the Miners Gala and Redhills – without a word being said on big public stages that others enjoyed appearing on.
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| Mineworkers’ union banners at the funeral service for Dave Temple at Durham Crematorium on 7 October |
In a milieu with more than its fair share of exaggerated arguments and personal squabbles, he maintained dignity and a proportionate sense of humour at all times.
After Dave died, his son Sean reminded me that his dad believed “you do not leave your wounded on the battlefield”. Straight after the miners’ strike, Dave was deeply involved in supporting miners who had been jailed and victimised.
In those years, Dave also organised and, with other friends and comrades, raised the money for nursing care for Des Warren, towards the end of Des’s life. Des was a union militant, who became very ill as a consequence of having been tortured with the “liquid cosh” when jailed on conspiracy charges arising from the 1972 building workers’ strike.
When people from around the world, who we saw as comrades, faced hardship and repression, Dave put a huge amount of energy into helping them. For example, our friends in the Kosovan and Bosnian mining unions, and the South African miners that Dave met when he travelled there.
After leaving the pit himself, Dave put his energy into Trade Union Printing Services and creating a printing and publications business that would first and foremost serve the labour movement.
Dave also became preoccupied with preserving the union’s and coalfield communities’ traditions, firstly through the annual Miners Gala. And in the 1990s and 2000s, he wrote a series of books about the Durham coalfield’s history, including two volumes of The Collieries of Durham; the Durham Miners Millennium Book 📖 Above and Below the Limestone (which is about the mining communities of Easington), and The Big Meeting: A History of the Durham Miners’ Gala.
Dave was someone I thought of as “comrade”, in a way that really meant something. When we worked together in the 1980s and 1990s, I looked up to him as someone older and wiser than me, who was always very respectful towards me and all others. I never lost that feeling. We will all miss him.
☭☭☭☭
There is much, much more to say about the history of which Dave was part – history that he helped to make. But here are just two more points. First, I want to express my deepest condolences to Jean, to Sean and Corina, and to Dave’s whole family.
Second, I will add this story of my own, about the efforts we made in the early 1990s to build bridges between the labour movement in the UK and in Russia and Ukraine – bridges that retain their significance today:
In 1990 I visited what was then still the Soviet Union for the first time. Both Dave and I were still members of a Trotskyist organisation, the Workers Revolutionary Party, that would break up not long afterwards. I was working for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), editing its newspaper.
A year earlier, in 1989, the Soviet coalfields had been shaken by a gigantic strike wave, the most widespread workers’ revolt since the 1930s. In Moscow, together with Russian friends, I approached the independent mineworkers’ union, which had emerged from those strikes, and urged them to make contact with their counterparts in the UK. Several of the still new organisations that made up the independent miners’ union showed interest, particularly the strike committees in the western Donbass, Ukraine, based in Pavlograd.
Second, I will add this story of my own, about the efforts we made in the early 1990s to build bridges between the labour movement in the UK and in Russia and Ukraine – bridges that retain their significance today:
In 1990 I visited what was then still the Soviet Union for the first time. Both Dave and I were still members of a Trotskyist organisation, the Workers Revolutionary Party, that would break up not long afterwards. I was working for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), editing its newspaper.
A year earlier, in 1989, the Soviet coalfields had been shaken by a gigantic strike wave, the most widespread workers’ revolt since the 1930s. In Moscow, together with Russian friends, I approached the independent mineworkers’ union, which had emerged from those strikes, and urged them to make contact with their counterparts in the UK. Several of the still new organisations that made up the independent miners’ union showed interest, particularly the strike committees in the western Donbass, Ukraine, based in Pavlograd.
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| Dave Temple (on the right, with beard) at one of the many open-air rallies during the 1984-85 miners’ strike |
The independent union was shunned by the International Miners Organisation, to which the NUM was affiliated at national level, and which was linked to the old bureaucratic Soviet miners’ union that had collaborated with the bosses against the 1989 strikes. But the Durham area NUM welcomed the contact with open arms.
Dave, who at that time was serving on the NUM Area Executive, was well known by his fellow mineworkers for the enthusiasm with which he sought out international links, and he was soon dispatched to Pavlograd.
He was the first British person many of his counterparts there had met. In a sarcastic play on the then-prevalent discourse about the “wild” former Soviet east and “civilised” western Europe, someone among them nicknamed him “Columbus”.
Dave’s report back to the Durham union about his trip was included in the 1992 programme for the Durham Miners Gala:
One miner I spoke to summed up the motive force behind the Soviet miners’ unrest like this: “Our aim is to make a human being into a human being, not a workhorse. We want miners to be proud of being miners.” […]
After 70 years of almost total isolation from their fellow workers abroad, the miners in the Soviet coalfield are eager to compare their conditions with those of other countries.
In Donetsk, Krasnoarmiisk [renamed Pokrovsk in 2016] and Pavlograd, the questions were the same: “How many square feet of space does a British miner and his family live in? How many days a week can you afford to eat meat? What is the temperature down your pit?”
Their complaints are uncomplicated: empty shelves in the food shops; cramped living conditions at home; high accident rates at the pit – all adding up to a low quality of life.
But these miners are not demoralised.
In 1992, another North East Area NUM delegation visited Donbass – by this time, in newly independent Ukraine. The late David Hopper, NUM (Durham Area) General Secretary, said on his return: “We were deeply shocked. We were in Pavlograd for seven days, in the company of miners for the whole time, and the conditions there were appalling.”
That delegation found that underground conditions were “comparable to British mines of 60 years ago”. Although there was machinery for coal-cutting and driving headings, it was at least 20 years behind UK standards. Dust suppression appeared to be unheard of.
Throughout the 1990s, the Durham miners – who were themselves going through tough times, dominated by pit closures and economic changes – kept in touch with their western Donbass counterparts. (More of the story was told in the 2022 Gala programme.)
In 2014, just weeks after the Donbass coalfield had been riven by the establishment of the Russian-supported separatist “republics”, a trade union representative from the region, Sergey Yunak, was welcomed as a speaker at the Durham miners’ gala, where he called for the “territorial integrity and independence of our country”. In 2022, the NUM was one of the first British unions to declare its support for its Ukrainian counterparts and contribute to efforts to send medical and humanitarian aid to mining communities on the front lines.
I would not say that none of these things would have happened without Dave Temple. But, for sure, they happened the way that they did, due, among other things, to his patient, caring, principled efforts.
