David John Douglass, sometimes known as Dave or "''Danny the Red''", is a political activist in
Tyneside and
Yorkshire. He is a member of the
IWW, the
NUM
Num may refer to:
* Short for number
* Num (god), the creator and high god of the Nenets people of Siberia
* Short for the Book of Numbers of the Hebrew Bible
* Khnum, a god of Egyptian mythology
* Mios Num, an island of western New Guinea
* Num, ...
and
Class War,
and was formerly in the
Revolutionary Workers' Party (Trotskyist) and the Socialist Union (Internationalist), of which he was a leading member. He is a regular contributor to the ''
Weekly Worker'', the newspaper of the
Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee).
He has also written ''Pit Talk in County Durham'' (1973), a book about the dialect
Pitmatic
__NOTOC__
Pitmatic (originally: "Pitmatical", colloquially known as "Yakka") is a group of traditional Northern English dialects spoken in rural areas of the Northumberland and Durham Coalfield in England.
The separating dialectal development ...
.
He holds an MA in Industrial Relations and Law.
He worked as a coalminer in the coalfields of
Durham and
South Yorkshire, and was NUM Branch Delegate for Hatfield Colliery from 1979. He appears in the documentary ''The Miner's Campaign Tapes'' to discuss the role of the popular media in the strike of 1984–85. In 1994–95 he was Branch Secretary at Hatfield Main, but after the pit was privatised the NUM no longer had any recognition there.
From 1994 to 2006 he helped to run the Miners Community Advice Centre in
Stainforth.
In 1999, Douglass appeared on the
BBC Two
BBC Two is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network owned and operated by the BBC. It covers a wide range of subject matter, with a remit "to broadcast programmes of depth and substance" in contrast to the more mainstream an ...
television series ''Living with the Enemy,'' "in which ideological enemies spend a week in each other's company," at the home of
Lord Rowallan of Kilmarnock.
He worked at the
National Coal Mining Museum for England as a researcher on the exhibition ''Strike, Not the End of It'', and subsequently published a book with the same title on the history of industrial disputes in British mining.
The three volumes of his autobiography, ''Geordies — Wa Mental'', ''The Wheel's Still in Spin'' and ''Ghost Dancers'', were published by
Christie Books between 2008 and 2010.
Published works
* ''Pit Life in County Durham'', History Workshop, 1972
* ''Pit Talk in County Durham'', History Workshop, 1973
* ''A Miner's Life'' (with Joel Krieger), Law Book Co Australasia, 1983
* ''Tell Us Lies About The Miners'', DAM, 1985
* ''Come And Wet This Truncheon'', DAM/Canary Press, 1986
* ''A Year Of Our Lives'', Hooligan Press, 1986
* ''Pit Sense versus the State: a history of militant miners in the Doncaster area'', Phoenix Press, year unknown
* ''All Power to the Imagination!'',
Class War Federation, 1999
* ''Strike, Not the End of the Story: Reflections on the Major Coal Mining Strikes in Britain'', National Coal Mining Museum for England Publications 4, Overton, 2005,
* ''Geordies — Wa Mental'', Christie Books, 2008
* ''The Wheel's Still in Spin'', Christie Books, 2009
* ''Ghost Dancers'', Christie Books, 2010
References
External links
Miners Advice Website page on Dave DouglassDave Douglass articles for Weekly WorkerDavid Douglass Archive at the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers
- papers and printed books relating to NUM and the 1980s strikes.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Douglass, David John
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Industrial Workers of the World members
Trade unionists from Yorkshire
Trade unionists from Newcastle upon Tyne
Proletarian literature