Banner speaks to Robert Burns's legacy in north-east England

This magnificent 10ftx9ft late 19th-century Durham miners’ banner (above) – part of the collection at Beamish Museum in the county– has been photographed and admired by thousands of Scottish visitors over the years.

Sadly it’s not on general display at present due to its age and fragility but a spokesperson told me people with a special interest in Burns could view the banner by appointment.

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Undoubtedly, the banner confirms the high esteem in which Burns was held by Durham miners in the days when trade unions struggled for rights and recognition.

Manufactured around 1890 by SM Peacock of South Shields, the Lambton Miners’ Lodge banner features an illustration of Burns Cottage in Alloway with a reproduction of Alexander Nasmyth’s renowned 1787 portrait of the Bard.

The banner also includes an image of another radical Scot, Alexander Macdonald, who started work in the pits at the age of eight and went on to become president of the Miners’ National Union and a Liberal MP, before the emergence of the Labour Party.

Macdonald was a speaker at the first Durham Miners’ Gala in 1871. The annual event is still going on to this day despite the fact that there are no deep mines left in the UK.

It is not known whether Scottish miners who moved south to find work in the burgeoning Durham coalfield in the 19th century influenced the decision to honour Burns in such a grandiose manner on the Lambton banner or whether it was simply the Bard’s reputation for egalitarianism and his well-known empathy for the common man.

While the Lambton Burns banner is the only one still surviving in the former coalfield, another lodge – Wingate – also featured the Nasmyth portrait of the Bard around the same time … opposite an image of William Shakespeare.

READ MORE: Was Scotland's bard political?

Meanwhile Etherley lodge members in the south of the county used a quotation from Burns’s famous poem The Cotter’s Saturday Night, as a slogan on their banner:

Princes and Lords are but the breath of kings

But man is the noblest work of God.

Burns trod on English soil on just three occasions, the first two in 1786 being in reality just quick forays across the Border near Coldstream and to Berwick.

The following year, he and two companions embarked on a six-day trip and stayed one night in Newcastle and the others in towns and villages in Northumberland and what is now known as Cumbria.

The night in Newcastle was recognised and celebrated 114 years later when the Walker-on-Tyne Burns Club paid for an impressive statue of the Bard on a tall plinth to be erected in their local park.

It fell into disrepair and had to be removed for safety reasons but thanks to support from the National Lottery a replacement was unveiled on the same spot in 2016.

However, it wasn’t without controversy as a perceptive Scots Geordies pointed out that the positioning of the monument meant that Burns had turned his back on Scotland!

For more information on Beamish, The Living Museum of the North visit www.beamish.org.uk.