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This Mining Review item documents a miners' benefit concert in Edinburgh's Usher Hall given by the great American singer and political activist Paul Robeson. Robeson had long been something of a hero to the British mining community, ever since he starred in the film Proud Valley (d. Pen Tennyson, 1940) as an American sailor stranded in Cardiff who finds work in a Welsh colliery (the newsreel opens with a short clip from the film). Robeson then visits an Edinburgh colliery and sings 'I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night' in its canteen. Joe Hill was a poet and union organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), executed on a trumped-up murder charge in 1915 and subsequently immortalised as a workers' hero of similar stature to Robeson himself. Michael Brooke *This film is included in the BFI DVD compilation 'Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930-1950'.
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Complete item (3:15)
