Bishop guest of honour at miners' tribute day.

THE former Bishop of Durham, Dr David Jenkins, is back in the North East today as guest of honour at an annual celebration of the region's coal mining industry.

Dr Jenkins has been invited by the National Union of Mineworkers to attend the Northumberland Miners' Picnic in Ashington, in the 25th anniversary year of the bitter 1984 pit strike.

He has travelled from his home in North Yorkshire to give an address at a special memorial service in the town's Holy Sepulchre Church at 11.30am today, which will see wreaths laid in tribute to those who died while working in the pits.

The service will also feature Wansbeck MP Denis Murphy, the Ashington Male Voice Choir, Wansbeck's Ashington Colliery Band and children from Welbeck First School.

Dr Jenkins became Bishop of Durham in 1984 at the height of the strike, and saw it as part of his role to get involved in the deeply divisive dispute, attracting controversy because of it.

He rebuked Margaret Thatcher's Tory Government in his enthronement sermon for its apparent determination to defeat the miners and its seeming indifference to poverty and powerlessness.

Yesterday NUM national chairman Ian Lavery, who lives in Ashington and is a former Northumberland secretary of the union, said: "We are delighted and honoured that Dr Jenkins has agreed to attend the service. He was a good friend of the miners during the 1984 dispute.'' The picnic is a family day at the Woodhorn Museum and Archives Centre..