Coal was king and unity ran strong...
EX-MINER Albert 'Slink' Oldale, of North Anston, recalls an era where 'the miner was king', and the story of the 1984-5 strike, which changed British industry and our communities forever:
“THE coal miners of this country were good working men, who laboured with their bare hands in very bad conditions.
Generations of them acclimatised themselves to the cold before dawn, to work long hours in the grim dark of the mines, often choking on coal dust.
But they were doomed men, many died long before their time in terrible accidents, others from lung damage.
The profit-hungry owners of pre-nationalisation slowly bled the industry to death. There are just the minimum number of pits, and they’ve closed the rich seams of Selby, with thousands of experienced miner’s jobs.
The last few pits in Notts are scheduled to shut.
There used to be 718,000 miners – it was a powerful industry then. During the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, the miner was king. They did a very hard and dirty job, and earned every penny they got.
They had powerful unions and few politicians took them on. A miner’s job needed a great amount of stamina and courage.
A young reporter once agreed to stay down for a programme called Living the News. It was an experience he never forgot. The darkness, the damp and choking dust, the danger and fear. “I have never been so afraid,” he wrote afterwards.
Mining was not just a hard way of making a living, it was a way of life. It was a forged and shining unity, a passionate brotherhood.
Danger created a mutual dependence on your mates. Mining had run in families for years and generations. We had a strong bond amongst each other.
The young women rarely married out of mining, it was a matter of honour. Though the miners were poor, the communities looked after their own, and they helped those who were sick or old and could no longer work.
Each pit village liked their own brass band and male voice choir. There wasn’t very often any crime, and most doors were left unlocked.
But the sense of community has now vanished, because Mrs Thatcher decided to take the miners on, and wanted to shut some pits.
She caught the industry when it was on a slight decline, and then the Government declared war on the unions. Maggie held the high cards, stocks of coal were high and it was going to be an unwinning struggle for the miners.
The leadership called for ballots among the workforce, Maggie was trying to destroy the mining unity. Mining communities were torn apart, family against family, friend against friend, father against son. Even today the wounds still linger.
There was terrible violence on the picket lines. Striking miners were inflamed by other miners who didn’t strike. There were vicious charges by the mounted police and pickets were arrested, with others having to run into ditches to hide from the police truncheons.
Finally, after a full year, the miners were starved back into work by hardships. The coal industry received the fatal blow, and Maggie closed about 100 pits. The once-fierce NUM is now a limping force, from 20,000 men, down to a few pits left open, to foreign competition manufacturing new fuels.
The strike fired a final bullet through the heart of mining, but I still think Maggie and all her cronies could have been beaten by a word called ‘unity’. All the miners together – they could have won the pits back.”
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Weather for Dinnington
Tuesday 07 February 2012
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