My Dad was a miner in and around the Strike of 1984. A pretty monumental piece of British history, and my Dad was involved…although I was never really sure to what extent due to his relentless and consistent refusal to talk about anything.
He only ever talked to me about it once. I’d taken him to my local pub, a mile away. He grumbled the whole way because a pub did not count as “local” to him if it was more than 200 metres away. I bought him a pint of warm, country beer, which he didn’t like and we settled into the pub, which he also didn’t like, as he thought it looked like a barn. “They need some wallpaper in here…”
But perhaps the exhaustion and the booze and the country air got to him because, for the first time, he told me a little bit about the Miners’ Strike.
I’d been reading a book about it you see…
I wanted to talk about the socio-economic impact of it all – the towns that would be abandoned, the generation of men that would be cast adrift, the millions that the government put into the industry to keep it afloat.
I wanted to talk about the changing nature of government – how historically the government had seen it as their role to subsidise industry for no reason other than to keep people in jobs and to keep communities together.
For me, whose only experience is of the market led, non-interventionist style of government, this seemed a foreign concept. I wanted to talk about how that might affect our respective expectations of, and resentment towards, government, or life even.
He preferred the smaller details:
“I used to go three miles to work, go down a shaft and then walk almost back to our house underground.”
Or, “there’s no toilets down there you know.”
Or “we weren’t allowed to call anyone a scab when we went back to work – so we called them Henrys.”
“Why Henrys?”
“No idea.”
He was also convinced that there were seams and seams and seams of coal left to be mined and that the closure wasn’t a financial decision – it was a political decision designed to break the Unions.
The Barnsley crest has a miner on one side and a glassblower on the other. Not that many people would probably associate Barnsley with glassblowing – it’s from a different time. I wonder how long it will be before the mining also slips into history?
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