Ex miner, David Nixon talks about life after the strikes and Betty Cook recalls her memories as the country marks the 40th anniversary of the miners strike.
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00:00 My name is David Nixon and the colliery behind me is Barnsley, Maine.
00:05 I was one of hundreds of people, just an ordinary picket, who was fighting for their job during the miners' strike.
00:14 I literally picketed everywhere. I'd be getting up at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, sending us to the various places.
00:23 You name the colliery and the chances are I picketed at that colliery.
00:27 Right, it was, kind of understand it from this way, everybody who worked at the pit were down at the lowest common denominator.
00:36 Everybody experienced the same problems and the problems were you didn't have the clothes, food, we had food parcels, so we were always fed.
00:47 We had soup kitchens, which we went to every Monday to Friday.
00:52 But there were a lot of things that we did without. The children did without. They did without Christmas presents.
00:58 They did without the nicer things of life.
01:01 Right, I started at 18, but before that, what drew me to mining was that at 16 I saw the '72 strike and I watched it on the television.
01:11 And it just kind of, something that kind of clicked there and I was kind of curious about it.
01:16 That had finished and time went on. What happened was that kind of disappeared back into my memories.
01:24 And then in 1974 the strike came along and I would be 18 then, coming up to 18.
01:29 And that kind of revitalised my interest in what was taking place.
01:34 And it wasn't necessarily about mining, it was more about what people were doing.
01:40 And because of that, when I got to 18, when my father said there's two things I can't do. One, I don't go down the pit.
01:46 And two, I can't join the army until I'm 18.
01:50 And so when I was 18, I finished the job that I was doing, which was a stonemason.
01:54 And I went to Upfield Colony, signed on, and the first thing I actually signed was the NUM book, which was to join the NUM.
02:05 That's the first thing you should do. And that was, to me, was the proudest moment.
02:08 So I joined, I went to the Colony, not to work in the Colony, but to be part of something bigger.
02:14 To be part of that kind of solidarity, that movement where people come together and fight for what they believe.
02:22 After the pit, I went to university and I ended up working in Parliament, working in offices, etc.
02:31 It was only until then that I realised what it's like to work down the pit.
02:36 When you work down the pit, you just take it as given. The conditions, which are horrendous.
02:42 I later became branch secretary and constantly I'd have five, six hundred injury claims going off at the same time.
02:50 Not fatalities, but people who were doing it to yourself. Broken finger, broken arm, broken jaw.
02:56 So it was a hard, dangerous job, but what you did was, you worked together.
03:05 You relied on people to help you for your safety and you do exactly the same for them.
03:11 So you're protecting each other all the time.
03:14 It was only until I started working in offices that I realised that, you know, it was hard graft, it was disgusting.
03:23 Would I want my children to work down there? Not in a million years.
03:27 Like my father said, you're not going to go down until you're 18.
03:31 To be able to understand what happened to communities after the strike, you need to drive through them.
03:36 And even now, 40 years on, how much it's affected them.
03:40 And in fact, there was a survey done and the most deprived area within the UK is one area that's just not far from here.
03:51 Were a picture closed, you'd be employing 2,000 people.
03:55 That's 2,000 families. Wives, children.
04:00 The economics behind that, when that had gone, it weren't a, was it a ripple effect?
04:08 No, it wasn't. It was an absolute tsunami.
04:11 Local businesses suffered. They closed.
04:15 There was local timber, there was steel, there was mechanics.
04:22 I mean, you can go on and on and on and on.
04:24 So it was a tsunami through the economics within the country that destroyed and weakened what this country was about.
04:31 To me, the only way I can explain it is that I met this one girl when she was 30 years of age, and that was just recently,
04:41 and she knew nothing about the miners' strike.
04:44 Now, in the working class movement, this is as big as Toll Puddle miners or Peterloo, but slowly it's disappearing into the past.
04:53 It's a memory I've got. Have I ever regretted it? Never regretted one moment.
04:59 Should we have won? I wish we had. We didn't.
05:02 And to be quite honest, society has suffered the consequences since.
05:07 Hi, I'm Betty Cope, and at the moment I'm Chair of National Women Against Pit Closures.
05:13 At the moment, we're celebrating 40 years since our great miners' strike.
05:18 It brings back many, many memories.
05:21 As a miner's wife and a son that worked in the mine, I decided that I was going to be involved in the 1984-85 strike.
05:31 I'd cried during the '72-74 strike.
05:35 My husband had been a flying picket, and I was left at home with the boys, and we were cold and hungry.
05:42 But when '84 came along, I knew it was going to be a long strike,
05:47 so I changed from full-time work to part-time work so that I could become involved.
05:53 At first, we just started in our very small community at Windhill Woolacarry to organise a small soup kitchen.
06:03 I went to a trade union conference in London, and there there were some striking Kent miners raising funds for their strike down there.
06:14 And so I sort of kept going out of conference and working with the Kent miners and raising funds for them.
06:22 When I came back, I found about an organisation that had just started, Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures,
06:30 and I went along to the very first meeting, and it was there I met Ms Cargill.
06:36 I also met Jean McRindle, who was a tutor at Northern College, and Jean was supporting the women.
06:42 She was a brilliant supporter of women, and so she asked how we were coping, what we were doing,
06:49 and I explained that we were trying to fund the soup kitchen with difficulty, and she said,
06:55 "Don't worry, we have funds in the National Women Against Pit Closures movement, and we'll help out with funding for you."
07:04 We were going to be in the traditional role of mothers, wives, housewives, working in soup kitchens, supporting families,
07:12 but we knew that we could contribute a lot more, so we decided we'd start going on picket lines.
07:20 The first picket line we went on was at Silver Hill.
07:25 There were two groups of us, the Barnsley women and then a group of supporting women,
07:31 and two of our women got arrested, and two of the other women got arrested.
07:37 It was quite funny, really, because Anna had been driving their minibus, but because she'd been arrested,
07:45 she threw the keys to Jean McRindle, and Jean tried to drive the minibus, but she couldn't put it in reverse,
07:52 so every time we needed to reverse, we'd all get out and push this minibus.
07:58 We went to the police station where they'd take the women, just to stand outside to shout and demonstrate,
08:05 in hope that they'd be able to hear us.
08:08 After that, Anna and I went picketing very regularly. I used to have a bit of supper, do what I had to do at home,
08:17 and then we used to be away about five o'clock in the morning on picket lines.
08:22 It wasn't easy on the picket lines. The police were abusive, they were violent towards us.
08:29 They didn't care that we were women. They treated us just like they were men.
08:34 And so we became quite militant on the picket line.
08:40 If they told us to move and we didn't want to do it, we'd refuse.
08:45 And so we began to really become strong women, and if somebody had told me, even three months before the strike,
08:56 the things that I would be doing, I would say, "Not me, I won't do that. I won't stand up to the police."
09:03 And then I was amazed at the power that the state had.
09:08 I just had never thought or believed how much power they had, how they could control our lives,
09:15 stop us moving around, listening in to our phone calls, beating our miners for no reason, arresting for no reason.
09:24 And so one day the police invaded our community and they stopped us going in or out.
09:32 We weren't allowed to go in and out, and that riled me. I lived there, it was my community.
09:39 And so my son had a dog, and she wasn't right great, but I took her up without a lead, up to the line of the police,
09:48 and they said, "Where are you going?" And I said, "I'm going up here. I'm walking the dog."
09:53 And the language, they didn't mince the language, and, "No, you're bloody well not. Get bloody well down the road."
10:01 And I said, "No, I'm not. I live here. I pay rates to walk my dog up here, and I'm going to walk the dog."
10:08 So the policeman that was nearest to me grabbed me by the shoulder, and the dog leaped up and grabbed his arm,
10:15 and she got her jaws right round his arm, and he was trying to shake her off.
10:21 And he just said to me, "This bloody dog bites." And I just looked at him and I said,
10:26 "Exactly, officer. She's trained to do just like yours are."
10:31 And they opened up and let me through. I didn't want to go, but I had to go. I had to make a point.
10:37 And so, yeah, I suppose I became militant, I became domineering.
10:44 But during the strike, I realised that up to then I'd been a mother and a wife, and I'd never been me.
10:53 And during the strike, I learned all sorts of things. I spoke at universities and colleges and learned all sorts of things.
11:02 And I thought, my ex always told me that I was thick, that it's no good explaining things to me, I wouldn't understand.
11:10 And I suddenly realised, I'm not thick, and I've got potential.
11:15 So after the strike, I determined I was going to go into further education.
11:21 I went to Northern College for two years, determined to go back and work in the community,
11:27 but then I got slipped in the system and went to Sheffield University as a very mature student in my mid-fifties.
11:36 I'd do it all over again, I really would, but I can't run as fast now as I used to have to do.