The Miners' Strike and Wearside: 40 Years On
2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the Miners' Strike. Sunderland Echo reporter Chris Cordner speaks to some of the Wearside folk who were involved about the events and their legacy.
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00:00 I think we all realised this wouldn't be like the other strikes where it was one or two days,
00:06 it was going to be a long term.
00:07 I think the government of the day had given the Met Police, police from outside the area,
00:14 free rein to do whatever they wanted.
00:16 Thatcher and our policies had done more damage to industrial Britain
00:20 than Hitler or the Luftwaffe did in five years of war.
00:24 This was wayside 40 years ago. A dispute which would last for a year was just beginning.
00:31 The miners strike.
00:33 Thousands of workers from the Durham coal fields walked out.
00:37 They were fighting to protect their pits, their jobs, their communities,
00:42 amid fears that collieries were facing closure.
00:46 The weeks that followed saw bitter days.
00:50 Families feared for their survival amid fuel and money shortages.
00:55 But what was it like to be at the heart of it?
00:59 It wasn't an easy, it's never an easy time to take or an easy decision to make to take strike action.
01:05 We were put in a position, we didn't instigate the strike, we didn't want the strike.
01:11 We wanted a livelihood, we wanted to protect our communities, our jobs, our families.
01:16 Those wishes were just taken away from us or would have been taken away from us.
01:20 And we had to fight.
01:21 I was the financial secretary at that time,
01:24 so I was like an understudy to the Lodge Treasurer, it was one of the three Lodge officials.
01:29 What we knew was coming, we knew that because it appeared that the government was building up to
01:38 the miners, we had a lot of steel workers and various other smaller unions, and we knew it was
01:45 going to come for us. We didn't think it would last for 11 months.
01:50 The feeling at that time was one of fear, one of dread. Will our pit be affected?
01:58 We'd been assured that ours wasn't. We were one of the super pits at Wearmouth,
02:03 that we're going to be safe. We were going to be safe for the next 100 years.
02:08 And we were told that by the government, we were told that by the National Coal Board.
02:14 But it was also that feeling that we needed to support our brothers and fellow miners in other
02:25 pits, the pits that were under threat, because some of them pits were making a profit.
02:30 So there was a mixture of feelings leading up to the strike.
02:36 We knew it was coming. We knew she had a plan, we knew that Thatcher and the government had a plan.
02:42 They'd had that plan, started that plan since 1974, the end of the '74 strike.
02:49 Lord Ridley chaired a commission or chaired a committee to negate the risk of electricity
03:01 disruption by miners, steel workers, railway workers. And the Ridley plan started in '74,
03:08 and the end product of that was '84, '85. At the end of the day, what they wanted to do was crush
03:14 the trade union movement and the National Union of Mine Workers in particular.
03:20 In '81, they backed down. There was four pits in Durham were threatened. There was other pits in
03:26 the various areas were threatened. And there was a series of spontaneous strikes took place. Pits
03:32 came, just walked out. They just walked out. And we were on the verge of a national strike at that
03:40 point. And Thatcher backed down. They backed down and said, "We'll invest more money. We'll
03:46 withdraw the closure plans." And despite the warnings from some trade union leaders,
03:52 Scargill, Magatty, Heathfield, we said, "Listen, this is a ruse. It's a ruse. They're going to
03:57 come back. They're not strong enough at the minute. The plans haven't been finalised.
04:01 They'll come back." Some of the more moderate miners' leaders thought that they saw it as a
04:08 victory. And the lads continued working as normal. And the final trigger was when they
04:17 announced the closure of Cork and Wood. They knew the Yorkshire area had a mandate
04:24 for strike action in the event of any closure being announced that hadn't been agreed previously
04:29 with the union. And they announced another list of pit closures, and that was the trigger.
04:34 And the strike started in March '84. And it was with a heavy heart. It really is. Anybody who
04:42 embarks on strike action, you're losing money. You've still got bills to pay. You've got rent
04:47 on mortgages. You've got food to buy. And your kids still need school uniforms and all the rest
04:52 of it. And it's never an easy decision. Never, never is, despite what the national press portray,
05:00 that we'll just strike up the union. Nobody wants that. You're left, we were left with no alternative.
05:06 Were you confident of success when you started? In the early days, yes, because we'd been successful
05:12 in '74 and '78. And I think that's the reason why the government was so vindictive. The fight was
05:19 as basic as to protect jobs. We weren't looking for a wage rise. We simply looked to protect jobs
05:26 and defend our communities. And the way that this particular community was pretty much dependent
05:32 on coal mining, a thousand men, and between £150 a week. And that money was coming into the
05:42 community each week. We lost that very, very quickly. We came out right at the beginning at Everton.
05:50 And we started picketing some of the open cast sites at the time that was going around in Durham
06:01 up with Tavallaw and around Bishop Auckland. And while I was away picketing, my wife,
06:09 Julie Arnaud, was at home with the kids. And I mean, I had a young family. These were young
06:14 girls with young families. But to stay loyal, I think the thing with the support group and the
06:21 women that were in it, because we were all in the same boat, the friendship, and you know,
06:27 you could, they could come and talk to us freely and vice versa. What's troubling is, oh, I'm getting
06:34 the electric bill in, I'm getting this in. But we were there to help. And we had, I mean, the miners
06:39 used to, I've got to say, the women that, and the Durham mechanics, they helped a lot of families
06:46 that was really struggling. We had a young family coming, and it was a case of trying to keep
06:51 that going. But also getting
06:58 coal for the fire. Because we soon ran out of coal. And everybody had a coal fire in those days.
07:07 And it was no different. So after picketing, I would be up on the pit hype, riddling
07:14 the waste on the pit hype to get the coal out of it. And I'd bring that back home and that would
07:21 be the fire for the next few days. The support we got from the wider community was absolutely
07:27 amazing. As an example, at that time, we still had shipyards in Sunderland. And the Austin and
07:35 Pickers guilds and British shipbuilders had gate collections and donated that money. And all that
07:42 money went to the miners' wives support group to buy food and stuff. Didn't finance the picketing
07:48 or anything like that. And Rolls-Royce did the same. There was lots and lots of people,
07:56 pensioners coming in here once a week when they cashed their pension to give us a couple of quid
08:01 towards the strike fund. When it was the first meeting we had, it was Florence Anderson and me
08:07 went to see him. It was to see if he's in the area of mines. And it was to meet them to see
08:14 how they were starting their kitchens up. And we went there, we got a lot of information.
08:19 And so what we did, we had initial meeting down at the old welfare and we got volunteers to help us
08:28 start the kitchen. But Florence was a Tyne and Wear councillor. And she says, right,
08:34 we're going to have a support group, but I want it run properly. So what she said, we have to
08:40 have a chair, vice chair, treasurer. So we had that from the start. I don't think many support
08:47 groups did, but with her expertise, we always run it like as an official support group. But when we,
08:56 Florence, I and Heather went to welfare, the union meeting was on, we were told to wait outside.
09:01 And we sat on the stairs till they were finished talking. And then NUM official came out and says,
09:07 right, we want, I didn't, it was them, Florence. We want to do a kitchen and other things. And we
09:14 want the backing of the NUM. Initially, I think they were a bit wary about it. Well, what does
09:20 women want to get involved for? I think we all realised this wouldn't be like the other strikes
09:27 where it was one or two days, it was going to be a long term. Without the women, we couldn't have
09:32 endured 12 months. We couldn't have lasted 12 months. They did an absolutely fantastic job.
09:37 And these buying lines were women who never supported public meetings. They never stood
09:42 in front of a crowd talking to people before. There were the wives, girlfriends, mothers,
09:48 sisters, aunts of miners, and in some cases of other people. And they banded together and they
09:56 showed their organisational skills. And by God, they were a formidable bunch.
10:01 There were grandmas, I mean, we're grandmas now, but these were miners, you know, grandmas.
10:08 They did the cooking. It was mince and dumplings. It was broth. It was
10:11 everyday food that you would get at home. And this was, was it every day of the week?
10:16 Every day. And how many were you cooking for?
10:18 Well, sometimes there were two and three sittings. So it could be the hundreds. And this was
10:26 happening all the time. Well, what happened as well is the children were getting free meals at
10:32 school. Then anyway, it ended up some children weren't having the free school meals, they were
10:37 coming to welfare at dinnertime. And we were feeding them as well, but their families coming
10:42 down. But my role was, we found out that the single miners did not receive anything. And some
10:51 of these single miners were the main wage earners in that house. So there was me and Jean Lamb,
11:01 we were volunteered to do food parcels. So we used to, we got the welfare to give us
11:08 permission to go to the cash and carries. We would do food parcels every week, every week of the
11:15 strike to single miners and hardship parcels as well, when we found out. So that was our role.
11:24 I wasn't involved in the kitchen, but we were up and down all, we were downstairs in a little
11:30 back room doing the parcels. And they were doing the meals upstairs. But once, right, we did basics,
11:39 eggs, potatoes, beans, probably a tin meats. And these were, we used to try and vary them.
11:47 But there were basics that you knew that you could use every day. If the lads didn't come
11:55 and pick them up, we would actually, you know, get them to them.
12:02 You were there most of the time doing the picking. What do you remember about that part of it, you
12:10 know, sort of being outside the pits and making your point and presumably as it went on, perhaps
12:19 a bit more bitter? It became, it became very bitter. There was a point where the local police,
12:30 Northumbria police, were pretty much replaced by Met police. They were particularly violent
12:36 and nasty, really nasty. And at that point, it was, you know, it got quite serious.
12:48 Why do you think that was?
12:49 I think the government of the day had given the Met police, police from outside the area,
12:59 free rein to do whatever they wanted. I remember the picking lines in some cases being very,
13:05 very violent. I remember them being, at first, at the very beginning, it was
13:10 joyful enough. It was the local copper, they would be standing there watching you and you'd
13:17 be on your picking line. There wasn't anything going on really. And it was quite cordial.
13:22 And then as time went on, that mood changed and you saw police being drafted in from places like
13:28 Leicester, from the Met and things like that. And it changed. It became a lot more sinister,
13:33 a lot more violent, a lot more authoritarian. It was a police state, there's no doubt about that.
13:40 And the forces of the British state came out to the maximum to defeat the miners.
13:47 An example of that is Orgreave. Orgreave was, when we arrived there, it was set up like
13:55 Napoleonic battlefield. I'm convinced it was a trap. We were held back in Sheffield
14:01 for two hours before they allowed us to go to Orgreave. This is coaches and men. And then we
14:06 got there, it was just set up for a place on horseback and dogs and thousands of police.
14:12 The video evidence was all there. And the big men who were in jeans and t-shirts.
14:20 It's a big loss to the shops locally and the other businesses that comes along with that,
14:29 with families. And it was all the debt that you had as well, because people bought cars,
14:36 televisions, videos at the time, all on HP. So quite often they would be landed with a
14:44 bailiff or somebody knocking at the door wanting money. We personally did,
14:51 we wrote to everybody how we owed money and told them there was no more money until I started work.
14:58 And I've got to say, none of them ever bothered us during the strike. Some of them had bad
15:04 reputations now. The Provy just stopped it and then restarted it when we went back to work after
15:11 12 months. It didn't add anything on and neither did Obank, the NatWest at the time. And it was
15:21 like a big, I don't know, it was like a big thank you for them at the end of the strike, because
15:29 a lot of lads had their televisions and videos confiscated. We got donations from all over. I've
15:35 got donations, all the unions would drop things in. What got me is one day we had this man come
15:43 knocking in and it was from the power stations and he popped a check in. And that used to happen
15:50 all the time. And people would just pop in, £10, £20 and these were other people, people living in
15:58 Hatton. But a lot of the unions sent them to the support group. They didn't go to the unions,
16:05 they came directly to the support. We had checks for £100, checks for £20 and it's surprising how
16:12 many. And I was just, I've been having a look at some of my things and it's surprising how it
16:18 mounted up. Our butchers, sadly the butchers no longer, would get the meat a bit cheaper.
16:25 And on a Friday when it was fish and chips or whatever it was, assuming it was chips,
16:30 the local fish shop did the chips for us and the trays were carried across to the welfare.
16:37 - Do you think it was a community that realised this was going to be an important issue that
16:42 defined that area? - I really did because every other person worked at the pit around here. It
16:49 was the main employee apart from Pearsons, the builders. But everybody, I didn't, all along
16:58 these streets where I live now, I would say every other house, the lad who lived next door to me was
17:03 single and you know that was his income. Another one round in the corner, he was very shy, wouldn't
17:13 come down to welfare at all. And Bob persuaded him to come down and he came every day after that.
17:22 It was just, he kept himself to himself, he went to work, he went home. So you know,
17:29 I think because we're a community and we've always been a community, you know everybody.
17:34 - Someone they didn't know personally, who helped out, was none other than Bruce Springsteen.
17:41 - I was at Durham in the mechanics office and I answered it, I've got to say she was absolutely
17:49 phenomenal and she says, look, she says, Bruce Springsteen has been in touch with the support,
17:54 Durham area support groups and he wants to invite some women down to his concert at St.
18:01 James's Park. And when we went there, we got seats were great right near there, you know,
18:05 you could see him and everything. And I've got to admit, I wasn't a, you know, I wasn't,
18:10 I knew about Bruce Springsteen but I didn't actually, you know, knew his music. But then
18:19 we, they were asked to meet him backstage and he handed the cheque and we couldn't, ten thousand
18:27 dollars. And it was, he did one for us and one for Northumberland. And you don't think somebody
18:36 who's living in America or a very good career would do something like that. But it's surprising
18:43 how many celebrities actually did support the miners. I've become very good friends with Mike
18:52 Elliott locally, Paul Weller, he's another one, Alan Hull as well. I mean, one day I was sitting
18:59 at Durham Mechanics Office, it was Ann Siddiq, me, Mike Elliott, you know, Linda's Bob's sitting
19:10 there, you know, he's there and I'm sitting there looking around, I thought, 'E, what am I doing?'
19:15 And it was a really difficult time for everybody. It wasn't just the pickets.
19:23 Oh, I had a lovely time. I can tell you, it wasn't a lovely time. It was quite horrendous at times and
19:31 very emotional, I'll put it that way.
19:36 How long would you be picking the ball per session?
19:40 The open cast were open for eight hours and we would land there probably before they started.
19:47 And we would be there for most of the day, trying to talk the wagon drivers not to go in.
19:53 But you had a feeling for, between successors and some of the operators, that they would tell us,
20:06 'If you come there, our wagons will turn away. If you're not there, our wagons will go in.'
20:11 So at those places, we always made sure there was at least a half a dozen lads there.
20:17 And our wagons invariably would do that. And it was mainly in the west of Durham where we got that
20:27 sort of support from the quarry owners.
20:30 It got more challenging as time went on. It becomes part of the norm. There was still a
20:36 hell of a lot of support from rank and file people, from the ordinary people in the street.
20:43 There was still support. I think lots of them realised the implications of these pits closing.
20:50 The downside of that was, and the negative side was, that some people would jilt into
20:57 believing the likes of where your mouth was safe. So we'd say, 'It can't work. You've got plenty of
21:02 time to work.' We knew that was untrue. We knew that was untrue. They didn't want the Durham
21:07 Coalfield. They didn't want the Scotland Coalfield. They didn't want the South Wales Coalfield or the
21:12 Kent Coalfield. They wanted to concentrate production in the soaper pits in the Midlands
21:16 and parts of Yorkshire. And that was going to be the end of it.
21:20 It was a lot worse at the end of the day than we envisaged. We thought we'd have some pits left.
21:26 We haven't got any left now.
21:27 There's lots of families who were driven to absolute desperation. In the end,
21:32 some lads went back to work a week or two before the end of the strike.
21:38 It wasn't because they disagreed with the strike. It was desperation.
21:42 Feed the families. The homes were at risk. I think their actions should be understood.
21:51 I don't think you realise the full extent at the time when you live and throw it.
21:56 It's when you've got time to reflect on it. We knew it was important because we knew we were
22:00 fighting for our lives. We were fighting for our lives. We were fighting for our jobs,
22:04 for our communities, for our families, for a whole way of life. We knew that. I knew that
22:09 very, very well. I knew they intended to destroy it. But the argument that I heard it time and time
22:20 again, it was in the press, it was on the television, on the radio. So, you know, they're
22:23 just hell-bent on bringing the government down. That was never the intention. If that had been a
22:28 consequence of us winning, which I suspect it may well have been, I would have welcomed that.
22:35 But that wasn't the reason we were on strike. It wasn't about money. It wasn't about pain
22:40 conditions. It was about the future of a whole industry. And I think as times went on,
22:47 our opposition was being vindicated. I fully supported the strike and everything that went
22:56 on there. I support that. I support striking mines. I was one of them. I was on the picking
23:02 lines with them, went to jail with them, got arrested with them. So we did all that.
23:07 And it was a bitter pill to swallow when we walked back. I just felt dejected that we hadn't
23:16 went back on our terms. We'd went back, well, we did. We went back on our terms. But it wasn't
23:22 a victory. It wasn't a victory. I suppose we can claim a moral victory now. We can claim,
23:28 you know, the moral high ground because we were proven to be right. Everything was said.
23:33 Everything the union said was proven to be correct. We've said, you know, from the day
23:39 we went back to work, it was, that wasn't a happy bunny. It was over with. Didn't feel
23:48 that we'd achieved our aims and objectives that we started off with 12 months previously.
23:54 But there was a great camaraderie.
23:59 As I got towards the end, I mean, it was really hard. Winter was coming, you know, in again.
24:09 I think we realised probably the week before they went back, things was going to happen.
24:17 And sadly, we knew one lad who went back the day before the strike was called off.
24:25 It's hard because he would be classed as the same as any other returning miner, you know.
24:33 It was hard. But we also, the first miner that crossed the picker line up at Everton,
24:39 actually didn't come from Hettin. He came from Brandon. He was one of the travelling miners.
24:44 And there was quite a few went back, but not the majority went back.
24:49 In my own mind, I knew the fight wasn't over. It was just, we were going to be back at work.
24:54 And it would be a struggle because we knew, we knew the plans were to close all the pits
25:03 down. Once that would clear, a victory over the miners, we knew it was the beginning of the end
25:10 for the, certainly in some of the areas, that it was the beginning of the end for the coal industry.
25:16 And they started straight away. Those pits, you know, Harington went straight away and those
25:21 lakes of Satterston and then they'll just bump, bump, bump, pit after pit after pit after pit,
25:25 being closed. The Porricollery Review procedure in place, where it would appeal the decision.
25:33 The pits that went through that, even if they got a successful outcome, they still closed the pits.
25:40 It was an exercise, it was a sham, an absolute sham. Within, you know, within 30 years,
25:46 there wasn't a pit left. It was mixed emotions, but the thing is, we weren't just,
25:51 yes, we fight to save the pit and we carried on fighting because Epling was one of the ones that
25:56 was, you know, due for closure. We were fighting for a community. We weren't just fighting for
26:02 the pit. We were fighting for a community because at the time where the strike was finishing,
26:10 there was rumours going round, there was another, Pearsons the builders,
26:16 they went out, they closed. Pearsons went into liquidation and they closed. So there was two
26:22 major employees of Hettin, went just like that, but nothing put in its place.
26:28 It was eight years, eight and a half years, and Weymouth was gone. We're getting a profit,
26:35 170 odd million tonnes sterilised under the North Sea and already marketed for the coal. It was good
26:41 coal, good quality coal that they incidentally used to use at the send down to Selby to sweeten
26:47 their coal to make their, give their coal a higher calorific value. Wasn't any reason on earth to
26:54 close it. None at all. It was just pure vindictiveness. Last coal field in, last coal mining
27:01 in the Durham coal field. And it was, that was an absolute tragedy and they didn't waste much
27:09 time in blowing the towers down. You know, we're not going to have any, we're not going to have any
27:16 reminders of our industrial past. They did the same when they closed the shipyards,
27:20 dynamite, they blew it all up. Didn't want any trace of that. And I still maintain that
27:29 the closure of Weymouth and then the closure of the, you know, we'd had the closure of the
27:35 shipyards about four years before that on the way up. Thatcher and our policies had done more damage
27:42 to industrial Britain than Hitler or the Luftwaffe did in five years of war. They absolutely
27:48 devastated these communities. It almost, now when I look back at it, it feels like we were profits.
27:55 We knew what was going to happen, but we felt it stopped happening. It's a little bit like saying
27:59 it's going to rain tomorrow. You're nearly right, we're going to stop the rain. And so we were right
28:06 in everything we predicted would happen. And the government of the day, Thatcher, was lying,
28:14 lying to the British public. She was saying, no, no, there's nothing we can do, we must close the
28:18 pit. And we threw 150,000 men out of work in a decade. My point of view is that the place started
28:29 to decline. There was no work, so a lot of the young people moved out. There was labour and empty
28:35 houses, colliery houses, a lot of colliery houses here in Hatton. We moved into one because we
28:42 couldn't afford the council rent with the debt that we'd built up over the, through the strike.
28:47 And we moved into a colliery house because the rent was seven and six in the old days.
28:57 That was the rent for the week. And there wasn't any central heating in the house, but there was a
29:03 big fire and a triplex oven. So it was one of these things where people moved out, people that were
29:14 coming in, were coming in from the landlords or from outsiders. Many of them had social problems,
29:24 put it that way. And gradually it all downloaded and then drugs came onto the scene
29:33 and house break-ins and everything else that was happening. We went,
29:41 I went to Europe, to the European Parliament. It was a meeting of Calfield areas when I was a
29:48 councillor in the, it would be the late 90s, to say what we could do around Europe about the
29:56 coal mining communities because of the implosion of the coal-powered fire stations all closing
30:04 down right across the world. And we heard from Russia, Ukraine, France, Germany, Belgium,
30:16 I think it was Belgium, I was in Belgium or Holland, had collieries. And all of them
30:23 had the same story. We thought we were unique here, where all these colliery villages were
30:30 just dying on their feet. It was across the whole of Europe. And I was like,
30:37 I was like taken back by it all. There was people committing suicide, there was people,
30:44 there was all kinds of hardship. There was unimaginable hardship in some cases.
30:49 And that was hard. That was hard because you still saw people paying debts off years and years later.
30:57 Looking back, do you think you were right in the actions that you took?
31:00 I don't think we could have done anything else. I really don't. And if we hadn't,
31:06 it would have happened over a shorter period of time.
31:09 Because of course, I think Harry Dunne and others were on the short list.
31:13 Yeah, Evelyn lasted a year after the strike. Yeah, it was gone.
31:16 And it's worth mentioning, before the strike, most pits lost about a third of the workforce
31:25 long before the strikes. Typically, a pit would have 1500 men. That went down to,
31:31 Evelyn went down to 1000 men. So the figures, even 150,000 men lost their jobs. If you include them,
31:40 those jobs that were lost while they were running the pits, then...
31:42 Have the communities like Evelton really recovered since then, 14 years on?
31:50 No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think if you look at the town centre,
32:00 the shops we've lost, the clubs we've lost, the pubs we've lost, the banks we've lost.
32:09 And giving you an indication of the health of the local economy, we don't have a bank,
32:14 we have two bench shops, which is usually an indication of a failing economy. When you don't
32:20 have a bank, we have bench shops. Personally, I think, regardless of whether you believe in
32:28 the strike or not, I always think it's a massive waste of people's lives. One of the characteristics
32:39 most miners have is their ability to overcome nature and difficulties.
32:45 Those skills would have been directly transferable into major
32:55 projects, road building, rail building, infrastructure projects, and the government
33:03 chose just to throw people in the scrap heap. No help whatsoever. Just everything ended.
33:10 Miners will always accept pit closures. Always. I mean, you just don't have a cope.
33:20 We have 300 million years worth of coal to shoot here. It would have been different pits
33:28 than we could have gone on. The government chose to go for the dash for gas, which
33:35 will hopefully be failing and causing problems now. We had energy security, and now we don't.
33:42 You never pay the price for it. I think the whole world is realising, the whole country's realising
33:48 now we've gone backwards. We've really gone backwards. When I left school, I got what we
33:55 were told was a job for life. When people needed a house or a home, you put your name down for
34:02 either a covey house or a council house, and within weeks you would get that. And they were
34:07 decent quality homes. Today, a young person leaving school, get a job at COSTA,
34:14 can't afford a mortgage, can't afford to go to university. It's not a better place.
34:20 Not a better place. Our young people have lost hope. There's no hope.
34:26 That's a shame of it all. Once the coal re-went, we knew that there would be a problem with
34:33 employment. There is its own social impact on everybody in the area, whether you're working
34:40 or not. There's a social impact for them to appear, because we all live here in the same community.
34:46 The impact of closing everywhere down was crazy. All I had to do was to get some other sort of
34:59 investment jobs into those villages, or near the villages, where they could travel now,
35:06 in order to keep the community afloat. It never happened. I mean,
35:12 we closed our colliery, moved the workforce to Merton, we closed Merton and moved that
35:20 workforce to Vientampus. And that was going on all the time. There was nothing coming in to replace
35:28 all those jobs. There was a thousand jobs lost at the colliery. There must have been 500 lost
35:35 when Pearsons the builders in Hetten closed. That was 1500 jobs gone out of our area.
35:41 What's the cost of that? What's the cost of that? The social cost is even bigger.
35:49 [Music]