Respect - Memories of The Miners Strike

With the death of Thatcher, I have been thinking a lot about what life was like during the 80's when I was a teenager.

In many ways, for a teenager, it was a great time to be one. Music and fashion ranged from Punk to Ska, Two-Tone to Gothic, New Romantic to Hep Cat. The wonderful thing about these fashions was that you could get much of the clothing in second-hand shops or make it. Needless to say, the sewing machine played a heavy roll in my life as I was always making or adjusting something. Being a Yorkshire lass, money was short thanks to The Thatch so we had to be creative and imaginative when trying to express ourselves through fashion.

I lived in a mining town called Mexborough (birthplace of Brian Blessed, Keith Barron and Ted Hughes), 8 miles from Doncaster and 12 miles from Sheffield. During the 80's Sheffield had given us bands such as The Human League and ABC among others, and had a great music scene. We were very proud of that.

Dad was a Miner, so The Thatch is not held in high esteem in our family. The 84-85 Miners Strike was a truly memorable time and dad stayed out on strike all the way through it. He picketed daily at Manvers, where he had worked from the age of 16 eventually becoming a Fitter and training others. Each day he would go off picketing to try to save his mine, and also attended marches and the big picket at Orgreave. Dad said that he would never want to picket other mines again after Orgreave. Dad, like most there, had always been a law abiding citizen and had never had dealings with the police. That day men and women alike, regardless of age, were beaten down by police, chased into woods to be beaten and hunted down like animals. It was frightening. I remember dad and his friends talking about it in our house when they came back, and the shock they felt at how they had been descended upon indiscriminately and in may cases without provocation.

At night dad would meet friends and they would go, in the stealth of night, to gather discarded coke slack and old railway sleepers so that we could stay warm. It made the house smell and blackened the walls, but it heated the house on cold winter nights.

In the summer we would go to the local hall to be fed in what was ultimately a soup kitchen. Russian miners and local people, in support, would send over food and clothing and I remember us picking up bags of food from the hall and excitedly unpacking it at home and trying to figure out what was in the tins with the strange writing on, and how it should be cooked. We ate quite a few tins of artichoke hearts and a lot of beans on toast! Butchers and bakers would bring meat and bread to those on the picket lines, and this helped to keep us fed too. There was much local support.

What was tremendous, too, during this time was the strength of the miners wives and the support that they gave their husbands. My mom kept our house going like clockwork so that, other than eating dinners at the community hall during summer, we barely went without. I remember that she even managed to get me a disk camera for Christmas! Dad has always said that she kept us going through that year by weaving her spendthrift magic!

At Christmas everyone contributed old toys so that children had something to open. Kind of like a miners swap shop. Dad, because he resembles Santa, would stand outside the local supermarket collecting for the miners and would play Santa Clause for the children and issue wrapped,recycled toys.

When the strike was over and the miners had been defeated, dad went back to work. It was never the same, the comradeship still existed with those who had stayed out, but for those that had gone back all ties had been broken. The atmosphere was terrible. A year later when redundancy was offered, dad took it. Shortly after we left Mexborough and moved to Bridlington in hope that employment opportunities would be better, and if they weren't...at least we had the sea and sand.

Like many of those in the North that felt abandoned by Thatcher and had their communities torn apart by her unremitting politics, there have been no tears shed in the Hobson household, and the thought of providing her with a 'commemorative' funeral has been met with incredulity. It shouldn't be a surprise though that the woman is proving to be as controversial in death as she was in life.

I'll end this my quoting Elvis Costello and simply saying Tramp The Dirt Down

Here are the real heroes in Large .