David Nixon and Betty Cook talk about the Miners strike for the 40th anniversary

Yorkshire Post

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.

Transcript

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.

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