Poolsbrook MW miners strike exhibition

Derbyshire Times

The ‘Solidarity and Community’ exhibition by Derbyshire Unemployed Workers Centre (DUWC) is a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike 1984-1985. Poolsbrook MW

Transcript

00:00 My name is John Burrows and I was a full-time official in the Derbyshire area coalfield.

00:05 This is an exhibition in Poolsbrook Miners' Welfare. It's an exhibition of the 40th anniversary

00:11 of the year-long miners' strike in the country and particularly in Derbyshire. It's an event

00:17 that everybody should come and have a look at. There's an opportunity to begin to understand

00:22 at least a little bit of what life during the strike was like. I was born in Dugmonton,

00:27 about a mile over the fields. Dugmonton lads never used to come into Poolsbrook.

00:32 It wasn't a safe place for us and in fact Dugmonton wasn't a safe place for Poolsbrook lads

00:41 because they were both pit villagers built to accommodate the families and the men that worked

00:48 in the coal mines at the neighbouring collieries like Ireland Colliery, like Markham Colliery,

00:54 within a two mile radius. There were six different coal mines where people, young men,

01:08 went to work underground. Who's 11 in this room today? So there you go, in four years time the

01:15 young men at 15 years of age would have gone to work underground in a coal mine.

01:22 It wasn't a pleasant place but they went to work there for one simple reason, they got some money

01:27 for working there. It was pitch black, you could not see your hand in front of your face

01:33 and therefore you needed a lamp on your head in order to be able to do the work and there

01:38 were men in this room that spent a lifetime working underground in that sort of environment.

01:56 So

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