Miners' Welfare

It was the night before my meeting with the Miners’ Welfare Committee Men, when I visited my Nan in her council bungalow kept warm with a real coal fire.

She will be 97 next week and is busy learning how to use a DVD player. To help her my mum puts ‘first aid’ plasters over the buttons so she can see how to “eject”, “pause”, and “play”. On the wall is a photograph of my granddad he is very hansom and "Nanny Buff", as we fondly call her is very proud of this.

I have mixed feeling about my Granddad, he was a hard man, he boozed, gambled and smoked a pipe. He had strange Victorian ethics when it came to the treatment of woman because of this my mum the opportunity to study at college and become a teacher.

A union man, my Granddad marched under a banner that declared "workers of the world unite" and an "8-hour day" for all. He was a coalface worker on good wages but his family sore little of this and lived a very poor life. Nan scrubbed floors, knowing her husbands earnings where drank, smoked or gambled a way. Mum blanked most of her childhood years.

Before my grandfather died he laid in a hospital bed with broken ribs from a pit accident that happened 20 years earlier. He confessed on his deathbed his love for Nanny Buff. My mother described that she never knew he was able to express his emotions in that way. He was a man whom express with feeling through violence and anger. She doesn’t talk about him very often.

Today, I sat round an old oak table with ex miners from forty years too eighty. The spirit of mining unites us, through our culture we have our common ground.

Around the oak polished table the faces around me look bored and grey. The once proud pillar to the community and its industry, this building is now a tomb housing our voiceless working class heroes. I do my thing, get out my lap top and talk about wanting to organise a party for the strike the mood shifts a little as I talk about London and bring people together to honour the strike. We set a date for the 31st 2009, 25 years since the Strike of 1984.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/southyorkshire/content/articles/2009/07/08/rachel_horne_miners_welfare_feature.shtml