Strike
The last British miners' strike began on this day in 1984. Forty years ago. My heart was with those miners and their communities then and so it remains. We will not forget. My mother was born in a South Yorkshire coal mining village in 1921. Her father was a coal miner before World War One and her maternal grandfather was a coal miner all his working life, like his father before him. You might say that it was on the backs of British coal miners that The British Empire was built. They dug the coal that powered industry, the railways and the steamships that fanned out across the globe - servicing the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. It was not the landed gentry or the descendants of Norman invaders who did it but hard-working men who sweated in darkness and risked their lives for coal. King Coal as they called it. My first teaching job after leaving university was at Dinnington, a coal mining village here in South Yorkshire. Back then the l...