What's people's overiding memory of the strile?

Ahhhh

i disagree with you, therefore you have greater principles than me! That's logical.

BTW. Where have i ever said postive things about the MET! You're making it up to back your arguments.

 

if you drive round parts of Dodworth, kendray, Lundwood, Darton, Kexboro, Mapp you see the exact oppositte. I'd say that Barnsley is a dying town to be honest. High levels of unemployment, Benefit claimants and has high numbers of people suffering from various addictions outside of smoking compared to other towns nevermind one of the highest rates of teen mums in the uk.

 

The striking miner who went in the local shop

I was delivering to the shop and he came in and bought one egg and an oxo cube the shop owner said it was for his dinner.
Thatcher rot in hell

 

You're beginning to depress me

My point is that it was the same in those days as well, as far as I can remember, but without the wealth which I believe today balances it somewhat. I totally agree that it can seem like that if you drive round some of those areas you mention.

I suppose I have rose coloured glasses - I remember thinking the same as what you have posted when I made my decision to go and live in Germany.

Most towns and cities can point to affluent and deprived areas, it is, in my opinion, the balance that has changed. If you go into the town on a week-end evening and see the dosh being splashed around, there is some money somewhere.

Anyway, Donny and Wednesday lost so I feel better now.

 

Being abused for declining to divvy up tinned food for miners

by patronising middle class students & never worked a day yummy mummies outside the Leeds Hospital where I was a student nurse.

I think that after they said 'How would you understand the deprivation they are going through being a spoilt little nurse' they were grateful to they survived with their skins in tact.

You may be able to take a lass outta Tarn but you can't take Tarn outta the lass.

I declined cos I came home 2 days a week n did my bit here - on the ground

 

No there isn't. Barnsley as a whole is a very poor town. It also has high numbers of commuters to bigger locations such as Wakefield, Sheffield, Leeds, Doncaster and Manchester where the money is rather than having internal wealth as a town.

 

RE: Hang on a minute

The town of Barnsley has not recovered and never will. i believe that many of the people who use benefits as their source of income would be down the pits if they were open. I don't believe the town would have the epidemic proportions of heroin and other drug addiction if the pits were open. When you see statistics on the worse towns & cities for addicts Barnsley is always in the top ten, then when you look at the other towns that make the list they all too were once mining towns so there must be some common ground between pit closures and the depression it brought to the areas and then drug problems.

As for the pits re-opening it's a pity the old bitch won't still be alive to see it happen.

 

Well yes and no

There are loads of very rich people in Barnsley, far more than 25 years ago, in my opinion.

But I totally agree with your key phrase "on the whole". On the whole Barnsley is a very poor town, although I would say that people who commute to surrounding towns and cities and earn their money there are actually contributing to the wealth of Barnsley even if they don't work there.

I can't really argue with you as I have no facts and figures to back it up - it's just a gut feeling, that's all, based on people I meet.

 

I was a young teenager at the time of the strike. i remember getting upset when my Mum and Dad used to argue about my Dad going picketting. My Mum did not want him to go as she knew what the police were capable of. Most of the time she managed to stop him by turning the alarm off before it woke him so he missed his lift to go!

 

I moved out of Barnsey three years ago and it is the best thing that I have ever done and I do not see me ever moving back on a full time basis. When i go back to games, see family looking at the town depresses me. Shops are closing replaced by £99 worlds, cheap boozers or a charity shop. Thats not wealth.

 

The town of Barnsley is a wonderful place

And has recovered very well, in my opinion. There are FAR worse places.

I was once on a business trip to Pittsburg USA. Pittsburg is a city in the USA which suffered through pit closures in a similar way to Barnsley. I and several colleagues were invited there (at my own cost I might add) to try to explain to them how to rebuild a town after the devastating effect of pit closures. The people of Pittsburgh were able to move on and rebuild their economy, because there didn't seem to be any political issues behind the closures. Barnsley is still trying but is held back by the bitter memories (rightfully) of the devastating attack on the miners by Thatcher.

Hamburg is a very affluent city in Germany, and one of the richest in the world. It also has a massive problem with heroin and cocaine. I don't believe that drug addicts have their habit because there isn't a convenient pit nearby. Manchester, Glasgow, London also have massive drug problems - I just don't see the connection with mining.

I agree with you about benefits though - maybe there would be less on benefits if the "darn 't pit" option was still open.

 

Different people, different views

I moved out of the town at a similar time to you (2004) and it was the worst thing I ever did. Stuck it for 3 years, then came back. Can't see me ever leaving again. I enjoy every minute of my life in Barnsley.

I agree with just about everything you say apart from that. Barnsley town is **** for shopping as you point out. I only disagree with you on one point - that there are loads of rich people in the town. I think there are, you think there aren't. Neither of us knows for sure.

 

What a lovely story!

That's lightened things up a bit

 

A person broke a small window in the side of my aged mothers house and climbed into the living room. My mother was in bed and was awakened by this person, who, to disguise himself, had taken a pair of my mother's knickers off the clothes horse in the kitchen, poked two holes in them and put them over his head. My mother had no money so he stole half a bottle of whisky and went on his way after threatening to set her on fire with the use of a cigarette lighter that he kept lighting. My mother didn't report it to the police as she was too embarrassed regarding the knickers incident.

 

the miners should have known better

having seen what her american henchman macgregor did to the british steel unions by luring them into a strike, you would have thought Arthur would have smelled something fishy when Macgregor immediately moved on to the NCB. Instead he walked straight into Maggies trap.

At the end of the day her ultimate goal was to remove the unions power (lets face it they were rampant in the 70's) and if that meant losing 2 of britains main industries, (coal and steel) and their surrounding communities it was a sacrafice worth making. Had those communities been in the Tory heartlands I'm not sure she would have taken the same route but as they were in stauch Labour strongholds she didn't give a ****.

 

"Drift" mining coal, "bell pit" mining coal

picking coal. darn back of gilroyd, dove cliff, seam at the back of Barnsley fire station blah blah blah. Just finished school that summer so nowt much to do. sweating cobs riddling tons of coal. Mi fatha's Fiat crammed to the rafters with sacks of the stuff. Flogging it for a couple of quid a sack to keep a family of 5 of us in snap. Pride that we got through it, bitterness at the politicians, press, police etc that attempted to destroy us by whatever underhand means they could employ.

 

RE: And done what exactly though

they had two options really, neither of which were palatable

A) Stand and fight and face an undetermined period of struggle and strife before ultimately being defeated

or

B) give in and take the redundo straight away


You can't fight the weight of the government I'm afraid, if the determination is there. The unions ruled the previous Labour governments and she was determined to break them. A no win situation for the miners I'm afraid

 

They way I saw it, the strike was kicked off because the National Coal Board (heavily subsidised by the government) wanted to close 20 un-economical pits.

What Arthur Scargill achieved by the year long strike, was to ensure that almost all (but a few) pits became un-economical. Pits that would have had many more years of profitable coal to extract, ended up closing because they'd became un-save / flooded / un-workable.

British Coal, who was at the time the equivalent of British Leyland was being heavily subsided by the government (this would now be considered illegal under european trade laws) and was massively uncompetitive. They had to do something as the power generating companies (British Coals main customer) were replacing their coal power stations with cheaper gas powered ones or buying in cheaper coal from across Europe.

It's not like we all still had coal fires in our homes back then did we? We were also guilty of switching to the cheaper / cleaner gas.

Mrs Thatcher may have had it in for the unions, but Arthur Scargill played a massive part in bringing an early closure to many, many pits.

Memories - I remember that taxi driver that got killed when a lump of concrete got dropped onto his car from a motorway bridge (N)