‘My grandfather survived Dunkirk – but it was the mines that got him’
LISA Mckenzie’s grandfather never wanted to be a miner. Aged just 16, he joined the British Army instead and was soon dispatched to India just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
“The limitations of working class men in this area meant there were two or three things you could do. One was to go down the mines and another was to join the British Army,” Dr Mckenzie says.
Tragically, the short-lived nature of this military career due to an injury at Dunkirk meant Dr Mckenzie’s grandfather ended up down the pit anyway – where he died aged just 58 from the pit dust on his lungs.
“He’d survived Dunkirk but it was the mines that got him,” says Dr Mckenzie, reflecting on the impact of the coal industry’s loss on Nottinghamshire 40 years since the beginning of the miners’ strike.
Now living in Bestwood Village and working as a senior lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire,
Dr Mckenzie says her father made the decision to go on strike on her 16th birthday.
It was a fight the whole family got behind, despite the dangers posed by a job down the mines.
Dr Mckenzie says: “Miners didn’t live much over 60 and my dad says now that the closure of the pits has probably given him 10 or 12 extra years, but it’s always swings and roundabout with class in Britain.
“These were secure jobs and jobs that would provide for a family and some sort of decent standard of living. That’s now gone.
“A full-time job on minimum wage now in this area will not buy you a house or provide you with decent living standards.”
Recalling her 16th birthday, Dr Mckenzie says she was awoken by the sound of a group of men talking in the kitchen. Initially believing the commotion was connected to her milestone birthday, the teenage Lisa soon discovered it was her father and his fellow miners discussing their next steps after having just made the decision to go out on strike.
Ian Macleod, now 76, worked at Silverhill Colliery in Ashfield, having previously been based at Gedling Colliery.
Living on the Carsic estate in Sutton, it was a job that Mr Macleod’s entire family felt a deep connection with.
Dr Mckenzie says: “Everybody’s dad worked at the pit and when we were playing out on the streets, you knew if somebody’s dad was working on nights because they’d say ‘move away from that window’. “The whole area moved with the daily rhythms of the mining industry. The mining was just the star of the show.” Dr Mckenzie, now 55, had been due to leave school just months after the miners’ strike began, but the importance of the industrial dispute meant that she did not return after it started. Initially spending her time helping mum Gwen Macleod with her Ashfield Women Against Pit Closures campaign, Dr Mckenzie went on to work at the Pretty Polly hosiery factory in Sutton. The company’s flagship Unwin Road factory eventually closed in 2005 but in Dr Mckenzie’s early working life it paid her a wage of around £17 a week. Tight finances meant that, of this money, she would give £7 to her family and keep the remaining £10. Uses for her wages at that time included looking out for her fellow family members, having saved up for weeks one Christmas to make sure her sister got the Cabbage Patch doll she desperately wanted, but which her mum and dad would have been unable to afford.
As well as helping her mum with campaigning, Dr Mckenzie’s early time away from school was also spent working at a soup kitchen set up to support families during the strike, an example of the community spirit with which she says mining communities were bound together.
“It wasn’t just the pit, it was all the community and the sports clubs built around that.
“Each pit had their own football club, darts team, skittles – the area depended on these and when the pits closed, the whole area lost that social network,” says Dr Mckenzie, who also fondly recalls holidays at the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp in Skegness, which closed in the 1990s.
The end of the miners’ strike in 1985 was soon followed by the closure of the Silverhill colliery in 1993.
Both the Silverhill and Teversal pits stood on the area now known as Silverhill Wood, a country park. The beginning of the end of Nottinghamshire coal mining saw Dr Mckenzie’s father getting a job as a driver in Mansfield, from which he was made redundant around two to three years later. “He did what a lot of men did, just sort of battened down the hatches and lived very frugally,” Dr Mckenzie says.
Although divisiveness still remains between those who went on strike and those who worked in 1984, Dr Mckenzie says the debate now has to be one which both sides can agree on, adding: “The big issue for me is what happened to us after the mines closed, which has been devastating for people that were down the pits and then their offspring. It’s the same families over and over again suffering.
“You get 10 or 15 years and then it’s redundancy or some sort of change and that’s what you see in de-industrialised areas like Nottinghamshire. I understand why people cling on to that nostalgia because what if it’s not nostalgia? What if it really was just better then?”
The whole area moved with the daily rhythms of the mining industry Dr Lisa Mckenzie