Miners Strike Quotes & Sayings

The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal — Michael Foot

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

Arthur Scargill's leadership of the miners' strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. He will have destroyed the N.U.M. as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader. — Jimmy Reid

I didn't call for a ballot at the start of the miners' strike in 1984. I'll regret that until my dying day. — Neil Kinnock

When the news of the Scottish find reached Kaniere, forty or fifty miners who had been toiling there for weeks for poor returns decided to cut their losses, buy new licences and make for Kokatahi. In the time that it took them to get to the warden's office at Hokitika and back, the Scottish strike had been talked up into a 'homeward bounder': a discovery so huge that it would change men's lives at a stroke and enable them to return home as rich men. They came up the river in pairs and groups. They — Rose Tremain

The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing. — Terry Teachout

The strike of the miners in Arizona was one of the most remarkable strikes in the history of the American labor movement. Its peaceful character, its successful outcome, were due to that most remarkable character, Governor Hunt. — Mary Harris Jones

My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners. — Agnes Smedley

Sometimes we need enemies more than we need friends. Mandy Walker — Laura Wilkinson