I started at Swannington school in September 1924 at the age of four and I remember being dragged there, protesting and unwilling, by my sister and her friends as the school bell clanged out its demanding call. My clearest early memories, however, are from the coal strike of 1926. My father was a coal miner as were the majority of men who lived in Swannington at that time. Working conditions in coal mines are almost of necessity bad; at that time seams as low as eighteen inches, unstable rock formations above the coal, and the constant threat of water were common. So it is little wonder that the colliers were militant when the owners wanted to increase the length of the daily shift and decrease wages.

As all cooking was done on open fires it was necessary to find alternative sources of fuel when coal stocks ran out. Wyggeston Hospital was the main land owner in Swannington and it was to the them that application was made to cut down a tree which I assume was either dead or dying. I did not actually witness the felling of the tree but went with my mother to take my father's tea when the men were engaged in cutting up the timber. Once the wood had been used up it was decided, using local knowledge, to sink a shaft in search of what was termed "out-crop" coal which had been mined in the area from as early as the thirteenth century. The chosen site was at the bottom of my maternal granny's garden, near the brook. Subsequently another shaft was sunk higher up the garden as the coal was being extracted on the "bell pit" principle for the double reason that the seam was shallow and there was no way of making the roof safe to travel any distance underground.

One morning I went with my father up Big Lane to No. 3 where other miners had driven a footrill into the old pit bank in search of coal. There were people in the village who were not directly involved in the mining industry and their standard of life was unaffected. Some of these did try to ameliorate the suffering of the children by providing teas occasionally in the Wesleyan schoolroom and others ran a soup kitchen in the old golf pavilion behind Railway Terrace. We as a family were better off than most because my paternal grandparents who lived at Coleorton had three acres, part of which was a large vegetable garden together with an orchard and soft fruit trees. They also kept a pig, chickens and rabbits. However, my father insisted that we should do as other children did and we queued for soup. I remember that on occasion tea was provided under the auspices of the landlord of the Station Inn. An incident which we children found tremendously exciting, but which in later years has caused me feelings of a very different nature, was when we "tinpanned" a blackleg miner from Swannington station to his home at Sinope.

This must be considered in the context of the times; if some men drifted back to work it would be the thin end of the wedge, the solid front would be broken and all the hardship and deprivation would have been for nothing, as indeed it proved to be. As the train drew into the station the miner, returning from Moira colliery, saw lined up a motley crowd of adults and children with tin cans, galvanised baths and tubs, and anything with which to make a noise (my father had procured some Nuttalls mintoes tins and sticks with which to beat them). The miner had to walk to his home to a cacophany of noise, with the police in attendance to keep a semblance of order. It was a salutary lesson and as far as I know he didn't err again. There was another man in the village who, when the strike had been on a number of months, was forced in sheer desperation at the abject poverty of his wife and children to go back to work, but no action was taken against him. He was never ostracised after the strike as happened to blacklegs in some parts of the country. Working at the pit this man had access to coal and could be observed after his shift walking home, a large lump of coal balanced on the top of his head, all the 21/2 miles from New Lount colliery. 1926 was a terrible year and things remained bad right up to the second world war when the men who had been pilloried and despised were exhorted to work harder to "keep the home fires burning" as well as to forward the war effort.