Pitmen Poets evoke memories of mining communities
THE visual signs of South Yorkshire’s once proud coal industry may be disappearing fast, as housing estates and new businesses occupy land where collieries once stood.
But the memories remain undiminished and, just to underscore the point, the Pitmen Poets were in the county on Saturday with their own blend of songs and stories to rekindle the realities of life in mining communities.
Billy Mitchell, Jez Lowe and and Bob Fox are all from the North East – the area where most of their material originates – but their sentiment was instantly recognisable to their audience at Barnsley Civic.
The three carved their own careers on the folk circuit before coming together as the Pitmen Poets 15 years ago.
Their credentials? Each is from a mining family, each the first generation encouraged to look beyond the pits for ‘something better’ as a career.
That background provided rich-pickings for an evening which evoked the camaraderie and realities of life in mining villages.
Equipped with guitars, other strings and the odd support from harmonica and tin whistle, their repertoire went from Dance to Your Daddy – the theme from the BBC’s When the Boat Comes In – to Judas Bus, a song about 1984 strike breakers, which needs no further explanation.
The latter had verses from the traditional song Blackleg Miner welded in, reflecting one of the most sensitive issues to affect mining communities through the course of the industry’s life.
It would have difficult to ignore the left-leaning attitudes on stage and they were clearly reflected in the audience, which had a demographic meaning virtually all would have their own memories of life during, as well as after, the era when mining dominated South Yorkshire as it did the North East.
The blunt response from an audience member – correcting the band with a rather more forthright name for strike breakers – was a reminder of how deep emotions still run, more than 40 years on from the 1980s strike.
Which focuses the mind on another remarkable change – that a community which was vehemently anti-Thatcher in that era showed itself in May’s elections to be very firmly in support of the right-wing Reform.
Except, perhaps, for the Civic audience who, it seemed, formed a small oasis with an old-fashioned outlook in a changed world.