re: #147 HappyWarrior

Okay as someone descended from coal miners, I got a great laugh out of that.

I’m the son of a coal miner. Our town had a lot of people in coal from long before I was born. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) built the town’s Welfare Institute, a combination of meeting-hall and educational facility. They hosted political discussions and invited speakers on politics and science, world history and events. The Institute had a film projection booth and showed newsreels from Europe and America, and a small library and reading-room with, among others, English-language copies of Pravda and other left-wing newspapers as well as older copies of Time and Newsweek from the US.

The local NUM paid for scholarships for gifted children to attend private schools and I got a small bursary from them when I went to University in the early 70s, as did some other schoolmates. Education was always a big thing in our locality, in part because the miners didn’t want their kids to have to go down the pit to work as they and their fathers had to.