Beatrice (93) speaks about growing up in a pit village, with family having lived in the village ever since the pit was first sunk. She remembers the turbulent times of the miners’ strike and a close-knit community.
“I’m Beatrice and my family have been part of Kiveton for years. I was born in the early 30s, well, 1931, so I’m nearly 94. My granddad came to Kiveton when they were appealing for miners, when they were starting to sink the pit. When they found that there were seams of coal, the news went out that they were crying out for miners.
My granddad came from Derby and he went straight to help sinking the pit when it first started in the late 1860s and early 70s. But my grandma was from Killamarsh, and she was a barmaid in the pub the Angel down at the canal that runs from Kiveton right through to Killamarsh. He would go to the Angel for a pint, and my grandma was there serving at the pub bar. And of course, the rest was history. They got married in 1880 and must have had a child every year. My dad was the youngest of them all.
In those days, you didn’t leave Kiveton. My dad met my mom on a charabanc trip to Blackpool. Unbelievable. But the Saint John’s Church at Wales had organised this trip to Blackpool for a day. And all the choir boys were on this trip, but they couldn’t fill the coach. So, they got in touch with Saint Thomas’s Church at Crookes in Sheffield to say, we need some more passengers on it to make it pay. And my mom and her sisters decided they wanted to go. But when my mum came to get on the coach, the only seat left was the one next to my dad. My dad married my mum in 1927. And I was born in 31. So, my history in Kiveton goes back all the way to when the pit was first sunken.
But see, Kiveton was a different place in those days because everybody was a miner. I lived on Stove Lane and in that little section of 12 houses, everybody worked at the pit. And because of that, we had a little community of its own. And these people did things together. They’d all get together. I think that it was a case of: you left school and walked down to the pit and asked if you could get a job. It was very rare, I think, in the 1930s that anybody moved away from Kiveton. My mum and dad brought up my cousin because his parents died when he was young. He left school and went to the pit and got a job. He hated working down the pit. So much so that one day when he came home, he said, “I’m not going to work down the pit anymore.” And Mum said, “Well, you’ve got to do something.” Anyway, he picked up an advert out of one of the newspapers that wanted policeman in London, and so, he hopped on a train and went to London and got taken on as a policeman way back in 1936.
I wasn’t affected by the miners’ strike because my husband wasn’t a miner, but we lived on the main road here. And one day I was at the front cleaning my front room windows, and a policeman came down the road and he came to me and he said, “If I were you, love, I’d go in the house, I wouldn’t continue.” So, I said, “What do you mean? I’m only cleaning my front room windows.” And he said, “The pickets have arrived and I’m afraid that there will be some trouble coming down the village.” So, I went in and yes, they did come down, but there weren’t that many Kiveton people. They were people that had been bussed in. They were the pickets that had been bussed into the village. Anyway, they did go down and I went back out again. But then towards the end of the strike when some of the miners started going back [to work], there was a lot of bad feeling. One night there was a commotion out on the street outside. And me and my husband, it woke us up and we looked out the window and the police were escorting the first lot of men that went back. As the number grew, and more and more men went back, they needed more and more police. So, there were police vans as well as police walking with the men. They escorted them all the way. And it was necessary to be absolutely sure that they were safe. There was a lot of bad feeling in the village one way and another.
I knew somebody who wouldn’t use the hairdresser because her husband had gone back to work. I worked in the library at Wales high school and one of the cleaners, her husband had gone back. And when she got to work every day, she came to me and asked, “Can I sit with you for a little while?” I said, “Yes. Why? Is there a problem?” Her husband had gone to work, and she was getting pretty badly treated by the women in the village. At the high school, the cleaners were ignoring her completely. She had a relationship with the cleaners up to that point. But when her husband went back to work, they just ignored her completely. So, she couldn’t sit and have a coffee with them. They wouldn’t have her, and so she’d come into the library and sit with me till it was time to get a bucket and go and do the work, and none of the women would actually work in the same area that she was. If she was cleaning in a classroom, the other women wouldn’t even work with her. She kept her job but eventually they left the village all together and didn’t come back.
Today there are people in the village that don’t even know it was a colliery village. You know, it’s amazing, isn’t it? I’ve gone with a friend to talk to the schools. I grew up during the Second World War and it’s just amazing what has gone on since then. You talk to the children about coal and what it was like to work at the pit. Sometimes there’s been people in the library while we’ve been doing these talks, and on occasions we’ve had people say, well, where was the pit? And to me, whose family originated from the pit, it’s just amazing that they’ve no idea. You know, that was my history. Now a lot of people don’t even know that it was a colliery. The people that work down at the Colliery Offices now are a totally different breed from what they used to be. They do lunch clubs, and they do fitness sessions and things like that, but it’s almost a business now.”