Word: nottingham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...meeting room upstairs at the Ollerton colliery welfare building in the Nottingham-Midlands coal field looked like a converted high school gymnasium. After an hour and a half downstairs of lager and bitter at a small communal bar, the miners filed into the room, noisy and nervous. Pea green was the color in vogue and woolen socks topped off waterlogged boots. A few sport jackets, an occasional tie, and two or three old brown frayed Stetsons dotted the crowd...
Like Whelan's gallows humor, the mood was black last week in Nottingham. Along with the rest of Britain's 270,000 mineworkers from Scotland to South Wales, they cast ballots on whether to go on a strike that could throw the country into chaos. The outcome will not be known until this week, but the confrontation between the miners and the government has already been joined...
...there was little doubt last week that the vote from the coal fields would approve a strike. On a visit to Nottingham near legendary Sherwood Forest, TIME'S Skip Gates found emotions running high. "I'll tell you why they'll vote to strike," declared Mrs. Maggie Johnson, a miner's wife for 43 years. "They talk about mechanization-well, the foul air's still there, the dust's still there, the dank's still there. It used to be the miners put their pride in their pockets -they had to, didn...
...battle in the Nottingham coal fields was being waged over miners for whom the strike will be a huge financial loss-"those who live from Friday to Friday, up to their bloody eyeballs in debt," as Joe Whelan puts it. Even the oldest red brick row house in Nottingham has a television antenna on its roof, wall-to-wall carpeting, and an automobile parked out front, all bought on "hire purchase," as the British call the installment plan. "With mortgages, with hire purchase, we can't afford a strike," says Marge Reid, whose husband has been a miner...
Edward Heath's Conservative government is disliked by the miners. Says Joe Wheelan, an officer at the National Union of Mineworkers in Mansfield, a mining town near Nottingham: "Heath has love and a kiss on the cheek for the oil sheiks, but he has a slap in the face for the British miner." Adds a miner's wife: "Brother Heath's making it seem that if the miners lift their ban, then petrol rationing will be unnecessary. I just can't believe that. We're being used as scapegoats. The only thing he hasn...