Andy Boag Photographer

Barnburgh Colliery - Closed 1988

I voted to go on strike, I didn’t fancy being out of work, but I don’t think anybody envisaged the length of time it would last, but I believed in it. In fact not long before the strike finished, my wife was a bit fed up with the lack of money, struggling and everything, and she said ‘If you don’t go back to work then I’m going to leave’. I said ‘Well you’ll have to leave then because I’m not going back’. That was the strength of feeling I had about it.

Like everyone, I was gutted when we came back. Relieved in a way, you could see for quite a while, before we came back that it was finished. We marched back behind the union flag, marched up to then old baths, and the union secretary gave a bit of a speech and he was in tears, it was pretty moving.

I walked in on my first day, and thought I would retire here, I never envisaged that it would go, or that after that I would have worked at twenty-five pits. I assumed, like my granddad who worked here, I’d start here from school and finish when I retired here. It’s a shame.