Aneurin Barnard Quotes

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

Mothers, unless they were very poor, didn't work. Both of my parents had to leave education. My mother had to work in a cotton mill until 18 or 19, when she took some training in domestic science.

I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

We've had a humble upbringing. You know, my father came through as a political refugee; my mother comes from a hard-working-farmers family. We've had humble upbringing.

My grandad was a miner. My father, brother, and uncles all work in industry.

When I got outta High School I was driving a truck. I was just a poor boy from Memphis, Memphis.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.

I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife.

My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.

My grandfather was a Methodist preacher, and my father was an unsuccessful businessman. We didn't have status or wealth.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

When you are raised, as John Edwards was, in a small town like Robbins, North Carolina, you get to understand poverty and unemployment, or inadequate health care, first-hand by seeing the daily struggles of your friends and neighbors.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

I grew up in a refinery town in Texas, and we weren't fancy enough to have a McDonald's.

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

I grew up among heroes who went down the pit, who played rugby, told stories, sang songs of war.

My great grandfather emigrated from Italy, and my grandfather worked in a steel mill and was able to raise kids and have a family and go on vacation.

My dad was down the pit and my mother worked in a newsagent.

My dad worked as a floor manager in a clothing mill in Dombivli and my mom is a housewife.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.