Dennis Skinner Quotes

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

My father and brothers were coal miners.

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

Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.

I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.

Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.

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

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

My grandfather, who brought me up, was a coal miner. I visited the mines with him. I remember it vividly. It was horrible. I'm glad I didn't go into the family business.

I am the son of a mine worker.

I come from a family of coal miners.

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

When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.

I could write about coal miners in Northern Pennsylvania, and people would ask if I was writing about my dad.

And that had a powerful appeal, particularly to those who had been denied the choice to stay on at school, to go to university, to be something else, other than going down the pit.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.

I grew up in a little pit village on the outskirts of Durham.

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

I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V., yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills.

My father was a steel worker and Martin's [Schulz] grandfather was a miner in Saarland. In these occupations, there is a particular awareness of solidarity. That creates links that aren't present in other relationships.

I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.

It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.