Jane McDonald Quotes

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.

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.

My dad started off in scrap metal, real men doing men's jobs.

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

My father was a tailor, my mother a machinist.

My dad sold encyclopedias and my mom worked in a factory office.

I was raised in a very blue-collar family.

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

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

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

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.

Being an MP is not a desperately hard life, like going down the pit or working in the steelworks - with which I am all too familiar, having been brought up in the city of Sheffield; and it certainly isn't badly paid compared with any of my constituents.

I left school when I was 16; then I worked for my father, who was a welder. And I was a welder for three years, you know, welder of fabrication, metal 'cause it was a big industrial town, Sheffield. It was much steel and coal and stuff like that.

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

People I grew up with, my family, work in the oil fields. Everyone works a labor job - construction, concrete. All we know is work. It's a physical culture.

I am the son of a mine worker.

I come from blue collar. I'm very working class.

My father was incredible: a longshoreman; my mother was a secretary. Very 'go to work' people. That's how I saw things.

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.

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 parents were workers. My mom, especially in my high school years, was a stock clerk at Kmart... My dad was a bartender that worked banquets.

West Virginia built this nation... we deserve respect.

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

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.