Miners Strike

A Memory of Twechar.

My father (Robert Summers born Dec  1916) was 6 months old when his father was killed in Ypers. A few years later my gran remarried a miner, James MacLachlan, an ex Cameronian. My father told me a story of how, during the strike and at the age of 5 or 6, he came home from school to see the village people crowded on the street shouting and cheering. He saw his mother, holding his baby brother in her arms and wrapped in a shawl, she drew my father into her side and through the crowd he could see his step-father and another miner, who had broken some strike rule, bare-knuckle fighting in the street. He described my grandfather as being stripped to the waist with his trousers held up with a big studded belt, a belt I remember seeing him wear when I was a young child. My grandfather had challenged the man for doing wrong. He described the village as having a dirt road with miners' rows down either side. Each house had a large sink at the door which the women did their washing in. There were no inside toilets but they had to empty their toilets (I am assuming some kind of chemical toilet) in a huge pit at the end of the village. Someone came and emptied it every week. Apparently my grandfather won the fight, but he had been the regimental middleweight boxing champion of the Cameronians during WW1.

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