when they heard my accent, they wanted to know why I wasn’t ‘down’t pit’.
It’s really just a social club and community centre for the area these days. I guess the name is a reminder and respectful nod to the industrial heritage of the area, the sacrificed lives and the many collieries that kept this country going throughout the war years. You could say that the headstocks are a memorial to that also.
When I was in me mid teens, Clipstone Miners Welfare was a good night out on a Sunday night back in the early 1980s.
I remember driving through Ollerton late one night during the miners strike and I’d be about 17 and just passed my driving test and the police had a checkpoint and stopped me.
They wanted to know where I’d been, where I was going and then told me to ‘fuck off home’. As I went past them, about half a dozen of them got their wallets out and waved them at me.
When I went to up to Uni, which was in in the Fens, I met a lot of very middle class, public school types. They were all good lads, but when they heard my accent, they wanted to know why I wasn’t ‘down’t pit’. I think it took me a while to transition and ‘fit in’, because of the town I had been brought up in.
