List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Foreword by Margaret Drabble Prologue 1 The Man with the Showman's Wagon 2 The Ship of the Road 3 The People Priestley Admired 4 The Musical Miner 5 Why 'Gresford' Mattered so Much 6 When the Mines Inspector Wept 7 The One-man Dance Band 8 The Gala Days of DBC Pierre 9 The Poor Peoples Vet 10 'It's So That We Don't Forget Them' 11 The Inspector Vanishes 12 'The Gala Is About Our Heritage' 13 A Walk Down Seaside Lane 14 A Man Who Knew His Worth 15 'You Somehow Know It Demands Respect' 16 From Mining Camps to Pit Villages 17 'Factory Folks Are Different' 18 Encamped on a Raft of Coal 19 Lament for a Vanished Culture 20 'It Makes My Hair Stand on End' 21 No Shoebox in the Wardrobe 22 'The Price the Miners Paid' 23 Peter Lee - the Man and His Town 24 The Battle of Easington 25 Misunderstanding the Miners 26 The Femme Fatale of the Coal Trade 27 'I Was Born to Be a Miner' 28 Bringing Children into the Sunlight 29 'I Loved Working in the Mines' 30 'The Best Years of My Life' 31 A Cold Day by the Don Appendix: The Verses of 'Gresford' Notes Biblography
"As much a history of culture and place as much as it is a biography, it's a fluent look at so many things which are difficult to catch without being sentimentally nostalgic - an intelligent, moving and thoughtful account of so much that has gone. But it's also packed with information - I loved that combination." --Lee Hall "Peter Crookston has written a book that is at once an elegy and a tribute. This is a moving account of the pit closures and the miners strike in the North East, but it is also an exploration of a landscape and a way of life that is vanishing day by day. He has captured testimony from miners and union officials, from miner s wives and politicians, from town planners and fellow journalists, and he has caught it just in time." --Margaret Drabble
Peter Crookston is a journalist and author who worked as an editorial executive on both The Observer and the Sunday Times. His first book was Villain: The Biography of a Criminal, published by Jonathan Cape. In 1984 he wrote the script for Lions Led by Donkeys, a Channel 4 documentary about men who survived the Battle of the Somme.
"As much a history of culture and place as much as it is a biography, it's a fluent look at so many things which are difficult to catch without being sentimentally nostalgic - an intelligent, moving and thoughtful account of so much that has gone. But it's also packed with information - I loved that combination." --Lee Hall "Peter Crookston has written a book that is at once an elegy and a tribute. This is a moving account of the pit closures and the miners strike in the North East, but it is also an exploration of a landscape and a way of life that is vanishing day by day. He has captured testimony from miners and union officials, from miner s wives and politicians, from town planners and fellow journalists, and he has caught it just in time." --Margaret Drabble
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