Educating the daughter of a coal miner generally seemed to be viewed as largely unnecessary beyond learning to read a payslip and work out if you’d been swizzed. Coal miner’s daughters married coal miner’s sons and produced coal miners and coal miner’s wives. The blind optimism of 1905 had produced any number communities all living under the assumption that the pits would always have a place for their sons and every son was owed a place. Nobody it seemed, took account of a changing world and would have scoffed at the idea of a woman prime minister, until it actually happened.
Margaret Thatcher wasn’t even a Southern softie with a privileged background. She was a grocer’s daughter from Grantham, not a million miles from the Nottinghamshire pitheads. The average miner I knew was very much a man’s man who hadn’t quite given up on the concept of a woman being a chattel. The Margaret Thatcher government was all about a free economy, the law of supply and demand and creating herself as the new Elizabeth 1, the woman with the heart and stomach of a man determined to end the strangle hold of the unions and the mining Industry.