Striking miners risked life and limb to collect from the spoil (slag) heaps
Miners picketed in their hundreds, sometimes in their thousands, fighting to protect their futures by mortgaging the present for an undefined period and often travelling under the cover of night from all points on the map. At home they were faced by worried wives, children too young to understand why Christmas was cancelled, acts of violence, family breakdowns that would take generations to fix, if they ever could, and financial problems that would haunt them for years,
To keep warm they risked arrest for trespass scrabbling in the spoil heaps for coal, and to put food on the table they went cap in hand to collect food parcels.