THEIR STAY-DOWN FORCED NCB TO DISCUSS
1959The NewsletterEdward Knight Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Pit after pit in the Scottish coal-fields responded immediately to the call of pickets from Clackmannanshire’s Devon colliery, where sixty-eight miners were staging a stay-down strike against the National Coal Board’s decision to close their pit.
Within three days about 22,000 miners in pits in Clackmannanshire, Stirlingshire, Ayrshire, West Lothian, Fife, the Clyde Valley and the Douglas Valley were out in sympathy, and to express their own opposition to the closures.
A campaign committee was set up to win support, and a branch official of each pit that joined the strike was brought on to it. Pickets toured the coal-field by car.
When I asked Benny Hughes, Devon pit delegate, about the NCB’s claim that the Devon colliery is ‘uneconomic’, he 1eplied emphatically: ’ *)utput per manshift is one of the highest in Britain, averaging between 28 and 30cwt. There is a profit of around 7s. 10d. for every ton of coal produced. Absenteeism is one of the lowest at 11 per cent.
‘Men were brought here six to eight years ago on the promise of a life’s work. Now we are told it is “uneconomic”
Jury 4, 1959