The Deadly Dust it takes its toll My chest is drawing tighter I've been reduced to a poor old soul And my pay poke's getting lighter I cough and wheeze where e'er I go And my spittle it is black But if I take a few days off I am threatened with the sack It used to be the coal board That would tell us not to shirk But now they've got the union For to do their dirty work While they hob nob with the manager And drink their cups of tea Discussing other methods How to quieten you and me But where are the men like AG Cooke Who would fight them tooth and nail And didn't care a button If they locked him up in jail He would fight on every issue That affected you and me This was a man they could not bribe With money or with tea Well friends you ask the question Just what can be done To put these people in their place without a tommy gun So lets look to men like Moffat And Scargill for a lead And Collins and McGahey For to beat this rotten breed And pull us from the crisis Which is a sad affair And tell the Lords and Admirals To get down and dig their share So rally round ye miner lads Its time to make a stand To show them that the miner Is the Finest in the land And get behind your leaders And I'm sure they'll do you proud And wrap this Tory party, In that shirt we call a shroud. Tam Early is a 66 year old miner who used to work the Fife and Kent coalfields. His poem sounds best when rectea after a bome of Scotch and in a Scottish accent. the government's Irish policy. Everybody on the left must give this serious thought.
Socialist Challenge1983Socialist Challenge No. 275, 7 January 1983
Its time
The scan: sc-no275.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)
Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Apple Vision OCR) from a scan of a newspaper page, and the page was cut into articles by machine, at the headlines found by their type size. Nothing has been corrected: expect misread words, text from a neighbouring article, and titles that are the machine reading of the headline, some of them only fragments. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: headline found by type size in the OCR geometry (split_tabloid.py); 1-1 of 7; machine-segmented newspaper page; uncorrected Vision OCR.