Mr William Ellins, a face worker, who has been at the colliery for 22 years: "The Government is making mining a dying industry. Young men won't start work at the pit because there is no money in it. I take home £29 a week, and I am a top wage earner."

It is claimed that Hapton Valley Colliery is a place where no school leaver has gone down the pit for eight years, and where the majority of the surface workers are victims of the disease miners get from inhaling coal dust. Those are two reasons why Hapton Valley today is no longer the "Happy Valley" of National Coal Board hand outs, claims Mr John Riley, delegate member of the colliery branch of the National Union of Mineworkers. He and other miners answered a question put to them by Burnley Express reporters: "How do you feel to be represented as public enemy number one and the reason why Britain is on half time?"

Mr John Barker, branch president, said he believed people in Burnley sympathised with them and understood that this time the miners had to get a good rise. He believed the dispute with the NCB would come to a strike, because nobody was going to move from the entrenched position reached nationally over Phase Three. But his colleague, Mr Riley, was in no doubt that the fight was one to save the industry and bring back new blood. The youngest miner at the colliery is 24.

The general public do not seem particularly sympathetic to the miners' action. Although the average man in the street seems to feel that the miners should be given more money there is the feeling that the NUM is trying to hold the country to ransom. The full effect of the miners' action and the ensuing three-day working week have not been realised, but there is already the fear that it will bring about tremendous hardship for the general public.