David Blunkett Quotes

Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

I left school when I was 16; then I worked for my father, who was a welder. And I was a welder for three years, you know, welder of fabrication, metal 'cause it was a big industrial town, Sheffield. It was much steel and coal and stuff like that.

It's man's work. My dad was gone at 4:30 in the morning and home at 8 at night, and he worked underground, and the last mine he worked in was 26 inches high in a lot of places. He liked the engineering of it - he liked the moving the earth and being able to extract something and put it back for reclamation. He enjoyed the whole process.

My dad was down the pit and my mother worked in a newsagent.

My grandad was a miner. My father, brother, and uncles all work in industry.

I do think my old fella wasn't much of a... I don't remember him ever being a 'dad' dad. He was too busy working. It was a hard life, man.

The Labor Party is a body that does not seek political life, and does not fight for its life.

My father was a tailor, my mother a machinist.

I think of doing a series as very hard work. But then I've talked to coal miners, and that's really hard work.

My dad sold encyclopedias and my mom worked in a factory office.

I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.

I think it's time we had a president who carried the same life experiences into the White House as most ordinary Americans.

I was raised in a very blue-collar family.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

My father had the same name as me but he was known as Alec. He was a member of the House of Representatives.

I don't have the hard everyday life that so many working mothers face.

When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.

My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.

It has been the greatest privilege of my adult and public life to have served, for 32 years, as the Member of Parliament for our local Highlands and Islands communities.

I was never afraid to go back to Pittsburgh and work in the steel mills.

I worked at the Steel Company Of Wales when I was 17. My job was to supply tools to the guys working the blast furnaces.

I come home every weekend and I still can't believe I represent Las Vegas in Congress. It's such a kick.

I don’t like the work but mother is dead and father brought me down [to the mines.] I had no choice. I have a harness on like a horse and pull carts. Large carts hold seven and a half hundredweight. [750 lbs.]

The collier women of this village—poor over-toiled creatures who carried up all the coal from underground on their backs by a long turnpike stair inserted in one of the shafts—continued to bear more of the marks of serfdom still about them …