The Copper and The Miner: Don McPhee's Famous Picket Line Pic

[El Jefe]

interesting article in G2 today about the two main protagonists in McPhee's photo. Such a shame what happened to Brealey.

 

[marty21]

read it, it was on a telly as well, but up north somewhere

interesting that some of the other photos on the roll had the two of them lauging and smiling at eachother

sad what happened to the miner, the strike seemed to destroy him, the copper ends up as some sort of gun toting survivalist, protection expert in the states? who could have predicted that ?

 

[editor]

The Miner and the Copper photo

Nice back-story to this famous photo:

The picture might not even be known to many people outside the U.K., but in Britain it's one of the best-known press photos of recent decades: a moment of good humor and seeming rapport between a policeman and a miner, in the midst of a bitter strike that was ugly and all too often violent.
For many years, the identities of the miner and the officer weren't known; they weren't to the late Don McPhee, the famous British newspaper photographer who took the picture.

But now, writes Martin Wainright in The Guardian, thanks to the efforts of a BBC Executive's assistant named Lucy Smickersgill, the identities of the two men have been discovered.

The miner was George "Geordie" Brealey, who died young (age 53) in 1997 from choking on an egg sandwich after having suffered a series of strokes, but who is fondly remembered by his many friends for his ready smile and sense of humor—including the way he would pretend to "inspect" the police, dressed in the toy bobbie's helmet he acquired on a family outing.

​

The policeman was Paul Castle (shown above in a more recent photo from his website), who now lives in Tennessee and runs a "Tactical Training & Research" company called Sabre, Inc.

Paul Castle now doesn't recall his feelings or the mood at the moment the photo was taken. Although he says he had sympathy during the miners' strike for "the decent human people [who] just got pulled into the middle of it all," he thinks that, at the time, he would have been more interested in crowd safety than anything else.

But the last word on the human aspect of the encounter, fittingly, is in the photographs—the negatives surrounding the shot on Don McPhee's contact sheet. The famous photo is the second of four, and the last two show Officer Castle laughing, as Geordie Brealey continues to clown.

From: http://theonlinephotographer.typepa...grapher/2009/02/the-miner-and-the-copper.html

 

[Crispy]

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=281240

Your choice of merge, sir!

 

[butchersapron]

Victory to the miners!

 

[butchersapron]

read it, it was on a telly as well, but up north somewhere

interesting that some of the other photos on the roll had the two of them lauging and smiling at eachother

sad what happened to the miner, the strike seemed to destroy him, the copper ends up as some sort of gun toting survivalist, protection expert in the states? who could have predicted that ?

But so fitting

 

[butchersapron]

the strike seemed to destroy him

Odd that.

 

[Kanda]

Victory to El Jefe!

 

[Crispy]

EDIT: yay

 

[editor]

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=281240

Your choice of merge, sir!

God dammit! Where's his ruddy tags?!

 

[danny la rouge]

Brealey, however, died in 1997, 12 years after the miners marched back to work at Yorkshire Main in March 1985, unbowed but comprehensively defeated after their disastrously botched last stand. He was only 53. He had transferred briefly to Maltby colliery when Yorkshire Main closed within the year, but he had lost heart. He suffered a series of strokes and finished up in
a wheelchair, unable to speak. Fatally, the paralysis spread to swallowing and he choked to death while eating an egg sandwich.

Brealey died in the house where he was born, a solid semi in Markham Square, a street in the Doncaster pit village of Edlington. His father had been a miner and his father-in-law went down Yorkshire Main at the age of 14. Mining was the community's whole life, not just a job, and it was this that the pickets at Orgreave were trying to sustain.

Never met him, but like everyone I knew his face. RIP George "Geordie" Brealey.

 

[editor]

*levers pulled.

Merge complete. It could have gone in several forums, but it's settled in here now.

 

[marty21]

Odd that.

not really you know what i mean

 

[butchersapron]

not really you know what i mean

Of course i do marty.

The battle is not to become like them today.

 

[DownwardDog]

Quentin Tarantino vs. Anthony Sher