Strike pay

David Herbert Lawrence was an English writer of novels, plays, poetry and essays. Lawrence was born to a large working class family, his father was a miner and his mother was a schoolmistress. Lawrence based some of his early works off his family life which often featured problems between his parents.

Lawrence was not afraid to give ink to his opinions, some of which created enemies in his country. Eventually this led to much of his work being censored or misrepresented. Lawrence and his wife Frieda Weekley would eventually leave England soon after the end of World War I. Lawrence would only briefly return to England and mostly traveled for the remainder of his life.

In ‘Strike Pay’, Lawrence returns to the scenes of his boyhood in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire. A group of miners, liberated from work by a strike, enjoy a day out but the hard realities of home life and mothers-in-law await their return. Tinged with good humour and the sense of comradeship among the miners and finally between the miner and his wife, this story epitomises working life before the Great War.