Скачать или смотреть The Row Between the Cages Alex Eaton & John Hasted

An early recording for Topic Records c1955 by the great Bill Leader (recorded in the Leader family home, Shipley, West Yorks I believe) featuring my father, Alex Eaton, then a socialist firebrand, with the atomic physicist, Professor John Hasted on guitar.... well, you don't get any more explosive than that! The photographs were mostly taken at Wortley Hall near Sheffield, during the Workers Music Association Summer School in 1955, the Hall having been purchased by the Trade Union and Labour Movement in 1950.


Here we have The Row Between the Cages, a song written by Tommy Armstrong, who lived through the heyday of the Durham Coalfield (1848-1920) and was widely regarded as one of the first radical working class poets. His song, The Row Between the Cages, depicts a fight between two pit cages which took the miners down the shaft to the Brockwell seam at a local colliery, the old cage being determined to show the new one that he is still capable of doing his job just as well as the new improved “youngster”. A.L. Lloyd described this song as a “symbolic epic” which stands as an isolated masterpiece amongst British mining songs.