Ollerton, Nottinghamshire 4.78

Ollerton is a small town in Nottinghamshire, England, on the edge of Sherwood Forest in the area known as the Dukeries. It forms part of the civil parish of Ollerton and Boughton and is in Newark and Sherwood District. The population of this civil parish at the 2011 census was 9,840.Formerly a rural village with a tradition of hop-growing, from the 1920s onwards the main industry was coal mining with Ollerton expanding greatly during the 1960s and 1970s. The colliery was sunk in the 1920s and completed during the General Strike of 1926, which led to a saying of "Ollerton was ever built with scab labour". During the expansion of the pit, many miners from closed collieries in north-eastern England and Scotland moved to work at Ollerton. There was a large Polish community amongst the miners at Ollerton, estimated to make up roughly half the workforce at the time of the 1984-1985 strike.As Ollerton Colliery was considered one of the most left-wing pits in Nottinghamshire, it was subject to heavy picketing at the time of the ballot by the Nottinghamshire NUM in March 1984. A miner from Ackton Hall Colliery, near Featherstone, West Yorkshire died at Ollerton when picketing during the miners' strike on 15 April 1984. David Gareth Jones was hit in the neck by a brick thrown by a local youth when he was picketing, but the post-mortem ruled that it had not caused his death and that it was more likely to have been caused by being pressed against the pit gates earlier in the day. News of his death led to hundreds of pickets staying in Ollerton town centre overnight. At the request of Nottinghamshire Police, Arthur Scargill appeared and called for calm in the wake of the tragedy. However, several working miners in Ollerton reported that their gardens and cars had been vandalised during the night. A memorial bench was sited near the spot where David died. As a mark of respect for David Jones, Ollerton Colliery closed for a few days afterwards.