Red was the order of the day at The Miner's Arms

THERE’S silence from the big screen television as Margaret Thatcher’s coffin is solemnly carried into St Paul’s Cathedral, but in the Miner’s Arms, in Coundon, there’s sizzling from the kitchen and Keeley Brown carries out a mid-morning breakfast: two sausages, two eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans and toast for £3.90.

The coffin is draped in the red, white and blue of the Union flag; the breakfast is soon drenched in the red of ketchup.

Coundon is a Durham community founded on coal, but, as the funeral unfolds, the politics turn out not to be as red as the ketchup.

The mourners in the cathedral launch into the first hymn, He Who Would Valiant Be, and Bobby Ross, 68, pictured below, is brave enough to admit that he voted for Mrs Thatcher in her first election.

“We’d had enough of Labour in 1979 and we needed a new brush, so me and my family voted Tory,” he says. “But we regretted it after a couple of years.”

Three years into the Thatcher era, Bobby set up his own construction company in Aycliffe.

“We did pretty well in the 1980s when the country was flowing and everyone was well off,” he says.

The TV flashes a picture of the Queen in her pew, all in black apart from her silvery hair – it is the first prime minister’s funeral she has attended since Winston Churchill’s, in 1965.

“In a way, she deserves it,” says Bobby – no one in Coundon uses the T-word.

“She did a lot, giving people the right to buy their council homes. She did well with the Falklands, and I respect her for that; but she did go too far with closing the pits and the steelworks. Some were making a loss, but she decimated places. She decimated communities. We never voted Tory again.”

The owner of the Miner’s Arms, Brian Robinson, 50, has recently had the pub done up and only opened for breakfasts – 9am to 11.30am – on Monday.

“I’ve done alright out of her,” he admits. “I left school in 1977 at 15 with no qualifications, but I never had to worry about work.”

He took Norman Tebbit’s advice, got on his bike, and earned £600-a-week as a roofer in Scotland. By the age of 44, he was able to retire to Spain for six years, before returning to the gently damp climate of Coundon.

In the cathedral, the Bishop of London speaks of Mrs Thatcher’s “steadfastness and resolve”, and Brian echoes him. “She had difficult decisions to make in difficult times,” he says. “But if you are a pitman who lost his job, you will feel bad about her.”

His elder brother, Amos, pictured below, takes over. Amos started as a 15-year-old at Middridge Drift in the late 1950s, and spent 31 years chasing pit jobs around the North-East as mine after mine fell like dominoes. When she took on the miners, he was a flying picket, up at 2am to travel to oppose her.

“She allowed the police to do things on the picket lines, she turned communities against the police and that’s not right,” he says.

IMMACULATE choristers on the TV – not a drop of ketchup on their white gowns – sing May Angels Lead You Into Paradise, but it is too painful for Amos to watch. “She’s done nothing for me. I had a few thousand in the bank, I was on ‘doscos’ at the coal face until the strike, and that’s what hit us on the head, and I blame her for it.”

He’s now chewing his gum as fast as Sir Alex Ferguson when a goal behind in the 94th minute. “Mind, it wasn’t just her,” he says. “Arthur Scargill – he should have had a ballot six weeks after the strike started.”

All the time, Keeley is busily popping out from the kitchen with cups of tea and plates of bacon butties. “I just got a text from my husband saying ‘Don’t sit down and stop work to watch the funeral – it’s cost us enough already’.”

Maureen Wales looks at the opulence of the pomp and ceremony on the telly, and at the 4,000 policemen lining the route.

“And round the world children are starving,” she says, shaking her head. “She should have paid for her own funeral.”

Despite being the greatgrand- daughter of Alderman William House, who, 100 years ago, was a miners’ leader in the Bishop Auckland area, Maureen was hopeful when Maggie came to power.

“The one good thing she did was get a woman in, and I thought it might be different,” she says. “A lot of women thought that, but it wasn’t.

“I was a club singer up at Consett when the steelworks closed and they said to me that there was no work for them, nothing.

“She left them with nothing.”

THE former Bishop of Durham appears on the screen, giving the Blessing, and the coffin is carried out to a waiting hearse. As it drives away, the cameras pan around on the faces of the great and the good. The funeral at the cathedral is over, and Mrs Thatcher’s memory will live on.

Keeley emerges once more from the kitchen, collecting empty plates and cups, tidying away ketchup bottles, and wiping down tables.

Breakfast at the Miner’s is over, and Mrs Thatcher’s legacy cannot be forgotten.