I cannot interfere … it breaks my heart to see what is happening in our country today. A terrible strike is being carried on by the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser's army and they beat Hitler's army. They never gave in. (Harold Macmillan, First Earl of Stockton, debut in the House of Lords, 13 November 1984)1
The miners’ strike of 1984–85 was the most protracted and bitterly contested strike in the history of late twentieth-century Britain: its importance as a watershed in industrial relations that was likely to determine the distribution of power between labour and capital for the foreseeable future was generally recognised at the time by supporters and opponents alike. Striking miners were the corps d’élite of the trade unions in 1984 and had famously humiliated Edward Heath's administration at the Saltley Gate coke depot in 1972, forcing him to introduce the three-day working week before his electoral defeat in 1974. But it was not only the left who believed the miners to be invincible in 1984–85. In contrast to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, many Conservative politicians privately believed the same. The Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet remembered the reaction of pure disbelief (‘The woman's mad. You can't win miners’ strikes. All you can do is buy them off’) when Thatcher announced on taking office in 1979: ‘The last Conservative government was destroyed by the miners’ strike. We'll have another and we'll win.’2
The strike, called in response to the National Coal Board's projected closure of Cortonwood and another twenty pits at a cost of 20,000 jobs, ran throughout the long, cold winter of 1984–85. Neither the 1972 strike, which started in January and ended in February, nor the 1974 strike, which started in February and ended in March, had been long lived. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) did not issue strike pay but it did make a small picketing allowance. The miners were ineligible for social security benefits and their dependants were ineligible for ‘urgent needs payments’ under the National Security Act of 1980, although £15 was deducted from benefits to cover ‘notional strike pay’.3 Incomes had been depleted by the previous year's overtime ban and poverty became endemic once household savings ran out. Thus many striking miners and their families found themselves perilously near to destitution.
What emerged was a historic mobilisation of the mining areas in their own defence, coupled with a humanitarian relief effort to the beleaguered coalfields organised through a network of miners’ support committees working with the mining communities to raise the millions of pounds that would prevent the miners’ being starved into submission. As Paul Mackney put it, this perhaps ‘involved more people at a greater pitch of activity over a lengthier period than any other campaign in the history of the labour movement’.4 In March 1985 the miners accepted defeat, processing back to the pitheads behind their bands and banners with all the pride and dignity that the instigators of the ‘orderly return-to-work’, the South Wales Federation of Miners, had intended the world to see. However, sacked and victimised miners were not reinstated and the National Coal Board (NCB) was able to implement its programme of pit closures virtually unhindered.
As Mike Sanders suggests, the ‘danger threatening the 1984–5 miners’ strike is not that of being forgotten, of being consigned to historical oblivion, but rather of being only available to the memory in ways which separate its historical significance from its current relevance’.5 How, then, can the historian return to the dispute in order to provide resources of hope for those with no memory of a lost industrial past? This chapter avoids the Thatcher/Scargill polarities in which the strike is usually discussed, and analyses the remarkable support for the miners, mobilised by the organised labour movement but encompassing countless groups and individuals far beyond its usual orbit, as an enduring legacy of the strike that demonstrates the traditions of that movement at their very best.6 I argue that the miners’ refusal to separate their own well-being from that of their dependants, coupled with the aggregation of the miners and their families by the miners’ support groups, differentiated the strike from previous disputes, and that this accounted, in part, for its longevity as well as the reversal in how the miners were perceived by the public and how they perceived themselves. If, as Beatrix Campbell put it, the ‘socialist movement in Britain had been swept off its feet by the magic of masculinity, muscle and machinery’, that ‘magic’ clearly no longer prevailed when machinery was idle and the miners were absent from the workplace that had traditionally conferred their masculinity, economic status and collective sense of self-worth.7 Single men and active pickets apart – the latter often in the minority – striking miners found themselves at home and reduced to unwelcome passivity and dependency. Voluntarily designating themselves as family men, while ironically lacking the wherewithal to feed and clothe their children, strikers became reliant on their own fundraising efforts and on the supporters who stood between themselves, penury and capitulation.
The informal coalition that identified with the moral and political arguments for investment in coal was exceedingly broad. It included women, traditionally excluded from the labour aristocracy, the young, the poor, student and inner-city radicals, peace activists, the unemployed (for whom trade unionism had hitherto had little meaning), anti-racists, gays, lesbians and ethnic minorities. In consequence new forms of solidarity, new forms of self-help and new forms of sustenance emerged. Although the trade unions remained at the centre of the dispute, Thatcher rhetorically dubbed all NUM supporters as ‘the enemy within’ – a comparison with the military dictatorship of General Galtieri in Argentina in the Falklands War, the ‘enemy without’, which was at first resented but subsequently adopted as a badge of pride.
The strike was initially defensive. Called by the miners to safeguard their own jobs, pits and communities, it quickly acquired a symbolic importance inseparable from its industrial objective. ‘Victory for the miners’ became a clarion call for many who identified the NUM as the chief obstacle to the systematic deregulation of the labour market, opposed the Falklands War and the ideological project of the early Thatcher years and discovered in the praxis of the strike an alternative vision of mutuality, effective trade unionism and co-operative ideals.
The dispute generated the passions that it did precisely because it was not perceived as narrowly economistic. Unlike the strikes of 1972 and 1974, this one was not about pay. On the contrary, its rhetoric invoked the right to work (resonant in the slogan ‘coal not dole’), reiterated the importance of close-knit communities and demanded consultations about proposed job losses, an ethical non-nuclear energy policy and that the welfare of human beings rather than profitability should feature prominently in calculations about economic planning, restructuring and change. What can loosely be termed the ‘moral case for coal’ appeared of concern not only to the miners but to all with a stake in a sustainable future. As the critic Raymond Williams put it, the ‘miners’ strike is being represented as the last kick of an old order. Properly understood, it is one of the first steps towards a new order.’8
By insisting on the importance of their own gender and sexuality while fighting alongside the miners, Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners presented a substantive challenge to the chauvinistic old labourist attitudes of the coalfields. Working-class women's activism, to which I will return below, was not new. Rather, it drew strongly upon equal rights traditions that were established in the mining areas between the wars and on traditions of women's protest during strikes going back to 1926, while inflecting those traditions in radical, innovative ways.9 It was women who emerged as the public spokespersons for their communities, articulating the case for coal as a common resource held in trust for future generations, and women who developed the links with the peace movement based upon a shared approach to a coal-based energy policy and opposition to the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
From the start, the NUM was beset with problems brought about by its lacerating internal divisions. In Nottinghamshire, miners who responded to the national strike call were heavily outnumbered by others who voted against it in a series of locally organised pithead strike ballots which were made possible by the federal nature of the union. Each of the county's thirty-one pits continued to work, ensuring that ‘the nation's lights, even at mid-winter, would not even flicker’.10 Ironically, it was the NUM's weakness rather than its strength which brought it into a new relationship with the marginalised and the dispossessed or, rather, which forced it to renew its old historic relationship with those who, in Hywel Francis's words, were ‘penned in by police and poverty’.11 As Hilary Wainwright and Doreen Massey noted: ‘Movingly, impressive support has come from those who are themselves experiencing industrial dereliction. Liverpool 8 [Toxteth] was one of the first paces to spawn a support group.’12 ‘On Merseyside there are fourteen support groups which between them have sent off £1 million so far (a million pounds – from a city itself in desperate poverty).’13 Inez Macormack co-ordinated the NUPE (National Union of Public Employees) ‘Fill a Bag and Feed a Family’ campaign, which was supported by Belfast's lowest-paid workers: school cooks, council employees and cleaners. ‘However much it plastered over the all-too-real cracks, one of the leading narratives of much strike literature was that of a united Wales standing against an external foe.’14 Indeed, so broadly based was the Welsh Congress in Support of the Mining Communities, established in Cardiff in October, that it was able to adopt the slogan ‘The NUM Fights for Wales’.15
The strike marked the high point of a brief, if now largely forgotten, period of popular protest between 1979 and 1984 which was characterised by student radicalism, new wave music, alternative bookshops and massive peace demonstrations organised by the re-energised Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament after the publication of E. P. Thompson's influential broadside Protest and Survive (1980). The feature film Pride, directed by Matthew Warchus in 2014, unerringly evokes the mood of the young at the time. What began as a conventional labour dispute quickly became attached to a politics of struggle in the inner cities, linked to the discontents of urban poverty and laced with the concerns of environmentalists and feminists. Black and ethnic minority groups and gays and lesbians rallied to the miners, recognising affinities between the latter's mistreatment and their own. Long-standing tensions between the police, the urban poor and the black community had fuelled the riots in Brixton and the Liverpool 8 district in 1981, and distrust of the police also became common within the mining communities: ‘Harassment by some police of men and women taking coal from wherever they could find it became a dominating feature of daily life.’16 In Nottinghamshire extra forces were drafted in to turn away ‘presumed pickets’, and quiet villages became habituated to inordinate numbers of police, house-to-house searches, road blocks and unprecedented restrictions on freedom of movement. The National Council for Civil Liberties reported that ‘many police officers from other forces who for the first time have had to work alongside colleagues from urban forces have not been at all happy with what they have seen’.17 The police deployed had been ‘systematically retrained in riot control, and readily mobile Police Support Units set up in every force [sic], following a review of police training in 1981 initiated in response to the urban riots of that year’.18
Money poured in from the troubled Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham. In Haringey leaflets and badges were printed in Turkish and Greek. Support for the miners, pastoral and practical, was received from Quakers, churches and other faiths. In Liverpool, riven with unemployment, sectarian division and social unrest, the Anglican bishop, David Sheppard, an outspoken critic of Thatcher, worked alongside the Catholic archbishop, Derek Worlock, in ministering to Lancashire miners and their dependants. The Asian community in Southall adopted the Betteshanger pit in Kent.19 In Glasgow collections were organised by the Indian Workers’ Association and in Birmingham worshippers at Sikh temples donated food.
Industrial chaplains working with the NUM in Selby, Durham and Nottingham warned of the damage as pits were left unattended and spoke of the suffering they had witnessed at first hand. A Church of England briefing paper reported strategic interventions from the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of Sheffield and Birmingham and the exchanges in The Times of 2 October 1984 between Peter Walker, Secretary of State for Energy, and the bishop of Durham: ‘Unfortunately, the Government to which you belong does not seem to care for the steadily increasing number of people who are unemployed, and are otherwise marginalised in society, and does not seem to care that it does not care.’20
The strength of feeling for the miners was prompted by the extent to which Thatcher had already restructured the economy, producing massive job losses and a drastic reduction in the size of Britain's industrial base. Two million manufacturing jobs had been lost between 1979 and 1981 in what William Keegan termed ‘the worst recession since the war, with manufacturing output dropping by nearly 20 per cent and unemployment more than doubling from 1.3 million to nearly 3.5 million in 1983’.21 To make explicit comparisons with the 1930s, the organisers of the People's March for Jobs in 1981 had followed the route of the Jarrow March of 1936.
By 1984 Thatcher had become closely identified with the controversial monetarist policies implemented to control inflation, improve Britain's global competitiveness and reverse Britain's long-term economic decline. Moreover, she was often held personally responsible for the human misery that ensued from the Conservative Government's policy of allowing ‘uncompetitive’ and ‘uneconomic’ industries to go to the wall. It was largely the dramatic success of the expedition to reclaim the Falkland Islands from Argentinian military occupation in April 1982 that transformed the prime minister's personal fortunes and resulted in an electoral landslide for the Conservative Party in June 1983.22
A key legacy of the disastrous ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–79 was the public equation of the right to strike with trade union irresponsibility and the misuse of power. The spectacle of uncollected rubbish festering, ambulances ignoring emergency calls and grave diggers refusing to bury the dead moved industrial relations to the forefront of the Conservative agenda. As Robert Saunders put it, the ‘ “Winter of Discontent” not only damaged the Labour Party and created a mood of revulsion against the unions; it also helped to resolve the incoherence within the Conservative's own union policy.’23 Hence, the miners’ strike took place in the context of three pieces of employment legislation (1980, 1982 and 1984) although ‘Only the South Wales National Union of Mineworkers which was sued at different times by two haulage firms and whose assets were sequestrated in August 1984 as a result, can be said to have been seriously affected by what were supposedly the Thatcher government's major anti-strike devices.’24 As Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, ‘had we fought an October general election the manifesto would have included no significant measures on union reform’.25
Confidential papers released by The National Archives in 2013 and 2014 reveal unprecedented stockpiling of coal over the winter of 1983/84 and just how high the curtailment of union power ranked in Thatcher's strategic thinking. The minutes of a secret meeting in September 1983 set out the full extent of the projected pit closure programme. Ian MacGregor, whose appointment as Chairman of the National Coal Board in March 1983 had been personally approved by Thatcher, planned to shut seventy-five ‘uneconomic’ pits over three years (1983–85) and to cut 64,000 jobs. Two out of three Welsh miners would be made redundant, 35 per cent of mines in Scotland, 48 per cent in the North East of England, 50 per cent in South Yorkshire, 46 per cent in the South Midlands and the entire Kent coalfield were to close.26 In January 1983 Nigel Lawson advised that ‘If Scargill succeeds in bringing about such a strike, we must do everything in our power to defeat him, including ensuring that the strike results in widespread closures.’27 Ferdinand Mount noted that ‘We must neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership wherever this corresponds to the wishes of the workforce.’28 It was hoped by the end of the century to see ‘a trade union movement whose exclusive relationship with the Labour Party is reduced out of all recognition’.29
The strike was sustained through an extensive network of miners’ support groups stretching from Aberdeen to Belfast and from Ipswich to the Isle of Wight. They were responsible for collecting money, groceries, clothing, toys, toiletries, shoes and other essentials. ‘Twinning’ arrangements were common: Norwich with Ollerton, Harlow, Huntingdon and Stevenage with Welbeck, St Albans with Newstead. Supporters overcame vocal objections to ‘bucket’ collections in shopping precincts and town centres, especially in Conservative-controlled areas, and maximised public sympathy by the strategy of aggregating the miners and their dependants: children were widely perceived as innocent parties in the dispute and women as (relatively) untarnished by unpopular picket-line violence. Leaflets promoting the Gwent Food Fund, for example, emphasised that all food was distributed to strikers and their families. The Labour Research Department estimates that the numbers in groups varied from ‘six to 110, with most in the ten to fifty range and the average being thirty’.30 Moreover, ‘weekly collections ranged from £25 (Waveney Town, Suffolk) to £1,000 (Isle of Wight and Kirby) but the average amount collected was almost £240 a week’.31 The support committees were, in the main, run by members of the Labour Party, the Communist Party and non-aligned trade unionists; many were set up by constituency Labour parties or local trades councils. A wide spectrum of Trotskyist, anarchist and other left groups either put aside their sectarian differences to work inside these committees or operated separately. In the provinces supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which had some 90,000 national members and a further 250,000 in local branches, were often active.32
The strongest groups were large, efficient and formidably well organised. The Oxford Miners’ Support Group ‘raised £111,000 in cash and food and received regular donations from ninety-two trade union organisations in Oxfordshire and forty-five Labour Party organizations’.33 Others were informal and extempore in nature. There is no national register of miners’ support groups. Many did not keep systematic records, leaving few, if any, traces of their existence behind. As Alison New of the Cambridge Miners’ Support Group put it: ‘We were too busy creating the historical record to document it.’34 What is true in Cambridge is true of hundreds of similar groups in England, Scotland and Wales.
Lifelong personal friendships developed out of solidarity and sustenance. As Norma Dolby from Derbyshire wrote in her strike diary: ‘whenever we were in trouble, or needed anything they were there. Never will those ties be broken; we will be friends for life.’35 Miners’ families in Nottinghamshire villages enjoyed free holidays in supporters’ homes: ‘everybody got close to one family in Cambridge and so that is where they always stayed whenever we went there’.36 In St Albans 600 toys were carefully labelled so that every child in Newstead and Annesley received an age-appropriate present at Christmas. Dundee ‘adopted’ more than seventy East Fife coalfield babies born during the strike.37 Raphael Samuel suggests that support of this kind ‘owed more to the humanitarian spirit of Good Works than, in any classical trade union sense, solidarity’.38 David Edgar wrote that fundraising ‘was closer to the impetus of Live Aid [July 1985] than the proletarian solidarity that won the miners their emblematic victory at Birmingham's Saltley Gate in 1972’.39
Traditional proletarian solidarity was demonstrated by the rail unions (National Union of Railwaymen, Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, and ASLEF (Associated Society of Locomotive Steam Enginemen and Firemen)), which blocked attempts to move coal from Nottinghamshire by rail, by lorry drivers (Transport and General Workers’ Union) and seafarers (National Union of Seamen) handling coal at the ports. Fleet Street print workers stopped a front page in The Sun appearing with the headline ‘Mine Führer’ and a photograph of Arthur Scargill supposedly giving a Nazi salute.40 Equivocal attitudes at the highest echelons of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) contrasted markedly with the enthusiasm demonstrated by the rank and file. Virtually every TUC-affiliated union had members fundraising voluntarily. The prodigious activities of the Birmingham Trades Council were chronicled in Birmingham and the Miners’ Strike (1986). The GMBATU (General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union) gave £1 million centrally.41 NALGO (National and Local Government Officers Association) donated a national total of £66,342. Many trade union branches set up their own support groups, with women trade unionists often working directly with women's action groups in the coalfields.42 In August a ‘26-truck convoy arrived in Yorkshire from London conveying £100,000 worth of food’, organised by SOGAT (Society of Graphical and Allied Trades).43 Of the twenty-four trades councils in a Labour Research Department survey, the ‘average council collected £230 per week’.44 The miners’ families’ Christmas appeal with full-page press advertisements signed by Howard Brenton, Judi Dench, Margaret Drabble, David Edgar, Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon raised a quarter of a million pounds, as well as 130,000 toys from the French trade unions.45
Well-wishers frequently bypassed the official NUM Miners’ Solidarity Fund, sending their money directly to pits or women's groups. Twinning arrangements were often haphazard: workers in Sheffield City Council Employment Department ‘stuck a pin in a map and it landed on Thurcroft’.46 There was no parity of income between pits. Those with backing from big trade unions and constituency Labour parties or prosperous hinterlands fared better. Barnsley, Sheffield and Doncaster ‘provided free meals, food and clothing vouchers, and lodgings allowances for single miners as well as deferring or waiving rents and rates’.47 Blaenau Gwent Council gave food vouchers to every miner and Torfaen Council waived miners’ rents.48
Two contentious issues accounted for the equivocation of the TUC and the Labour Party nationally. The most divisive was the decision of the NUM not to hold a national ballot requiring a majority of 55 per cent (later changed to 50) under union rule 43. Instead, a national executive committee resolution of 19 April called upon all areas to join those already involved in area strikes based on rule 41.49 Since an estimated 80 per cent of NUM members were on strike in April, critics argued that a strategic opportunity had been lost to win over Nottinghamshire and demonstrate the legitimacy of the strike to the rest of the trade union movement.50 Scargill's tactics and conduct of the strike were also controversial. The refrain, ‘Arthur Scargill, we'll support you ever more’, sung to the tune of ‘Cwm Rhondda’, echoed across the picket lines in the militant coalfields of Yorkshire and Kent, where Scargill was lionised as the defender of working-class interests. But his reluctance to work more closely with the TUC put him at odds with General Secretary Norman Willis and union officials intent on brokering a settlement with MacGregor. For this and other reasons the TUC General Council proved largely ineffective in mobilising support.
Television images of violent confrontations with the police did nothing to help Labour's electoral prospects. Moreover, Scargill's strategy of ‘picketing out’ the working collieries created difficulties with senior figures in the Labour Party, including Neil Kinnock and Stan Orme, shadow secretary for energy, who were arguing strongly for the alternative energy policy outlined in The Case for Coal (1984). Kinnock, the son and grandson of a miner, representing a mining constituency, Islwyn, had replaced Michael Foot in 1983 in a closely fought leadership contest in which he had rounded on Scargill, accusing him of ‘destroying the coal-industry single-handed’ and of being the ‘labour movement's nearest equivalent to a First World War general’.51 Kinnock's personal support for the strike was never in question, although he did not visit a picket line until 3 January, following a promise to his constituents.52 He was close to the leaders of the South Wales Federation and his brother-in-law was in charge of the pickets at Wylfa power station.53 Kinnock made ‘seventy speeches in favour of coal as the opinion polls displayed a continuing and – for a long time worsening – effect of the strike on Labour's standing’, but came to believe it essential to distance himself from the strikers if the Labour Party was to win the next election.54
Many Labour-controlled authorities, councillors, constituency Labour parties, MPs, and party officials worked tirelessly for the miners until the end: Joyce Gould, the Women's Officer, ‘was constantly syphoning funds to us and trying to make the contacts and encouraging women's councils and women's sections to make contact with us’.55 The disappointment of Labour Party supporters who had formed the backbone of the miners’ support groups and ‘adopted’ striking collieries was palpable. As Huw Beynon put it, the ‘failure of the Labour Party to initiate action in support of their cause, to point vigorously to questions of unemployment and energy policy; to raise clearly important issues about civil rights and the workings of the police force and the legal system, was not simply treacherous, it was incomprehensible’.56
Also backing the strikers was the Communist Party, dwindling in size and internally divided between its Eurocommunist leadership, who looked to the theoretical journal Marxism Today, and the ‘hardline’ readers of the Morning Star, which had passed out of party control. Seriously weakened by its internal problems, the party was still able to exert a disproportionate influence in the NUM, largely due to the positioning of its key activists. These included Jean Miller in Barnsley, Kath Mackay and Vicky Seddon in Sheffield, Hywel Francis and George Rees in Wales, Ida Hackett in Nottinghamshire, Mark Ashton in the gay community and Ella Egan, daughter of Scottish president Abe Moffat, who co-ordinated the National Union of Mineworkers’ Scottish Area (NUMSA) women's groups. Egan and Lorraine Bowler from Yorkshire were both on the committee of Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC).
Broad leftism, represented by Mick McGahey as vice president of the NUM, was the dominant political force within the NUM in South Wales and Scotland, the areas known to be most critical of the national conduct of the strike. McGahey, although persistently rumoured to have serious reservations, remained publicly loyal to Scargill throughout. A Scottish miners’ leader, George Bolton, vice president of the NUMSA, was the chairman of the Communist Party. Historically, there had always been a strong communist presence in the NUM – the Scottish presidents, Abe and Alex Moffatt, Laurence Daly (Peter Heathfield's predecessor), Arthur Horner and Will Paynter had played important roles in earlier struggles. The funeral of Paynter, a former president of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, took place during the strike. The party was still important in regions of the NUM where it had officials at pit or area level, and in coalfields where rank-and-file members were veterans of the industrial disputes of the 1970s. Malcolm Pitt, leader of the NUM in Kent in 1972, was jailed briefly during the 1984 strike.
In 1984 the Communist Party was intent on building a ‘broad democratic alliance’ to reflect the importance of the ‘new social forces’ in British society in accordance with the position in its manifesto, the British Road to Socialism (1977). The manifesto marked a radical departure in asserting that the struggle for socialism needed to extend beyond the working class and involve ‘not only an association of class forces but of other important forces in society which emerge out of areas of oppression not always directly connected with the relations of production’.57 Those with whom communists sought to engage included the women's movement, campaigners for black and minority ethnic rights, the peace movement, gays and lesbians and progressive elements within Scottish and Welsh nationalism. This theoretical position, with its rejection of ‘workerism’ and understanding of the importance of identity politics, made it possible for many key academics, activists and intellectuals, such as Beatrix Campbell, to support the miners while foregrounding aspects of their own identities (feminism, Welsh identity, gay activism).
As Peter Ackers suggests, the leadership of the Communist Party were ‘much more critical of the official conduct of the strike than their measured written statements would suggest’.58 This was because ‘solidarity with the miners was an extremely emotive and morally loaded issue of loyalty on the left’ and
Eurocommunists with official positions in the party and trade unions could ill-afford to launch frontal assaults on the leadership of the NUM or policies like striking without a national ballot. This would have led to immediate internal defeat by labor [sic] movement loyalists at Party Congress or Morning Star meetings. The struggle to stay ‘on-side’ was constant.59
The eleven gay and lesbian support groups formed during the strike reflected the policies of the organised left in London and local authorities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Southampton and, notably, Sheffield under David Blunkett. Members of Bristol South Labour Party, which supported Welsh miners, had belonged to the Bristol Campaign for Homosexual Equality and the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights.60 The London boroughs of Brent, Hackney, Greenwich, Islington and Lambeth were particularly active in the promotion of gay rights. Between 1981 and May 1984 ‘grants totalling at least £292,548 were approved for gay groups’ in London and the £751,000 committed to the London Lesbian and Gay Community Centre in Islington brought the total to £1,043,548.61 In 1983 the Greater London Council, chaired by Ken Livingstone, set up a Gay Working Party which advised on grant applications and maintained contact with over 100 such groups.62 Livingstone also chaired the Mineworkers’ Defence Committee during the strike.
Diarmaid Kelliher has analysed one group that put socialist politics on the agenda of the London gay community and sexual politics on the agenda of the trade unions. Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, whose activities were memorialized in Pride, was set up by Mike Jackson and Mark Ashton (a former chairman of the Young Communist League). The £20,000 raised is estimated to have paid about a quarter of the bills in Dulais, helping to break down homophobic attitudes in rural Wales: ‘Rather than their sexuality it was the metropolitan lifestyle of the young activists that posed the biggest problem.’63 Their solidarity was transformative largely because they refused to allow their own sexuality to be subsumed. In consequence, the NUM was invited to lead the London Gay Pride March in 1985 and supported the first resolutions in favour of gay rights passed at the TUC and Labour Party conferences that year.
WAPC was launched in May 1984 at a rally in Barnsley attended by 10,000 women and a national delegate conference in Chesterfield in November. Because their key objectives, preventing colliery closures and job losses, were endorsed nationally by the NUM they were accepted, albeit with some resistance, in coalfields where patriarchal attitudes had been naturalised in the workplace and the home for generations. However, they differed from working-class women who had defended their own jobs in the Grunwick (1978) and Dagenham machinists’ (1967) disputes: the jobs underground which they fought to save were tightly regulated by unions which had excluded women from membership and in which women had been prohibited from working under the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842. Women were thus engaged in a struggle on two fronts: to stop pit closures and to enable women to participate fully in the coal dispute and to have their own distinctive voices and perspectives heard.
To this end, WAPC accentuated their credentials as loyal miners’ wives and family members, thus legitimising women's involvement, winning themselves plaudits from the labour movement and access to the male-dominated political spaces hitherto occupied exclusively by the NUM. ‘Miners’ wives’ is, of course, an inaccurate (albeit common) misnomer for activists who attempted to make contact with all the women in the coalfields whose lives were affected by the strike and who ‘believed that the dispute was as much our dispute as the men's because we had as much suffering as the men who worked down the pit’.64 Many miners’ wives did not take part in the strike or were actively opposed to it, while some women working in colliery canteens were on strike in their own right. Even the ‘seventy five rule’ stipulating that three-quarters of WAPC members should be from mining families still left one in four women with no familial connection to a miner.
Without consciously using a feminist vocabulary, WAPC recognised that sexist and patronising attitudes constituted a deterrent to women's political involvement and insisted on their right to engage separately in the strike. They used their influence with the NUM and status as ‘authentic’ representatives of the mining districts to make women's perspectives heard on issues such as peace, jobs, health and education, and other subjects on which the union had no policy, developing relationships with protestors at the Greenham Common peace camp. Reciprocal visits led to the formation of Greenham Women for a Miners’ Victory and to regular collections at the camp gates. ‘Mines not missiles’ became a popular slogan on badges and T-shirts and ‘Mines not Missiles’ groups were set up.
While the women's action and support groups should not be romanticised, the very existence of hundreds of groups organised by women for which documentary evidence exists was clearly of major political significance – whatever comparators may be used – as were the role that these groups played in mitigating day-to-day hardship and their impact on the lives and consciousness of the women who ran them.65 Women's groups fed and clothed entire communities, acquiring expertise on all strike-related matters, from Department of Health and Social Security claims to mortgage repayments and international solidarity, as well as providing many sought-after public speakers. For example, Lynne Cheetham, a miner's wife from Point of Ayr, ‘very nervous and apprehensive’, addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, won instant acclaim and toured mining towns and car factories in France, raising thousands of pounds.66 The strike brought together ‘accidental’ or ‘circumstantial activists’ whose commitment was a product of their life circumstances and ‘long term activists’ whose political outlook had been formed over an extended time-span. The distinction was a loose one. Many miners’ wives made the transition from ‘circumstantial’ to long-term activist: Sian James, MP for Swansea East, is the best known. Neither were ‘long term activists’ invariably feminist or middle class (‘parachuted into the coalfields and, once the action was over headed back to their middle-class London homes to write their Ph.Ds’).67
WAPC, which held committee meetings in the NUM headquarters in Sheffield, was never a monolith and the group was subject to internal fissures, divisions and tensions. The prominence of Anne Scargill and Betty Heathfield as ex officio members led to criticisms that the organisation was being orchestrated at a national level by the NUM president and general secretary.68 However, WAPC enjoyed remarkable success in drawing many women into political activity for the first time. What women brought to the strike was the disregard for hierarchy that was the hallmark of the women's movement in the 1980s, coupled with a spontaneity that challenged the procedures and assumptions of the trade unions. ‘Without a formal structural base, without such things as standing orders, rules and constitutions, the women of the coalfields launched a massive political education campaign, publicising through the country and abroad what was happening in the coalfields and its implications for other workers.’69
WAPC tactics, such as overnight occupations of empty properties or the use of the suffragette colours on banners, were reminiscent of Edwardian first-wave feminism, while their ‘women only’ groups placed WAPC on a continuum with other feminist organisations of the 1980s. However, working-class women often saw feminism as a procrustean bed in which they did not wish to be placed, simultaneously attempting to disassociate themselves from the negative connotations attached to the word in many working-class communities while acting in recognisably feminist ways. Attitudes have mellowed considerably over time. Interviewed for the British Library's ‘Sisterhood and After’ oral history recordings of the Women's Liberation Movement, the WAPC's treasurer, Betty Cook, hoped that ‘future generations will gain inspiration from not only Women Against Pit Closures but the women's movement as a whole because we are now part and parcel of the women's movement’.70
Women's activism had a historical precedent in the Lock-Out of 1926, when Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947) led a massive humanitarian effort organised by the Women's Committee of the Labour Party and collected £313,000, clothes, food, milk, shoes and medicines. As Arthur Cook wrote in appreciation: ‘the Women's Committee worked night and day to collect funds, to arrange for our choirs and bands, and to dispatch money, clothes and boots … The Labour Women cared for Humanity, when the Government led by Baldwin tried to starve our people.’71 In her biography, A Woman's Work is Never Done, Elizabeth Andrews, Labour Party Women's Organiser for Wales, recollects miners’ wives, Mrs Beatrice Green of Abertillery, Mrs Johnna James of Tonypandy and Mrs Herman of Pentree, making effective fundraising speeches in London during the Lock-Out.72 Andrews recalls the Labour Advisory Councils and the Relief Committee of the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's Organizations, under whose guidance ‘we set up in Wales in a very short time a wonderful network of organisations to look after expectant and nursing mothers, children, and sick people’.73
Wilkinson spent many weeks living and working with women in the Yorkshire coalfields during the Lock-Out, helping to initiate a tradition of mutual respect and understanding, which was revived by middle-class women ‘outsiders’ active in the pit villages during in the 1984–85 strike. For example, women from the Cambridge Miners’ Support Group regularly helped with the cooking in the Blidworth communal kitchen: ‘It was great for us to have them, they really helped to take some of the burden off us and it made us realise how hard we worked to see how tired it made them.’74 Relationships between women from differing social and educational backgrounds were initially complicated by pre-existing imbalances of power and class differences, as well as some suspicion of motives: ‘Sometimes I got annoyed as it felt like every organisation that wanted attention was jumping on our bandwagon,’ wrote a striking canteen worker and NUM member, Catherine Paton Black.75
What middle-class women like Alison New and Lucy Munby from Cambridge still recollect, however, is the warmth of their reception in the mining villages after hazardous weekly journeys to deliver much-needed money and foodstuffs to places like Rainworth that they could not previously have identified on the map.76 Small children were an ‘ice breaker’, as were the ubiquitous Saturday night social evenings at which supporters were welcomed. ‘The capacity of Newstead folk to create enjoyable community events, even in hard times, was impressive,’ recalls Vivien Bailey of the St Albans support group.77
‘Equal rights feminism’ was strongly embedded in the Staffordshire mining areas, where the reputation of the legendary Fanny Deakin (1883–1968), a working-class maternity rights and childcare campaigner from the mining village of Silverdale, lived on. Deakin had been a communist county councillor and an Alderman in Newcastle-under-Lyme for many years. Jim Phillips suggests that women's activism in the Scottish coalfields may ‘have owed something to Communist Party Tradition, especially in Fife, Communist women expected a greater involvement in public life, and Communist Party men – more or less – accepted the desirability of this’.78 Indeed, women's local knowledge and expertise was crucial to the strike's maintenance. Notts Women Against Pit Closures, which co-ordinated all the Nottinghamshire women's groups, was chaired by Ida Hackett, a veteran communist who had been prominent in the equal pay campaign during the Second World War:
Mrs Hackett liked to tell a story about the time she and fellow union members got involved in a dispute over pay. In the hosiery union, female workers received a higher rate of pay than men and the men weren't happy about the situation. When two national union officials visited Mansfield to persuade the women to accept lower rates, rather than equal pay for men and women, the angry women chased them out of the meeting and up the hill.79
In Nottinghamshire, where families were torn apart on ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ lines, the visibility of women in the action groups counteracted media attention on miners’ wives supporting their husbands’ ‘right to work’. Women joined picket lines, strengthened one another's morale and combated individual feelings of isolation. Women's groups were set up for some thirty Nottinghamshire pits, their nomenclature (such as the Ashfield Women's Support Group or the Langold Women's Action Group) emphasising the importance attached to action and support, respectively.
Working relationships between men and women could sometimes be acrimonious. In Normanton ‘The men wouldn't let us join forces with them, we couldn't speak at Union meetings, we hit a brick wall.’80 Elsewhere, there were disagreements between NUM officials attempting to exercise local control and women demanding decision-making powers. One hundred and six women's groups were organised centrally from Cardiff, covering twenty-seven pits.81 However, as Geoffrey Goodman notes, there was a ‘long tradition and reputation for male chauvinism in Wales in general, and perhaps South Wales in particular’, and the ‘women's activities were not universally welcomed by the men’.82 Although women in Gwent set up their food centre and distributed 6,000 parcels every week it was men who met weekly to make decisions: ‘At no point during the strike were women allowed to attend one of those meetings.’83
Extreme poverty and hardship inevitably put a strain on intimate relationships and necessitated questioning and readjustment of domestic roles. While some marriages were cemented by a sense of common purpose, others fell apart.84 One NUM area official found ‘one in six of those who came to see me experiencing very distressing marital problems … the trauma of the strike was directly related to the break-up of the marriage’.85 A Methodist minister in Barnsley equated women's altered self-perceptions and new understandings of their potential ‘with the New Testament experience of “transfiguration” ’.86 Many working-class women gained confidence to study for higher qualifications, for example at Northern College, or to apply for jobs which would previously have seemed unattainable. However, shifts in consciousness are intractably difficult for the historian to map. The feelings of emancipation, agency and self-esteem which women activists reported were frequently qualified by unhappy personal recollections of the dispute as a time of great personal anxiety, insecurity and distress. The desire to return to normality was strong.
The ‘tradition of women's protests in British mining communities has always been largely community based, deriving its authority as well as its form from commonly understood values’.87 However, the notion of community is itself problematic. As a consequence of earlier pit closures, new housing developments and changing patterns of migration, the terms ‘mining community’ and ‘mining village’ were far from synonymous. Yet, as Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson point out, the ‘frequent references to “mining village” … in the discourse of the strike suggested the continuing vibrancy of historically discrete, spatially isolated and bounded places in the imagination of the Left’.88 Nevertheless, the longevity of the strike demonstrated the value that the miners attached to their trade union and the loyalties learned in both workplace and home, as well as the contempt that was ubiquitously felt for the ‘scab’ labour in Nottinghamshire and the working minority elsewhere. Solidarity was transmitted through the family, with women acting as the bearers of communal consensus. ‘In my family and Dave's we have between us seven miners who all work down the pit, not one of them returned to work during the strike of which I am very proud,’ testified Janine Head, a Normanton activist.89
The miners’ epic struggle in defence of their industry and their communities secured them a place in the annals of English radical protest alongside the Jarrow marchers and the demonstrators at Peterloo. However, what few had envisaged at the time was the magnitude of Thatcher's victory or the eradication of the coal industry in places like the Welsh valleys where mining had been a way of life for generations. In 1984, Britain had 180 working deep-cast coal mines and 181,400 miners.90 In 2013 the NUM's figures revealed 1,283 mineworkers left in the industry.91 With the closure of Kellingley pit in Yorkshire in December 2015, the history of deep-cast mining in Britain came to an end.
And the price of the miners’ defeat? Kinnock estimates that ‘by all reasonable reckoning’ breaking the strike had ‘cost 47 billion pounds in today's money’.92 It is impossible to calculate exactly how much was collected by the organised labour movement and their supporters, although the mobilisation of money, solidarity and resources was arguably on a scale that had not been witnessed since the Aid for Spain Movement in the 1930s. One estimate is £60 million.93 The value of groceries, toys, clothing, toiletries, infant necessities and holidays can never be known.94
1 House of Lords Debates, 13 November 1984, 457 col. 240.
2 Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography vol. 1 Not for Turning (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013), p. 537.
3 Lesley Sutcliffe and Brian Hill, Let Them Eat Coal: The Political Use of Social Security During the Miners’ Strike (London: Canary Press, 1985), p. 3.
4 Paul Mackney, Birmingham and the Miners’ Strike: A Story of Solidarity (Birmingham: Trades Council, 1987), p. 1.
5 Mike Sanders, ‘ “Alive to Production, Misery, Slavery – Dead to Enjoyment and Happiness” ’, in Simon Popple and Ian W. Macdonald (eds), Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), pp. 10–22, at p. 11.
6 See, for example, Seamus Milne's pro-Scargill, The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso, 1994) and Ian K. MacGregor with Rodney Tyler's pro-Thatcher, The Enemies Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike, 1984–5 (London: Collins, 1986).
7 Beatrix Campbell, Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties (London: Virago, 1984), p. 97.
8 Raymond Williams, ‘Mining the Meaning: Key Words in the Miners’ Strike’, in Richard Gable (ed.), Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), p. 125.
9 See Jaclyn J. Gier-Viskovatoff and Abigail Porter, ‘Women of the British Coalfields on Strike in 1926 and 1984: Documenting Lives Using Oral History and Photography’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19 (1998), 199–230.
10 W. John Morgan and Ken Coates, The Nottinghamshire Coalfield and the British Miners’ Strike 1984–85 (Nottingham: University of Nottingham Department of Adult Education, c.1990), p. 27; Peter Wilsher, Donald Macintyre and Michael Jones, Strike: Thatcher, Scargill and the Miners (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), p. 107.
11 Hywel Francis, History on our Side: Wales and the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike (Ferryside, Wales: Iconau, 2009), p. 45.
12 Doreen Massey and Hilary Wainwright, ‘Beyond the Coalfields: The Work of the Miners’ Support Groups’, in Huw Beynon (ed.), Digging Deeper for the Miners: Issues in the Miners’ Strike (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 149–68, at p. 152.
13 Massey and Wainwright, ‘Beyond the Coalfields’, p. 154.
14 Daryl Leeworthy, ‘The Secret Life of Us: 1984, the Miners’ Strike and the Place of Biography in Writing History “From Below” ’, European Review of History 19 (2012), 825–46, at 830.
15 Francis, History on our Side, p. 61.
16 Francis, History on our Side, p. 45.
17 John Alderson, Larry Gostin, Sarah McCabe, Ian Martin, Christopher Mason and Peter Wallington, The First Report of the Independent Inquiry Civil Liberties and the Miners’ Dispute (London: National Council for Civil Liberties, 1984), p. 17.
18 Sarah McCabe and Peter Wallington with John Alderson, Larry Gostin and Christopher Mason, The Police, Public Order and Civil Liberties: Legacies of the Miners’ Strike (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 23.
19 Labour Research Department, The Miners’ Case (London: LRD, 1984), p. 14.
20 The Church and the Miners: Strike: a Briefing Paper (London: General Synod Board for Social Responsibility Industrial and Economic Affairs, 1984), pp. 5–6.
21 Roger Middleton, Government versus the Market: The Growth of the Public Sector, Economic Management and British Economic Performance, c.1890–1979 (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), p. 630; William Keegan, Mrs Thatcher's Economic Experiment (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 10.
22 Francis Beckett and David Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line: The 1984 Miners’ Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain (London: Constable, 2009), p. 36.
23 Robert Saunders, ‘ “Crisis: What Crisis?”: Thatcherism and the Seventies’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds), Making Thatcher's Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 39.
24 Eric J. Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London: Routledge, 2013 [1997]), p. 38; Richard de Friend and Gerry R. Rubin, ‘Civil Law and the 1984–85 Coal Dispute’, Journal of Law and Society 12 (1985), 321–32, at 322.
25 Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 414.
26 See confidential minute, 15 September 1983, www.margaretthatcher.org, document 133121 (accessed 10 October 2014).
27 Guardian, 1 August 2013, p. 16.
28 Guardian, 1 August 2013, p. 16.
29 Guardian, 1 August 2013, p. 16.
30 Labour Research Department, Solidarity with the Miners, p. 17.
31 Labour Research Department, Solidarity with the Miners, p. 18.
32 James Hinton, ‘Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’, in Roger S. Powers (ed.), Protest, Power and Change (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997), p. 63.
33 Alan Thornett (ed.), Preface, The Miners’ Strike in Oxford (Oxford: Oxford and District Trades Union Council, 1985), p. 7.
34 Alison New, conversation with Mary Joannou, 1 October 2014.
35 Norma Dolby, Norma Dolby's Diary: An Account of the Great Miners’ Strike (London: Verso, 1987), p. 17.
36 Lynn Beaton, Shifting Horizons (London: Canary Press, 1985), p. 211.
37 Jim Phillips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984–85 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 117.
38 Raphael Samuel, preface to Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield and Guy Boanas (eds), The Enemy Within: Pit Villages and the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. x.
39 David Edgar, ‘The Miners’ Strike: Coal not Dole’, Guardian, Review, 5 April, 2004, p. 19.
40 Granville Williams, ‘Trade Union Solidarity and the Miners’ Strike’, in Granville Williams (ed.), Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath (London: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, 2009), pp. 36–46, at p. 39.
41 Jonathan Winterton and Ruth Winterton, Coal, Crisis and Conflict: The 1984–5 Miners’ Strike in Yorkshire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 120.
42 Granville Williams, ‘The Media and the Miners’, in in Granville Williams (ed.), Shafted, p. 31.
43 Martin Harvey, Martin Jenkinson and Mark Metcalf, The Miners’ Strike (Barnsley: Pen and Sword History, 2014), p. 120.
44 Labour Research Department, Solidarity with the Miners (London: LRD, 1985), p. 11.
45 John Rose, ‘But Once a Year’, New Statesman, 28 December, 1984, p. 15.
46 Peter Gibbon and David Steyne, Thurcroft: A Village and the Miners’ Strike, an Oral History (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1986), p. 59.
47 Winterton and Winterton, Coal, Crisis and Conflict, p. 133.
48 Brian Curtis, The South Wales Miners 1964–1985 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 211.
49 De Friend and Rubin, ‘Civil Law and the 1984–85 Coal Dispute’, p. 323.
50 De Friend and Rubin, ‘Civil Law and the 1984–85 Coal Dispute’, p. 323.
51 Cited in Robert Harris, The Making of Neil Kinnock (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 164.
52 Winterton and Winterton, Coal, Crisis and Conflict, p. 113.
53 Martin Adeney and John Lloyd, The Miners’ Strike 1984–5: Loss without Limit (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 293.
54 John Lloyd, Understanding the Miners’ Strike (London: Fabian Society, 1985), p. 16.
55 Jean McCrindle, interviewed by Sheila Rowbotham, ‘More than Just a Memory: Some Political Implications of Women's Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984–5’, Feminist Review 23 (Socialist Feminism: Out of the Blue) (1986), 109–24, at 119.
56 Huw Beynon (ed.), Introduction, Digging Deeper for the Miners (London: Verso, 1985), p. 22.
57 The CPGB, The British Road to Socialism (London: CPGB, 1977), p. 16.
58 Peter Ackers, ‘Gramsci at the Miners’ Strike: Remembering the 1984–85 Eurocommunist Alternative Industrial Relations Strategy’, Labor History 55 (2014), 151–72, at 156.
59 Ackers, ‘Gramsci at the Miners’ Strike’, p. 156.
60 Daryl Leeworthy, ‘ “Don't Worry about Him, He's a Scargill Man”: The Strike and After’, https://historyonthedole.wordpress.com, 12 March 2015 (accessed 20 March 2015).
61 Rachel Tingle, Gay Lessons: How Public Funds are Used to Promote Homosexuality among Children and Young People (London: Pickwick Books, 1986), p. 8; GLC Agenda, 22 May 1984, quoted Tingle, Gay Lessons.
62 Tingle, Gay Lessons.
63 Diarmaid Kelliher, ‘Solidarity and Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners 1984–5’, History Workshop Journal, 77 (2014), 240–62, at 242; Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 166.
64 Jean Miller, ‘Barnsley’, in Vicky Seddon (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Women and the Pit Strike (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), pp. 227–40, at p. 228.
65 LSE Women's Library, Papers of Jean McCrindle, including records of Women Against Pit Closures, 7J MC.
66 Tony Heath, ‘The Miner's Wife Who Found Her Voice and Spread the Word’, Guardian, 2 June, 1984, p. 14.
67 Triona Holden, Queen Coal: Women of the Miners’ Strike (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), p. 139.
68 Keith Laybourn, Marxism in Britain: Dissent, Decline and Re-emergence 1945–c.2000 (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 127–8.
69 Joan Witham, Hearts and Minds: The Story of the Women of Nottinghamshire in the Miners’ Strike 1984–5 (London: Canary Press, 1986), p. 25.
70 Betty Cook interview, Sisterhood and After: an Oral History of the Women's Liberation Movement, The British Library, www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/clips/activism/campaigns-and-protests/143237.html (accessed 24 March 2014).
71 A. J. Cook, quoted in Marion Phillips, Women and the Miners’ Lock-Out: The Story of the Women's Committee for the Relief of the Miners’ Wives and Children (London: Labour Publishing, 1927), p. 25.
72 Elizabeth Andrews, A Woman's Work is Never Done (Ystrad, Rhondda: Cymru Democratic Publishing Society, 1956), p. 25.
73 Andrews, A Woman's Work is Never Done, p. 24.
74 Lynn Beaton, Shifting Horizons (London: Canary Press, 1985), p. 211.
75 Catherine Paton Black, At the Coalface: My Life as a Miner's Wife (London: Headline, 2012), p. 303.
76 Conversations between Alison New, Lucy Munby, Vivien Bailey and Mary Joannou, all of whom were active in Nottinghamshire during the strike, 17 November 2014.
77 Vivien Bailey, Thirty Years On: The 1984/5 Miners’ Strike and the St Albans Nottinghamshire–NUM Miners’ Support Group (St Albans: privately produced pamphlet, 2014), no pagination.
78 Phillips, Collieries, Communities and the Miners’ Strike in Scotland, 1984–85, p. 135.
79 Nottingham Post, 9 May 2012, www.nottinghampost.com/Obituary-Ida-Hackett/story (accessed 1 February 2015).
80 Janine Head, Mavis Watson and Teresa Webb, Striking Figures: The Story of Normanton and Altofts Miners Support Group 1984–5 (Halifax: Artivan and Striking Figures, 1986), p. 23.
81 Jean Stead, Never the Same Again: Women and the Miner's Strike 1984–5 (London: Women's Press, 1987), p. 17.
82 Geoffrey Goodman, The Miners’ Strike (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 90.
83 Alex Gray, ‘Women's Place in the Welsh Congress’, in Seddon (ed.), The Cutting Edge, pp. 205–10, at p. 207.
84 Chrys Salt and Jim Layzell (eds), Here We Go! Women's Memories of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike (London: Political Committee, Co-operative Retail Services, c.1985), p. 4.
85 Janet Peters, ‘A Day in the Life of a Pit Prop’, Guardian, 2 June, 1984, p. 14.
86 Brian Jenner, Christian Reflections on the Miners’ Struggle (Sheffield: New City, 1986), p. 64.
87 Gier-Viskovatoff and Porter, ‘Women of the British Coalfields on Strike in 1926 and 1984’, p. 202.
88 Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson, ‘ “Side by Side with Our Men?”: Women's Activism, Community, and Gender in the 1984–1985 British Miners’ Strike’, International Labor and Working-Class History 75 (2009), 68–84, at 74.
89 Janine Head, quoted in Striking Figures, p. 27.
90 National Coal Board, Reports and Accounts 1985/6 (London: National Coal Board, 1986), p. 19.
91 Annual returns for 2013 as submitted to the Certification Office, published 24 November, 2014, www.NUM.org.uk (accessed 12 March 2015).
92 Neil Kinnock interview, www.historyandpolicy.org/…/the-miners-strike-30-years-on-conference (accessed 1 June 2015).
93 Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons, The Great Miners’ Strike of 1984–5 and its Lessons (London: SWP, 1985), p. 127.
94 A multimedia archive and website on the work the Cambridge Miners Support Group including interviews with key activists has been compiled by the Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University and can be accessed online at www.cambridgeminersstrike.com/.