Robert Gildea looks at the recent commemorations of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike and finds many inspiring positives that emerged from their historic battle.

Forty years on, the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 is being vigorously commemorated, but in very different ways. In South Yorkshire on Saturday 9th March, a small procession marched behind a pipe band from Dunscroft to the headgear of Hatfield Main colliery, which still stands.

The atmosphere was lively but edgy, the feeling one of pain and latent anger. “We should never forget the injustices thrust upon us,” said Doncaster Councillor Nigel Ball, who was 18 at the time of the strike, recalling the pit closures that devastated mining communities from Scotland to Kent, but argued that such attacks only brought those communities together.  There were repeated references to history and heritage, and the need to pass the history of struggle to future generations. Former Hatfield miner Dave Douglass, confined to a hospital bed in Sunderland after a stroke, sent a message warning that “the proletariat is still the target, their aim to wipe us out.” He urged a relaunch of a miners’ gala, to be held in Doncaster on the second Saturday in August from 2025.

The procession moved on to the pit club in Stainforth, which was packed to the rafters by a restless crowd. Rose Hunter of the North Stafforshire Miners’ Wives Action Group,recalled that “we watched in horror what the police did to villages in Yorkshire”, occupying them in order to intimidate the miners and force them back to work, criminalising and jailing those who resisted.

Arthur Scargill, the star attraction, paid tribute to the “magnificent” Woman against Pit Closures who had sustained the strike. He then reran the history of the strike, arguing that it began not in March 1984 but in November 1983 with the overtime ban, and that it would have been won if the NUM areas had continued the mass picket after Orgreave, or if the pit deputies’ union NACODS had not betrayed them. “For a year and four  months,” he concluded in heroic mode, “the miners of Britain fought a battle that was alongside the greatest battles of history. It was alongside the battles of the Chartists, the Diggers and the Tolpuddle martyrs, and history will judge who was right and who was wrong.”

Very different was the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Woman against Pit Closures on the previous Saturday, 2nd March, in Durham. Every year, on the second Saturday in July, former miners and their supporters parade into the city centre behind their banners. They feel at home here. Now, in spite of the rain, it was time for the women, and the atmosphere was warm and upbeat.

At the centre of things was Heather Wood, who had brought miners’ wives into Save Easington Area Mines (SEAM) to sustain the strike in County Durham. She introduced Sarah Woolley, the first female General Secretary of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union, who declared: “We know that the reason the Miners’ Strike went on for so long was because of the support of women in their communities. We women weren’t defeated. We found our voices. We had a political education.”

The fighting spirit of the women looked not back, but forward. “We are still here. We still believe in what we believed in then. By God we’d do it all again,” assured Welsh miner’s wife Siân James. Betty Cook, lifelong friend of Anne Scargill, who recalled the picket they had formed and brazier lit outside Michael Heseltine’s Board of Trade to combat a second round of pit closures he announced in 1992. “Our brazier is still burning,” she said. “They cannot put the light out. They’ll never put the light out.”

These commemorations articulate two very different narratives to come out of the Miners’ Strike. The first is of a heroic struggle to defend the pits from the Thatcher government plans to slim down the mining industry ahead of privatisation and to take revenge on the National Union of Mineworkers that had brought down Edward Heath in 1974. The defeat of the strike was followed by pit closures which inflicted unemployment, insecure employment and bad health on former miners, put miners’ families under huge strain and ripped the heart out of mining communities which lost schools, services, leisure facilities and, at worst, suffered the scourge of drug addiction.  Feeling abandoned not only by the Conservatives but often by the Labour Party, many from these communities voted to leave the EU and collapsed the Red Wall.

A second narrative, however,  highlights stories of reinvention and redemption.  Some former miners and miner’s wives, who had left school at 15 or 16, went back into education and found new careers as social workers, probation officers, in citizen’s advice,  mental health and care, with the aim of repairing their broken and abandoned communities. Children of the strike achieved the same by becoming teachers, nurses and GPs. Miners at the Tower colliery in South Wales organised an employee buy-out in 1995, while others continued to promote the trade union movement.

Former miners, their wives and children often became local councillors in order to rebuild their communities, and a few, like Siân James, became MPs. Battles were still fought by and for the miners. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign was formed in 2012, campaigning for a public inquiry along the lines of Hillsborough. In Scotland, former miners who, compared to their comrades in England and Wales, were twice as likely during the strike to be arrested and three times as likely to be criminalised, secured a law in 2022 which removed their strike-related criminal records.

The miners are not done. And maybe their year-long strike has been an inspiration for the many workers who have gone on strike over the last two years in defence of wages and working conditions. Some of that resilience was echoed by Mick Lynch of the RMT who declared in August 2022: “The working class is back. We refuse to be beat, we refuse to be humbled, we refuse to wait for the politicians and policy drivers and we refuse to be poor, any more.”

Robert Gildea is the author of Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85, published by Yale, 2023. He will be speaking about his book at Bookmarks, London, on Friday 15^th March at 6.30pm.