UK miners' strike (1984–1985)
Encyclopedia
The UK miners' strike was a major industrial action
affecting the British coal industry
. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and its defeat significantly weakened the British trades union
movement. It was also seen as a major political and ideological victory for Margaret Thatcher
and the Conservative Party
.
The strike became a symbolic struggle, since the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was one of the strongest unions in the country, viewed by many, including Conservatives in power, as having brought down the Heath government in the union's 1974 strike. The later strike ended with the miners' defeat and the Thatcher government able to consolidate its free market
programme. The political power of the NUM was broken permanently. The dispute exposed deep divisions in British society and caused considerable bitterness, especially in Northern England
and in Wales
. Ten deaths resulted from events around the strike: six pickets, three teenagers searching for coal, and a taxi driver taking a non-striking miner to work.
had been nationalised by Attlee's Post War Labour Government and was in 1984 managed by the National Coal Board
(NCB) under Ian MacGregor
and, as in most of Europe, was heavily subsidised. A number of mines ("pits") in the United Kingdom were profitable and remained open after the strike
, several of which still operate (including one in Warwickshire
and four in Yorkshire
). However, most mines were unprofitable and the government wanted them closed. The viability of many of these mines was called into question, but the government closed many before reports were collated, instead using temporary offers of increased redundancy pay to encourage miners into voting in favour of pit closures. In addition, the government insisted that in order to make the mines profitable they required efficiency improvements to be achieved by means of increased mechanisation and thus job cuts. Many unions resisted this.
The National Union of Mineworkers had a federated structure, influenced by syndicalism
, where branches and regions had a large degree of regional autonomy. Miners in Nottinghamshire
had a very different set of conditions from those in South Wales
, for example. This made the question of "national" action a vexed one, and contributed to confusion over the question of whether a strike ballot was necessary. The only nationally co-ordinated actions were the mass pickets at Orgreave
.
In 1978, the Ridley Plan
for dealing with the power of the coal miners' union was leaked to The Economist
magazine (issue dated 27 May 1978). It reported the plans of the Conservative opposition, led at the time by Margaret Thatcher, and included the steps that any subsequent Conservative government would have to take in order to avoid the fate of the 1970s Heath government, which was widely seen as having been brought down by the miners' strike of 1974. The plan was known and discussed by striking miners.
passed a resolution that a strike should take place if any pit was threatened with closure for reasons other than exhaustion or geological difficulties. In 1982, the members accepted a government offer of a 5.2 percent raise, rejecting their leaders' call for a strike authorisation. In 1983, the Conservative Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher
appointed Ian MacGregor
as head of the National Coal Board
(the UK statutory corporation
that controlled coal mining). He had previously been head of the British Steel
Corporation, which, according to one of Thatcher's biographers, he had turned from one of the least efficient steel-makers in Europe to one of the most efficient, nearly bringing the company into profit. However, this was achieved at the expense of a halving of the workforce in the space of two years. This reputation raised the expectation that jobs would be cut on a similar scale in mining, and confrontations between MacGregor and the leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill
, seemed inevitable.
. Although not widely known at the time, the Thatcher government had prepared against a repeat of the effective 1974 industrial action by stock-piling coal, converting some power stations to burn petroleum, and recruiting fleets of road hauliers to transport coal in case sympathetic railwaymen went on strike to support the miners.
strike action began when workers at the Manvers
complex walked out over the lack of consultation. Over six thousand miners were already on strike when a local ballot led to strike action from 5 March at Cortonwood
Colliery at Brampton Bierlow
, and at Bullcliffe Wood colliery, near Ossett
. The 5 March action was prompted by the further announcement by the Coal Board that five pits were to be subject to "accelerated closure" within just five weeks; the other three were at Herrington
in County Durham
, Snowdown
in Kent
and Polmaise
in Scotland. The next day, pickets from the Yorkshire area appeared at pits in the Nottinghamshire
coal field (one of those least threatened by pit closures). On 12 March 1984, Arthur Scargill
, president of the NUM, declared that the strikes in the various coal fields were to be a national strike and called for strike action from NUM members in all coal fields.
union not to strike created a tense situation in the mines, with NACODS deputies being labelled as "scabs" by union hardliners. On 23 October, one thousand pickets attempted to prevent a sole bath attendant from entering the threatened Emley Moor
colliery. Some of the engineers felt that going on strike would actually work against the cause, as lack of maintenance below ground could allow geological conditions to deteriorate to a state that would prevent the pit from reopening - defeating the whole goal of opposing closures; however, hard-line strikers were not always sympathetic to this line of argument. The first two pits to close in 1985 were Barrow colliery at Worsborough Bridge and Ackton Hall colliery at Featherstone
. Both were closed as they were unsafe for the miners to return to work rather than because continued operation would have been "uneconomic".
. Lancashire
miners had originally been lukewarm about striking, but, ignoring the wishes of the working members, its leaders announced on 22 March that the strike was official. Many miners in South Wales resented how their previous attempts to launch strikes in support of the steel workers and health workers had been largely unsupported, but there were enough pits in the region under threat of closure to gain momentum for the strike in the area. Support was less strong in the Midlands
and North Wales
. In Nottinghamshire, most of the pits had modern equipment and large coal reserves; most of the Nottinghamshire miners remained at work and the Nottinghamshire NUM disagreed with the decision to launch a national strike without a ballot. Many within the NUM condemned them as strikebreaker
s, and the Nottinghamshire branch eventually broke away to form the core of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers
.
A widely reported clash during the strike took place at the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham
on 18 June 1984. This confrontation between striking miners and police, around 10,000 on each side, was dubbed 'The Battle of Orgreave
'. Violence flared after police on horse-back
charged the miners with truncheons
drawn and inflicted serious injuries upon several individuals.
In 1991, the South Yorkshire Police
were forced to pay out £425,000 to thirty-nine miners who were arrested in the events at the incident. Other less well known, but also bloody, police attacks took place, for example, in Maltby, South Yorkshire. These confrontations contained organised police lines including charges by police and police mounted on horseback. In some cases miners organised themselves against this.
Events that encouraged the end of the strike included an assault on a working miner in Castleford
in November and the manslaughter of a taxi driver
driving a working miner to work in South Wales in December. The strike failed to have the widespread impact of earlier stoppages which had led to blackouts and power cuts
in the 1970s; electricity companies were able to maintain supplies throughout the winter, the time of biggest demand.
The union's funds had also run too low to pay for pickets' transportation, and many miners had been unable to pay for heating over the winter. Some mining families resorted to scavenging for coal on spoil tips, a desperate move as most of the "spoil
" was very dangerous and liable to tip. Three children died in this manner. Many others found themselves arrested for trespass and theft.
voted to carry on the strike. Nottinghamshire
, Leicestershire
and South Derbyshire did not send any delegates to the conference.
The end of the strike was felt as a terrible blow to loyal NUM members, though many understood that the extreme poverty being suffered after a year without wages was difficult to bear. Indeed, in many areas, striking miners made a distinction between those who had returned to work after only a couple of months strike, and those who felt forced to return to work for the sake of their children, many months later.
In several pits, miners' wives groups organised the distribution of carnations at the gates on the day the miners went back, the flower that symbolises the hero. Many pits marched back to work behind brass band
s, in processions dubbed "Loyalty Parades".
. When wage reforms were rejected by two national ballots, Gormley declared that each region could decide on these reforms on their own accord; his decisions had been upheld by courts on appeal. Scargill did not call a ballot for national strike action, perhaps due to uncertainty over the outcome. Instead, he attempted to start the strike by allowing each region to call its own strikes, imitating Gormley's strategy over wage reforms; it was argued that 'safe' regions should not be allowed to ballot other regions out of jobs. This decision was upheld by another vote five weeks into the strike. Many miners, especially at the threatened pits, were also opposed to a ballot, due to the time required to organise one and the urgency of the situation arising from the accelerated closure programme. There was a fear that strike supporters would refuse to take part in a ballot. Critics point out that Scargill's policy of letting each region decide seemed inconsistent with the threatened expulsion of the Nottinghamshire branch after 20,000 out of 27,000 miners in the county voted against the strike.
The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher
enforced a recent law that required unions to ballot members on strike action. On 19 July 1984, Thatcher said in the House of Commons that giving in to the miners would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob
; she referred to the striking miners as "the enemy within", and claimed they did not share the values of other British people. "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands
. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty". On the day after the Orgreave picket
of 29 May, which saw five thousand pickets clash violently with police, Thatcher said in a speech:
Arthur Scargill
's response to the incident was:
In August, two miners from Manton
colliery who protested that the strike was not "official" without a ballot took the NUM to court. In September the High Court
ruled that the NUM had breached its own constitution by calling a strike without first holding a ballot. Scargill was fined £1,000 (which was paid for him by an anonymous donor) and the NUM was fined £200,000. When the union refused to pay its fine, an order was made to sequestrate
the union's assets but it was found that they had been transferred abroad. By the end of January 1985 around £5 million of NUM assets had been recovered.
The Trades Union Congress
(TUC) did not support the NUM, seeming to support Thatcher's call for a national ballot. Solidarity action was taken, however, by railworkers
and by dockers, who were both threatened with dismissal if they refused to handle coal. The Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union
, an electricians' union, actively opposed the strike; Ian MacGregor's autobiography detailed how its leaders supplied the government with valuable information that allowed the strike to be defeated. Steelworkers' unions did not support the strike, a stance which was widely resented by the miners after the support that they had given the steel strike in 1980 and after concessions were made by the NUM on deliveries of coke
to steel works during the strike. The National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers
(NACODS) nearly went on strike in September; this was one point where the balance seemed to be tipping in favour of the miners, but Scargill's subsequent contempt of court
orders caused the NUM to be fined and lost it wider support in the trade union movement. MacGregor later admitted that, had NACODS gone ahead with their strike, a compromise would probably have been forced on the Coal Board. Files later made public showed that the Government had an informant inside the TUC, passing them information about the negotiations.
and Nottinghamshire
, where the former were striking and the latter strike-breaking, led to many bitter confrontations in the region. Instances of violence directed against working miners by striking miners were reported. In some cases, this extended to attacks on the property, the families and the pets of working miners.
The Sun
newspaper took a very anti-strike position, as did the Daily Mail
, and even the Daily Mirror and The Guardian
became hostile as the strike went on. The Morning Star
was the only national daily newspaper that was consistently supportive of the striking miners and the NUM.
squads from London) from around Britain to attempt to stop the pickets preventing the strikebreakers working. Many picketers were subject to intimidation
and often violence from the police. Police attempted to stop pickets travelling between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, an action which led to many protests. The government claimed these actions were to safeguard individual civil rights
. Many miners have seen this as class warfare
, with the police as the 'special bodies of armed men' that Friedrich Engels
described.
During the industrial action 11,291 people were arrested and 8,392 charged with offences such as breach of the peace
and obstructing the highway. Former striking miners have alleged that soldiers in police uniform were also used on the picket lines, to avoid publicising the necessity of bringing in the military (this was never proved and is highly unlikely). In many former mining areas antipathy towards the police remains strong to this day because of the violence meted out. The government was criticised for abusing its power when it ruled that local police might be too sympathetic to the miners to take action against the strike, and instead brought in forces from distant counties. The Labour MPs for Doncaster North
and Castleford and Pontefract
both raised concerns in Parliament
over suggestions that the police had asked miners held in custody about their political allegiances.
This strike was also the first in which the provision of welfare benefits were restricted in a way that miners saw as being used as a weapon against strikers. Welfare benefits had never been available to workers on strike but their dependents (i.e. spouses and children) had been entitled to make claims in previous disputes. However, Clause 6 of the 1980 Social Security Act banned the dependents of strikers from receiving "urgent needs" payments and also applied a compulsory deduction from the strikers' dependents' benefits. The government viewed this legislation as not concerned with saving public funds but instead "to restore a fairer bargaining balance between employers and trade unions" by increasing the necessity to return to work. The majority of miners and their families had to survive the strike on handouts, donations from the European Economic Community
's "food mountain" and from charities. Poverty and hunger became rife in the mining heartlands.
A wide network of several hundred miners' support groups were set up, often led by miners' "wives and girlfriends groups", such as Women Against Pit Closures
. These support groups organised thousands of collections outside supermarkets, communal kitchens, benefit concerts and other activities. The strike marked an important development in the traditional mining heartlands, where feminist
ideas had not previously been strong.
(Director-General of MI5
, 1992 – 1996) published an autobiography in 2001 in which she revealed MI5 'counter-subversion' exercises against the NUM and the striking miners, which included the tapping
of union leaders' phones. However, she denied that the agency had informers
in the NUM, specifically denying that then chief executive Roger Windsor
had been an agent.
Socialist groups claimed that the mainstream media deliberately misrepresented the miners' strike, saying of The Sun's reporting of the strike: "The day-to-day reporting involved more subtle attacks, or a biased selection of facts and a lack of alternative points of view. These things arguably had a far bigger negative effect on the miners' cause". It was however argued that none of the facts presented were untrue and should by the same token be presented.
As the strike went on, a series of media reports sought to cast doubt on the integrity of senior NUM officials. In November 1984, there were allegations that Scargill had met with Libya
n agents in Paris, and other senior officials travelled to Libya. Links to the Libyan government were particularly damaging coming seven months after the murder of policewoman Yvonne Fletcher
outside the Libyan embassy in London by Libyan agents. This did not, however, prevent the Thatcher Government buying Libyan oil to help the effort to defeat the strike. In 1990, the Daily Mirror and TV programme The Cook Report
claimed that Scargill and the NUM had received money from the Libyan government. These allegations were based on allegations by Roger Windsor
, who was the NUM official who had spoken to Libyan officials. Roy Greenslade
, the Mirrors editor at the time, said much later he believes his paper's allegations were false. This was long after an investigation by Seumas Milne described the allegations as wholly without substance and a "classic smear campaign".
It was also claimed that Arthur Scargill diverted money donated by Russian miners during the strike. The NUM received payments from the trade unions of Afghanistan
(which was Soviet
-occupied at the time). Soviet miners who sent money to the NUM would not have been able to obtain convertible currency without the support of the Government of the Soviet Union
and Thatcher claimed to have seen documentary evidence that suggests that Soviet-leader Mikhail Gorbachev
authorised these payments. The diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev, a senior party official in the Soviet Union at the time, also lends credence to the interpretation that the funding was provided at the behest of the Soviet government.
The hint of a link tarnished Scargill and yet trust of him amongst striking miners remained firm. Scargill was perceived as a militant hero by the unions, and as a Marxist thug by most of the mainstream press. Scargill always denied these accusations and accused the government of fueling a smear campaign. However, the ex-head of MI5
Dame Stella Rimington
claimed in her autobiography, "We in MI5 limited our investigations to those who were using the strike for subversive purposes."
, Nottinghamshire, by a flying brick during fighting between police, pickets, and non-striking miners, while Green was hit by a truck while picketing at Ferrybridge power station
in Yorkshire. The NUM names its memorial lectures after the two.
A taxi driver, David Wilkie
, was killed on 30 November 1984. He had been taking a non-striking miner to work in the Merthyr Vale
Colliery, South Wales when two striking miners dropped a concrete post onto his car from a road bridge above. He died at the scene. The two miners served a prison sentence for manslaughter
.
The impact of the strike was nowhere near as hard-hitting as previous strikes such as those of the early 1970s. With most homes equipped with oil or gas central heating and the railways long since converted to diesel and electricity, the only remaining significant sector of Britain's national infrastructure that was still reliant upon coal was the electrical generation industry under the Central Electricity Generating Board. The problem of potential power-shortages as a result of a coal strike had been recognised by the Thatcher government which insisted that Britain's coal-fired power stations create their own stockpiles of coal which would keep them running throughout any industrial action. This strategy turned out to be incredibly successful during the miner's strike as the power stations were able to maintain power supplies even through the winter of 1984. It also meant that the striking miners themselves, unable to pay their energy bills without wages, were the only ones who lost out.
During the strike, many pits permanently lost their customers. Much of the immediate problem facing the industry was due to the economic recession in the early 1980s. However, there was also extensive competition within the world coal market as well as a concerted move towards oil and gas
for power production. The Government's own policy, known as the Ridley Plan
was to reduce Britain's reliance on coal; they also claimed that coal could be imported from Australia, America and Colombia
more cheaply than it could be extracted from beneath Britain. The strike subsequently emboldened the NCB to accelerate the closure of many pits on economic grounds.
No figures available for the 1000 N.C.B. staff employees.
. Between the end of the strike and privatisation, pit closures continued with a particularly intense group of closures in the early 1990s. There were 15 former British Coal deep mines left in production at the time of privatisation, however, by March 2005, there were only eight major deep mines left. Since then, the last pit in Northumberland
, Ellington Colliery at Ellington
, has closed whilst pits at Rossington
and Harworth
have been mothballed. In 1983, Britain had 174 working mines; by 2009, this number had decreased to six. During the strike, Scargill had constantly claimed that the government had a long-term plan to reduce the industry in this way. The miners' will to resist deteriorated rapidly and there was a very apathetic response to the intensive period of closures in the early 1990s, despite evidence that there was much more sympathy for the miners then than in 1984.
Nottinghamshire miners had hoped that their pits were safe, but they too were mostly closed in the 1985-1994 period. This was widely resented as a betrayal of the promises that had been made to working miners in the strike; they had been told that their jobs were safe and their industry had a future. The subsequent behaviour of the Conservative government was seen by most on the left, and in the "heavy" industries, to confirm fears about how they had been used to divide the miners' union.
The effect of the strike has been long and bitter for many areas that depended on coal. Many miners were forced into debt as the union did not make strike pay
ments to its members, only paying money to strikers on picket. The problem was compounded as the union's failure to hold an official ballot meant that the strike was illegal and social security rules prevented benefits being paid to participants of illegal strikes. Further, the rules meant that any benefits paid to partners or dependents of striking miners were calculated as if strike pay was being received.
The closure of pits also affected engineering, railways, electricity and steel production, which were all interlinked with the coal industry. Unemployment
reached as high as 50% in some villages over the following decade. Migration out of old mining areas left many villages full of derelict houses and earning the reputation as ghost town
s. The tensions between those who had supported the strike and those who had not, lasted for many years afterwards (and sometimes continues today, having been passed down to the next generation), eroding the strong sense of unity that had previously existed in such communities. A murder in the former mining town of Annesley
, Nottinghamshire in 2004 was a result of an argument between former members of the NUM and the UDM, an indication of continued tensions.
The 1994 European Union inquiry into poverty classified Grimethorpe
in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country and one of the poorest in the EU. The county of South Yorkshire was made into an Objective 1 development zone and every single ward
in the City of Wakefield
district of West Yorkshire
was classified as in need of special assistance. In Merseyside
, the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley
, had contained the "Cronton
" pit and the neighbouring Metropolitan Borough of St Helens
contained Sutton Manor, Bold and Parkside collieries.
Other areas have recovered and now boast a good standard of living. Recovery was quickest in areas where the economy was more diverse, such as in Kent or the West Midlands
. Brodsworth
boasted the largest mine in the country and is also enjoying relative affluence. Old colliery sites have often been turned into new industrial parks or retail parks. Xscape
, an indoor ski-slope, forms part of an entertainments centre and outlet shopping complex built on the former site of Castleford
's Glasshoughton
colliery.
Whilst the strike was on, public opinion in the Home Counties
(except Kent) was mixed, whereas in the Welsh valleys
, Yorkshire and other areas actually affected by the strike, support was high. It has become a symbol of the perceived indifference that the Conservative Party under Thatcher had to problems of unemployment and poverty. The Daily Mirror, which had been hostile towards the strike at the time, began a campaign to raise awareness of the social deprivation in the coalfield
s. The Coalfields Regeneration Trust
is an organisation that makes grants to aid the redevelopment of former mining areas.
Although mining is now only a very small industry in Britain, as of 2003 it was reportedly more productive in terms of output per worker than the coal industries in France, Germany and the United States
Andrew J. Richards' book, Miners on Strike, dedicated a chapter to how unusual it was in 1984 for a large-scale strike to be launched in protest at job cuts. In Britain, trade unions had traditionally launched strikes for claims on wage rises and rights at work, but strikes in defence of jobs had been very rare. Since the example of the 1984-5 miners' strike, union leaders have been much more likely to call for action in defence of jobs. Coincidentally, 1984 was the year when Harvard
economists Richard B. Freeman
and James Medoff published the book What do Unions do?, where such a strategy was seen as good for productivity and less of a pressure on inflation.
. Several scenes depict the chaos at the picket lines, clashes between armies of police and striking miners, and the shame associated with crossing the picket line. The film also showed the abject poverty associated with the strike, the harshness and desperation of not having coal for heat in winter as well as depicting the contrast between miners and the middle-class.
The strike is also involved in the background to the plot of the 1996 film Brassed Off
, which is set ten years after the strike when all the miners have lost the will to resist and accept the closure of their pit with resignation. Brassed Off was set in the fictional "Grimley", a thinly disguised version of the hard-hit ex-mining village of Grimethorpe
, where some of it was filmed.
The satirical Comic Strip
Presents episode "The Strike
" (1988) depicts an idealistic Welsh screenwriter's growing dismay as his hard-hitting and grittily realistic script about the strike is mutilated by a Hollywood
producer into an all-action thriller starring Al Pacino
(played by Peter Richardson) as Scargill, and Meryl Streep
(played by Jennifer Saunders
) as his wife. The film parodies Hollywood films by over-dramatising the strike and changing most important historic facts. The film won a Golden Rose
and Press Reward at the Montreux Festival.
The 1984 episode of the 1996 BBC television drama
serial Our Friends in the North
revolves around the events of the strike, and the scenes of clashes between the police and striking miners were re-created using many of those who had taken part in the actual real-life events on the miners' side. In 2005, BBC One broadcast the one-off drama Faith, written by William Ivory and starring Jamie Draven
and Maxine Peake
. Many of the social scenes were filmed in the former Colliery town of Thorne, near Doncaster. It viewed the strike from the perspective of both the police and the miners.
Airline Virgin Atlantic's 2009 television ad titled "Still Red Hot" commemorating its 25th year opens with a scene set in 1984 in which a newsagent yells the news of the day: "Miners' strike! Miners' strike!", showing the headline of a nondescript newspaper: "IT'S THE PITS".
was turned into a musical, Billy Elliot the Musical
by Elton John
, and has been successful on London's West End
. The musical has been brought to Broadway
and won a Tony Award
in 2009 for Best Musical
(the highest award given to musicals in the U.S.).
, published in 2001.
A 2005 book, GB84, by David Peace
combines fictional accounts of pickets, union officials and strike-breakers. Graphic details are provided of many of the strike's major events. It also suggests that the British Intelligence services were involved in undermining the strike, including the making of the alleged suggestion of a link between Scargill and Muammar al-Gaddafi
.
Val McDermid
published the novel A Darker Domain
in 2008 which has one of its plot lines set in the strike. Multiple reviewers gave the book acclaim for exploring the social and emotional repercussions of the strikes. One reviewer pointed out that McDermid was raised in Fife
, so much of her understanding of the events must have been shaped by her childhood there.
On 5 March 2010, the 25th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike, a new artwork by British visual artist, Dan Savage was unveiled in Sunderland Civic Centre. Commissioned by Sunderland City Council, Savage worked with the Durham Miners Association to create the large scale commemorative window, which features images and symbols of the strike and the North East's mining heritage.
' "A Design for Life
", and "1985", from the album Lifeblood
; Pulp
's "Last day of the miners' strike"; Funeral for a Friend
's "History
", and Ewan MacColl
's "Daddy, What did you do in the strike?". Newcastle
native Sting recorded a song about the strike called "We Work the Black Seam" for his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles
, in 1985. Billy Bragg
's version of "Which Side Are You On?
", neatly encapsulated the strikers' feeling of betrayal by the perceived indifference of wider elements within British society. Also in 1985, English punk group The Mekons portrayed the miners' situation in the song "Abernant 1984/5" on the album Fear and Whiskey
.
The folk song "The Ballad of '84" contains the view that David Jones and Joe Green died as a result of the police's handling of events. U2
's song "Red Hill Mining Town
" from their Joshua Tree
album is about the strike, according to lead singer Bono
. On 7 July 1984 the anarcho-punk band Crass
played their final show in Aberdare
, Wales at a benefit for striking miners.
Chumbawamba
recorded several pieces in support of the miners. These include the cassette only "Common Ground", recorded as a benefit for the miners. They also recorded a song called "Fitzwilliam", which described the Yorkshire village of that name after the strike. Fitzwilliam
eventually saw around a third of its housing stock demolished due to the dominance of derelict properties. They also made a song called "Frickley" about the football club Frickley Athletic
, which referenced the continued distrust of the police by those in mining areas after the strike. they also recorded an acapella song entitled coal not dole, a popular slogan used by the miners throughout the strike.
Chris Cutler
, Tim Hodgkinson
and Lindsay Cooper
from Henry Cow
, along with Robert Wyatt
and poet Adrian Mitchell
recorded The Last Nightingale
in October 1984 to raise money for the striking coal miners and their families.
Dire Straits
' "Iron Hand", from their 1991 album On Every Street
, refers to the Battle of Orgreave. Folk singer John Tams
' "Harry Stone-Hearts of Coal" which featured on his 2001 album Unity and which won "Best Original Song" at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards
is set against the backdrop of the Battle of Orgreave.
Banner Theatre
recorded two cassettes - "Here We Go" in 1985 and "Saltley Gate" in 1993, with many songs from the pen of Dave Rogers. The best known are "Saltley Gate" about the mass Birmingham picket, "Maerdy, the Last Pit in the Rhondda" and "Busking for the Miners" which celebrates how Birmingham people supported the miners' struggle. "Monday Morning Rain" was written for Banner's 1989 show "In the Reign of Pig's Pudding" and is a poignant song about the effects of unemployment after pit closures - it is included in the album "Elixir of Life". Rogers also wrote songs for the New Vic Theatre
production "Nice Girls", relating to the protest camps set up outside threatened pits by women from all over Britain in 1993. Banner toured these camps and created the song "Women on the Line" - this was later included in their video ballad "Burning Issues" which marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1984/5 Miners Strike and was developed with former mining communities in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and South Wales.
The strike also inspired two entire albums. Freq, recorded in 1984 by ex-Hawkwind
singer and lyricist Robert Calvert
. Alternating with songs such as "All the machines are quiet" and "Work song" are five short tracks taken from speeches and demonstrations recorded amongst the miners themselves. The industrial group Test Department recorded the 1984 album Shoulder to Shoulder, in collaboration with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir. The album combined harsh industrial rhythms with the traditional songs sung by the male choir, and also included poetry and speeches from the strike.
Soul/punk/pop/rockabilly band The Redskins
, who were notable for their left-wing views and lyrics, supported the struggle of the miners and the union. Their song "Keep on Keepin' On" was a rallying support for the strike, and the band played benefits in support of the strike. The punk/Oi!
band Angelic Upstarts
recorded a song supportive of the miners called "One More Day". Welsh punk rockers Foreign Legion
's song "Another Day" is about the strike.
Paul Weller of the style council was a big supporter of the miners and wrote a song called "Stones Throw Away" which can be heard on the number one album "Our Favorite Shop" from 1985.
British pop trio Soho
gave mention to the miners' strike in their 1990 hit song "Hippychick".
Bradford-based rock band New Model Army
wrote and released two songs about the strike: "1984", from their "The Price" EP of that year, and "The Charge", from their eponymously titled EP of 1987. "1984" was a graphic portrayal of villages under siege, phone-tapping and the strikers’ growing sense of bitterness and frustration. "The Charge" dealt with the aftermath of the strike, feelings of betrayal and the way of life that was lost with the miners’ defeat.
Industrial action
Industrial action or job action refers collectively to any measure taken by trade unions or other organised labour meant to reduce productivity in a workplace. Quite often it is used and interpreted as a euphemism for strike, but the scope is much wider...
affecting the British coal industry
Coal mining
The goal of coal mining is to obtain coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content, and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United States,...
. It was a defining moment in British industrial relations, and its defeat significantly weakened the British trades union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
movement. It was also seen as a major political and ideological victory for Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
and the Conservative Party
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
.
The strike became a symbolic struggle, since the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was one of the strongest unions in the country, viewed by many, including Conservatives in power, as having brought down the Heath government in the union's 1974 strike. The later strike ended with the miners' defeat and the Thatcher government able to consolidate its free market
Free market
A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
programme. The political power of the NUM was broken permanently. The dispute exposed deep divisions in British society and caused considerable bitterness, especially in Northern England
Northern England
Northern England, also known as the North of England, the North or the North Country, is a cultural region of England. It is not an official government region, but rather an informal amalgamation of counties. The southern extent of the region is roughly the River Trent, while the North is bordered...
and in Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
. Ten deaths resulted from events around the strike: six pickets, three teenagers searching for coal, and a taxi driver taking a non-striking miner to work.
Background
CoalCoal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
had been nationalised by Attlee's Post War Labour Government and was in 1984 managed by the National Coal Board
National Coal Board
The National Coal Board was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the mines on "vesting day", 1 January 1947...
(NCB) under Ian MacGregor
Ian MacGregor
Sir Ian Kinloch MacGregor, KBE was a Scottish-American metallurgist and industrialist, most famous in the UK for his controversial tenure at British Steel and his conduct during the 1984-1985 miner's strike while managing the National Coal Board.-Early life:Born in Kinlochleven, Scotland, his...
and, as in most of Europe, was heavily subsidised. A number of mines ("pits") in the United Kingdom were profitable and remained open after the strike
Strike action
Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...
, several of which still operate (including one in Warwickshire
Warwickshire
Warwickshire is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare...
and four in Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
). However, most mines were unprofitable and the government wanted them closed. The viability of many of these mines was called into question, but the government closed many before reports were collated, instead using temporary offers of increased redundancy pay to encourage miners into voting in favour of pit closures. In addition, the government insisted that in order to make the mines profitable they required efficiency improvements to be achieved by means of increased mechanisation and thus job cuts. Many unions resisted this.
The National Union of Mineworkers had a federated structure, influenced by syndicalism
Syndicalism
Syndicalism is a type of economic system proposed as a replacement for capitalism and an alternative to state socialism, which uses federations of collectivised trade unions or industrial unions...
, where branches and regions had a large degree of regional autonomy. Miners in Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire Miners' Association
The Nottinghamshire Miners' Association was a trade union in the United Kingdom.The union was founded in 1881 to represent coal miners in Nottinghamshire....
had a very different set of conditions from those in South Wales
South Wales Miners' Federation
The South Wales Miners' Federation , nicknamed "The Fed", was a trade union for miners in South Wales.The union was founded on 24 October 1898, following the defeat of the South Wales miners' strike of 1898...
, for example. This made the question of "national" action a vexed one, and contributed to confusion over the question of whether a strike ballot was necessary. The only nationally co-ordinated actions were the mass pickets at Orgreave
Battle of Orgreave
The Battle of Orgreave is the name given to a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in 1984, during the UK miners' strike...
.
In 1978, the Ridley Plan
Ridley Plan
The Ridley Plan was a 1974 report on the nationalised industries in the UK. The report was produced in the aftermath of the Heath government being brought down by the 1974 coal strike....
for dealing with the power of the coal miners' union was leaked to The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
magazine (issue dated 27 May 1978). It reported the plans of the Conservative opposition, led at the time by Margaret Thatcher, and included the steps that any subsequent Conservative government would have to take in order to avoid the fate of the 1970s Heath government, which was widely seen as having been brought down by the miners' strike of 1974. The plan was known and discussed by striking miners.
Sequence of major events
A strike nearly occurred in 1981, when the government had a similar plan to close twenty-three pits, though the threat of a strike was then enough to force the government to back down. It was widely believed that a confrontation had only been averted in the short-term and the Yorkshire minersYorkshire Miners' Association
The Yorkshire Miners' Association was a British trade union.The union was founded in 1881 with the merger of the South Yorkshire Miners' Association, and the West Yorkshire Miners' Association, agreed only because both organisations were weakened by unsuccessful disputes...
passed a resolution that a strike should take place if any pit was threatened with closure for reasons other than exhaustion or geological difficulties. In 1982, the members accepted a government offer of a 5.2 percent raise, rejecting their leaders' call for a strike authorisation. In 1983, the Conservative Prime Minister
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
appointed Ian MacGregor
Ian MacGregor
Sir Ian Kinloch MacGregor, KBE was a Scottish-American metallurgist and industrialist, most famous in the UK for his controversial tenure at British Steel and his conduct during the 1984-1985 miner's strike while managing the National Coal Board.-Early life:Born in Kinlochleven, Scotland, his...
as head of the National Coal Board
National Coal Board
The National Coal Board was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the mines on "vesting day", 1 January 1947...
(the UK statutory corporation
Statutory Corporation
A statutory corporation or public body is a corporation created by statute. While artificial legal personality is almost always the result of statutory intervention, a statutory corporation does not include corporations owned by shareholders whose legal personality derives from being registered...
that controlled coal mining). He had previously been head of the British Steel
British Steel
British Steel was a major British steel producer. It originated as a nationalised industry, the British Steel Corporation , formed in 1967. This was converted to a public limited company, British Steel PLC, and privatised in 1988. It was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index...
Corporation, which, according to one of Thatcher's biographers, he had turned from one of the least efficient steel-makers in Europe to one of the most efficient, nearly bringing the company into profit. However, this was achieved at the expense of a halving of the workforce in the space of two years. This reputation raised the expectation that jobs would be cut on a similar scale in mining, and confrontations between MacGregor and the leader of the miners, Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill is a British politician who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1982 to 2002, leading the union through the 1984–85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history...
, seemed inevitable.
Pit closures announced
On 6 March 1984, the National Coal Board announced that the agreement reached after the 1974 strike had become obsolete, and that in order to rationalise government subsidisation of industry they intended to close 20 coal mines. Twenty thousand jobs would be lost, and many communities in the north of England, Scotland and Wales would lose their primary source of employmentEmployment
Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...
. Although not widely known at the time, the Thatcher government had prepared against a repeat of the effective 1974 industrial action by stock-piling coal, converting some power stations to burn petroleum, and recruiting fleets of road hauliers to transport coal in case sympathetic railwaymen went on strike to support the miners.
Action begins
Sensitive to the impact of the proposed closures in their own areas, miners in various coal fields began strike action. In the Yorkshire coal fieldSouth Yorkshire Coalfield
The South Yorkshire Coalfield is defined by a triangle lying between Barnsley, Doncaster and Sheffield, though a few mines within the coalfield lie outside this area. It is part of the larger Midland coal field which stretches from Nottingham in the south to Bradford and Leeds in the north...
strike action began when workers at the Manvers
Manvers Main Colliery
Manvers Main Colliery was a coal mine, sunk on land belonging to the Earl Manvers and was situated on the northern edge of the township of Wath-upon-Dearne, between that town and Mexborough, in the Dearne Valley, South Yorkshire, England...
complex walked out over the lack of consultation. Over six thousand miners were already on strike when a local ballot led to strike action from 5 March at Cortonwood
Cortonwood
Cortonwood Colliery was sunk in 1873, a year after the formation of the Brampton Colliery Company, which took its name from the local parish of Brampton Bierlow, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England....
Colliery at Brampton Bierlow
Brampton Bierlow
Brampton Bierlow, often known simply as Brampton, is a former mining village and civil parish situated in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, on the south side of the Dearne Valley, between Barnsley and Rotherham. According to the 2001 census, the parish had a...
, and at Bullcliffe Wood colliery, near Ossett
Ossett
Ossett is a market town within the metropolitan borough of the City of Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, England. It is located on junction 40 of the M1 motorway, half-way between Dewsbury, to the west, and Wakefield, to the east. In the 2001 census, it was classified as part of the West Yorkshire...
. The 5 March action was prompted by the further announcement by the Coal Board that five pits were to be subject to "accelerated closure" within just five weeks; the other three were at Herrington
Herrington
Herrington is an area in the south of Sunderland, formerly in County Durham in North East England.The Herringtons are split into East & Middle and West and New villages. East and Middle Herrington is now a largely residential area just off the A690...
in County Durham
County Durham
County Durham is a ceremonial county and unitary district in north east England. The county town is Durham. The largest settlement in the ceremonial county is the town of Darlington...
, Snowdown
Snowdown
Snowdown is a village near Dover in Kent, England. It was the location of one of the four chief collieries of the Kent coalfield....
in Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
and Polmaise
Fallin, Stirling
Fallin is a village in the Stirling council area of Scotland. It lies on the A905 road 3 miles east of Stirling on a bend in the River Forth. The United Kingdom Census 2001 recorded the population as 2710....
in Scotland. The next day, pickets from the Yorkshire area appeared at pits in the Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire is a county in the East Midlands of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west...
coal field (one of those least threatened by pit closures). On 12 March 1984, Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill is a British politician who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1982 to 2002, leading the union through the 1984–85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history...
, president of the NUM, declared that the strikes in the various coal fields were to be a national strike and called for strike action from NUM members in all coal fields.
The National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS)
The decision of the NACODSNational Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers
The National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers represents colliery deputies and under-officials in the coal industry. NACODS was established as a national organisation in 1910...
union not to strike created a tense situation in the mines, with NACODS deputies being labelled as "scabs" by union hardliners. On 23 October, one thousand pickets attempted to prevent a sole bath attendant from entering the threatened Emley Moor
Emley, West Yorkshire
Emley is a village in West Yorkshire, England between Huddersfield and Wakefield with a population of 1,867 according to the 2001 census. It is east of Huddersfield and west of Wakefield. The village lies in moorland close to the Emley Moor TV Transmitter...
colliery. Some of the engineers felt that going on strike would actually work against the cause, as lack of maintenance below ground could allow geological conditions to deteriorate to a state that would prevent the pit from reopening - defeating the whole goal of opposing closures; however, hard-line strikers were not always sympathetic to this line of argument. The first two pits to close in 1985 were Barrow colliery at Worsborough Bridge and Ackton Hall colliery at Featherstone
Featherstone
Featherstone is a town and civil parish in the City of Wakefield in West Yorkshire, England. It lies south-west of Pontefract and has a population of 14,175.Featherstone railway station is on the Pontefract Line.-History:...
. Both were closed as they were unsafe for the miners to return to work rather than because continued operation would have been "uneconomic".
Observation of the strike
At its beginning, the strike was almost universally observed in the coalfields of Yorkshire, Scotland, the North-East and KentKent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
. Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...
miners had originally been lukewarm about striking, but, ignoring the wishes of the working members, its leaders announced on 22 March that the strike was official. Many miners in South Wales resented how their previous attempts to launch strikes in support of the steel workers and health workers had been largely unsupported, but there were enough pits in the region under threat of closure to gain momentum for the strike in the area. Support was less strong in the Midlands
English Midlands
The Midlands, or the English Midlands, is the traditional name for the area comprising central England that broadly corresponds to the early medieval Kingdom of Mercia. It borders Southern England, Northern England, East Anglia and Wales. Its largest city is Birmingham, and it was an important...
and North Wales
North Wales
North Wales is the northernmost unofficial region of Wales. It is bordered to the south by the counties of Ceredigion and Powys in Mid Wales and to the east by the counties of Shropshire in the West Midlands and Cheshire in North West England...
. In Nottinghamshire, most of the pits had modern equipment and large coal reserves; most of the Nottinghamshire miners remained at work and the Nottinghamshire NUM disagreed with the decision to launch a national strike without a ballot. Many within the NUM condemned them as strikebreaker
Strikebreaker
A strikebreaker is a person who works despite an ongoing strike. Strikebreakers are usually individuals who are not employed by the company prior to the trade union dispute, but rather hired prior to or during the strike to keep the organisation running...
s, and the Nottinghamshire branch eventually broke away to form the core of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers
Union of Democratic Mineworkers
The Union of Democratic Mineworkers is a British trade union not recognised by the TUC or the Labour party for coal miners, which is based in Nottinghamshire, England...
.
A widely reported clash during the strike took place at the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham
Rotherham
Rotherham is a town in South Yorkshire, England. It lies on the River Don, at its confluence with the River Rother, between Sheffield and Doncaster. Rotherham, at from Sheffield City Centre, is surrounded by several smaller settlements, which together form the wider Metropolitan Borough of...
on 18 June 1984. This confrontation between striking miners and police, around 10,000 on each side, was dubbed 'The Battle of Orgreave
Battle of Orgreave
The Battle of Orgreave is the name given to a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in 1984, during the UK miners' strike...
'. Violence flared after police on horse-back
Mounted police
Mounted police are police who patrol on horseback or camelback. They continue to serve in remote areas and in metropolitan areas where their day-to-day function may be picturesque or ceremonial, but they are also employed in crowd control because of their mobile mass and height advantage and...
charged the miners with truncheons
Baton (law enforcement)
A truncheon or baton is essentially a club of less than arm's length made of wood, plastic, or metal...
drawn and inflicted serious injuries upon several individuals.
In 1991, the South Yorkshire Police
South Yorkshire Police
South Yorkshire Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing South Yorkshire in England.The police force covers an area of approximately 1,554 square kilometres which is made up of the county's three boroughs , along with the City of Sheffield. The resident population is 1.2...
were forced to pay out £425,000 to thirty-nine miners who were arrested in the events at the incident. Other less well known, but also bloody, police attacks took place, for example, in Maltby, South Yorkshire. These confrontations contained organised police lines including charges by police and police mounted on horseback. In some cases miners organised themselves against this.
Events that encouraged the end of the strike included an assault on a working miner in Castleford
Castleford
Castleford is the largest of the "five towns" district in the metropolitan borough of the City of Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, England. It is near Pontefract, and has a population of 37,525 according to the 2001 Census, but has seen a rise in recent years and is now around 45-50,000. To the north...
in November and the manslaughter of a taxi driver
Killing of David Wilkie
David Wilkie was killed during the miners' strike in the United Kingdom, when two striking miners dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto his taxi whilst driving a strike breaking miner to his workplace. The attack caused a widespread revulsion at the extent of violence in the dispute...
driving a working miner to work in South Wales in December. The strike failed to have the widespread impact of earlier stoppages which had led to blackouts and power cuts
Power outage
A power outage is a short- or long-term loss of the electric power to an area.There are many causes of power failures in an electricity network...
in the 1970s; electricity companies were able to maintain supplies throughout the winter, the time of biggest demand.
The union's funds had also run too low to pay for pickets' transportation, and many miners had been unable to pay for heating over the winter. Some mining families resorted to scavenging for coal on spoil tips, a desperate move as most of the "spoil
Spoil
Spoil or spoils:*Plunder taken from an enemy or victim.*Material removed during:**excavation**mining**dredging*An Australian rules football tactic, see One percenter #Spoil...
" was very dangerous and liable to tip. Three children died in this manner. Many others found themselves arrested for trespass and theft.
The formal end
The strike ended on 3 March 1985, nearly a year after it had begun. Some workers had already returned to work of their own accord, a symbolic victory for the government, although ministers later admitted that the figures of returners were inflated to hurt the strikers' morale. In order to save the union, the NUM voted, by a tiny margin, to return to work without a new agreement with management. In the special conference that ended the strike, only KentKent Miners' Association
The Kent Miners' Association was a trade union in the United Kingdom.Coal was discovered in Kent in the late nineteenth century, but extraction did not begin until 1912. The Kent Miners Association was established in 1915, and immediately affiliated to the Miners' Federation of Great Britain...
voted to carry on the strike. Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire Miners' Association
The Nottinghamshire Miners' Association was a trade union in the United Kingdom.The union was founded in 1881 to represent coal miners in Nottinghamshire....
, Leicestershire
Leicestershire Miners' Association
The Leicestershire Miners' Association was a trade union in the United Kingdom.The union was founded in 1887 as the Coalville and District Miners' Association to represent coal miners in the Coalville area of Leicestershire...
and South Derbyshire did not send any delegates to the conference.
The end of the strike was felt as a terrible blow to loyal NUM members, though many understood that the extreme poverty being suffered after a year without wages was difficult to bear. Indeed, in many areas, striking miners made a distinction between those who had returned to work after only a couple of months strike, and those who felt forced to return to work for the sake of their children, many months later.
In several pits, miners' wives groups organised the distribution of carnations at the gates on the day the miners went back, the flower that symbolises the hero. Many pits marched back to work behind brass band
Brass band
A brass band is a musical ensemble generally consisting entirely of brass instruments, most often with a percussion section. Ensembles that include brass and woodwind instruments can in certain traditions also be termed brass bands , but are usually more correctly termed military bands, concert...
s, in processions dubbed "Loyalty Parades".
The question of a pre-strike ballot
The issue of whether a ballot was needed for a national strike had been complicated by the actions of previous NUM leader Joe GormleyJoe Gormley
Joseph Gormley, Baron Gormley, OBE was President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1971 to 1982, and a Labour peer....
. When wage reforms were rejected by two national ballots, Gormley declared that each region could decide on these reforms on their own accord; his decisions had been upheld by courts on appeal. Scargill did not call a ballot for national strike action, perhaps due to uncertainty over the outcome. Instead, he attempted to start the strike by allowing each region to call its own strikes, imitating Gormley's strategy over wage reforms; it was argued that 'safe' regions should not be allowed to ballot other regions out of jobs. This decision was upheld by another vote five weeks into the strike. Many miners, especially at the threatened pits, were also opposed to a ballot, due to the time required to organise one and the urgency of the situation arising from the accelerated closure programme. There was a fear that strike supporters would refuse to take part in a ballot. Critics point out that Scargill's policy of letting each region decide seemed inconsistent with the threatened expulsion of the Nottinghamshire branch after 20,000 out of 27,000 miners in the county voted against the strike.
The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
enforced a recent law that required unions to ballot members on strike action. On 19 July 1984, Thatcher said in the House of Commons that giving in to the miners would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob
Ochlocracy
Ochlocracy or mob rule is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of legitimate authorities.As a pejorative for majoritarianism, it is akin to the Latin phrase mobile vulgus meaning "the fickle crowd", from which the English term "mob" was originally derived in the...
; she referred to the striking miners as "the enemy within", and claimed they did not share the values of other British people. "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands
Falklands War
The Falklands War , also called the Falklands Conflict or Falklands Crisis, was fought in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the disputed Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands...
. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty". On the day after the Orgreave picket
Battle of Orgreave
The Battle of Orgreave is the name given to a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, in 1984, during the UK miners' strike...
of 29 May, which saw five thousand pickets clash violently with police, Thatcher said in a speech:
I must tell you ... that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed. [cheering] It must not succeed. There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it.... The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.
Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill
Arthur Scargill is a British politician who was President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1982 to 2002, leading the union through the 1984–85 miners' strike, a key event in British labour and political history...
's response to the incident was:
We've had riot shields, we've had riot gear, we've had police on horseback charging into our people, we've had people hit with truncheons and people kicked to the ground.... The intimidation and the brutality that has been displayed are something reminiscent of a Latin American state.
In August, two miners from Manton
Manton, Nottinghamshire
Manton is a former mining village and suburb of south-east Worksop, north Nottinghamshire. Manton Colliery was one of the few pits in the county to generally support the strike in 1984-5...
colliery who protested that the strike was not "official" without a ballot took the NUM to court. In September the High Court
High Court of Justice
The High Court of Justice is, together with the Court of Appeal and the Crown Court, one of the Senior Courts of England and Wales...
ruled that the NUM had breached its own constitution by calling a strike without first holding a ballot. Scargill was fined £1,000 (which was paid for him by an anonymous donor) and the NUM was fined £200,000. When the union refused to pay its fine, an order was made to sequestrate
Sequestration (law)
Sequestration is the act of removing, separating, or seizing anything from the possession of its owner under process of law for the benefit of creditors or the state.-Etymology:...
the union's assets but it was found that they had been transferred abroad. By the end of January 1985 around £5 million of NUM assets had been recovered.
The Trades Union Congress
Trades Union Congress
The Trades Union Congress is a national trade union centre, a federation of trade unions in the United Kingdom, representing the majority of trade unions...
(TUC) did not support the NUM, seeming to support Thatcher's call for a national ballot. Solidarity action was taken, however, by railworkers
National Union of Railwaymen
The National Union of Railwaymen was a trade union of railway workers in the United Kingdom. It an industrial union founded in 1913 by the merger of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants , the United Pointsmen and Signalmen's Society and the General Railway Workers' Union .The NUR...
and by dockers, who were both threatened with dismissal if they refused to handle coal. The Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union
Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union
The Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union, known as the EETPU was a British trade union formed in 1968 as a union for electricians.-History:...
, an electricians' union, actively opposed the strike; Ian MacGregor's autobiography detailed how its leaders supplied the government with valuable information that allowed the strike to be defeated. Steelworkers' unions did not support the strike, a stance which was widely resented by the miners after the support that they had given the steel strike in 1980 and after concessions were made by the NUM on deliveries of coke
Coke (fuel)
Coke is the solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal. Cokes from coal are grey, hard, and porous. While coke can be formed naturally, the commonly used form is man-made.- History :...
to steel works during the strike. The National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers
National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers
The National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers represents colliery deputies and under-officials in the coal industry. NACODS was established as a national organisation in 1910...
(NACODS) nearly went on strike in September; this was one point where the balance seemed to be tipping in favour of the miners, but Scargill's subsequent contempt of court
Contempt of court
Contempt of court is a court order which, in the context of a court trial or hearing, declares a person or organization to have disobeyed or been disrespectful of the court's authority...
orders caused the NUM to be fined and lost it wider support in the trade union movement. MacGregor later admitted that, had NACODS gone ahead with their strike, a compromise would probably have been forced on the Coal Board. Files later made public showed that the Government had an informant inside the TUC, passing them information about the negotiations.
Strike-breaking and journalism
The refusal of some miners to support the strike was seen as a betrayal by those who did strike. The opposite positions of miners in the adjacent coal fields of YorkshireYorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
and Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire is a county in the East Midlands of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west...
, where the former were striking and the latter strike-breaking, led to many bitter confrontations in the region. Instances of violence directed against working miners by striking miners were reported. In some cases, this extended to attacks on the property, the families and the pets of working miners.
The Sun
The Sun (newspaper)
The Sun is a daily national tabloid newspaper published in the United Kingdom and owned by News Corporation. Sister editions are published in Glasgow and Dublin...
newspaper took a very anti-strike position, as did the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
, and even the Daily Mirror and The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
became hostile as the strike went on. The Morning Star
The Morning Star
The Morning Star is a left wing British daily tabloid newspaper with a focus on social and trade union issues. Articles and comment columns are contributed by writers from socialist, social democratic, green and religious perspectives....
was the only national daily newspaper that was consistently supportive of the striking miners and the NUM.
Government action
The government mobilised the police (including Metropolitan PoliceMetropolitan Police Service
The Metropolitan Police Service is the territorial police force responsible for Greater London, excluding the "square mile" of the City of London which is the responsibility of the City of London Police...
squads from London) from around Britain to attempt to stop the pickets preventing the strikebreakers working. Many picketers were subject to intimidation
Intimidation
Intimidation is intentional behavior "which would cause a person of ordinary sensibilities" fear of injury or harm. It's not necessary to prove that the behavior was so violent as to cause terror or that the victim was actually frightened.Criminal threatening is the crime of intentionally or...
and often violence from the police. Police attempted to stop pickets travelling between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, an action which led to many protests. The government claimed these actions were to safeguard individual civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
. Many miners have seen this as class warfare
Class conflict
Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....
, with the police as the 'special bodies of armed men' that Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
described.
During the industrial action 11,291 people were arrested and 8,392 charged with offences such as breach of the peace
Breach of the peace
Breach of the peace is a legal term used in constitutional law in English-speaking countries, and in a wider public order sense in Britain.-Constitutional law:...
and obstructing the highway. Former striking miners have alleged that soldiers in police uniform were also used on the picket lines, to avoid publicising the necessity of bringing in the military (this was never proved and is highly unlikely). In many former mining areas antipathy towards the police remains strong to this day because of the violence meted out. The government was criticised for abusing its power when it ruled that local police might be too sympathetic to the miners to take action against the strike, and instead brought in forces from distant counties. The Labour MPs for Doncaster North
Doncaster North (UK Parliament constituency)
- Sources :* Election results from 1992 to the present* Election results from 1945 to the present* The website of Ed Miliband...
and Castleford and Pontefract
Pontefract and Castleford (UK Parliament constituency)
Pontefract and Castleford was a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom until the 2010 general election. It elected one Member of Parliament by the first past the post system of election.-Boundaries:...
both raised concerns in Parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom, British Crown dependencies and British overseas territories, located in London...
over suggestions that the police had asked miners held in custody about their political allegiances.
This strike was also the first in which the provision of welfare benefits were restricted in a way that miners saw as being used as a weapon against strikers. Welfare benefits had never been available to workers on strike but their dependents (i.e. spouses and children) had been entitled to make claims in previous disputes. However, Clause 6 of the 1980 Social Security Act banned the dependents of strikers from receiving "urgent needs" payments and also applied a compulsory deduction from the strikers' dependents' benefits. The government viewed this legislation as not concerned with saving public funds but instead "to restore a fairer bargaining balance between employers and trade unions" by increasing the necessity to return to work. The majority of miners and their families had to survive the strike on handouts, donations from the European Economic Community
European Economic Community
The European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) The European Economic Community (EEC) (also known as the Common Market in the English-speaking world, renamed the European Community (EC) in 1993The information in this article primarily covers the EEC's time as an independent...
's "food mountain" and from charities. Poverty and hunger became rife in the mining heartlands.
A wide network of several hundred miners' support groups were set up, often led by miners' "wives and girlfriends groups", such as Women Against Pit Closures
Women Against Pit Closures
Women Against Pit Closures was a political movement supporting miners and their families in the UK miners' strike of 1984–85. The movement is credited with bringing feminist ideas into practice in an industrial dispute and empowering women to take a public role in a community with a male-dominated...
. These support groups organised thousands of collections outside supermarkets, communal kitchens, benefit concerts and other activities. The strike marked an important development in the traditional mining heartlands, where feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
ideas had not previously been strong.
MI5 "counter-subversion"
Dame Stella RimingtonStella Rimington
Dame Stella Rimington, DCB is a British author, who was the Director General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996. She was the first female DG of MI5, and the first DG whose name was publicised on appointment...
(Director-General of MI5
Director-General of MI5
The Director General of the Security Service is the head of the Security Service , the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency...
, 1992 – 1996) published an autobiography in 2001 in which she revealed MI5 'counter-subversion' exercises against the NUM and the striking miners, which included the tapping
Telephone tapping
Telephone tapping is the monitoring of telephone and Internet conversations by a third party, often by covert means. The wire tap received its name because, historically, the monitoring connection was an actual electrical tap on the telephone line...
of union leaders' phones. However, she denied that the agency had informers
Informant
An informant is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law enforcement world, where they are officially known as confidential or criminal informants , and can often refer pejoratively to the supply of information...
in the NUM, specifically denying that then chief executive Roger Windsor
Roger Windsor
Roger Windsor was chief executive of the NUM between 1983 and 1989, including during the 1984 Miner's Strike. He later moved to France....
had been an agent.
Public opinion and the media
Public opinion during the strike was divided and varied greatly in different regions. When asked in a Gallup poll in July 1984 whether their sympathies lay mainly with the employers or the miners, 40% said employers; 33% were for the miners; 19% were for neither and 8% did not know. When asked the same question during 5–10 December 1984, 51% had most sympathy for the employers; 26% for the miners; 18% for neither and 5% did not know. When asked in July 1984 whether they approved or disapproved of the methods used by the miners, 15% approved; 79% disapproved and 6% did not know. When asked the same question during 5–10 December 1984, 7% approved; 88% disapproved and 5% did not know. In July 1984, when asked whether they thought the miners were using responsible or irresponsible methods, 12% said responsible; 78% said irresponsible and 10% did not know. When asked the same question in August 1984, 9% said responsible; 84% said irresponsible and 7% did not know.Socialist groups claimed that the mainstream media deliberately misrepresented the miners' strike, saying of The Sun's reporting of the strike: "The day-to-day reporting involved more subtle attacks, or a biased selection of facts and a lack of alternative points of view. These things arguably had a far bigger negative effect on the miners' cause". It was however argued that none of the facts presented were untrue and should by the same token be presented.
As the strike went on, a series of media reports sought to cast doubt on the integrity of senior NUM officials. In November 1984, there were allegations that Scargill had met with Libya
Libya
Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....
n agents in Paris, and other senior officials travelled to Libya. Links to the Libyan government were particularly damaging coming seven months after the murder of policewoman Yvonne Fletcher
Yvonne Fletcher
WPC Yvonne Joyce Fletcher was a British police officer fatally shot during a protest outside the Libyan embassy at St. James's Square, London, in 1984. Fletcher, who had been on duty and deployed to police the protest, died shortly afterwards at Westminster Hospital...
outside the Libyan embassy in London by Libyan agents. This did not, however, prevent the Thatcher Government buying Libyan oil to help the effort to defeat the strike. In 1990, the Daily Mirror and TV programme The Cook Report
The Cook Report
The Cook Report was a British current affairs television programme shown on ITV, produced for the network by Central Television from 1987 to 1998.-History:...
claimed that Scargill and the NUM had received money from the Libyan government. These allegations were based on allegations by Roger Windsor
Roger Windsor
Roger Windsor was chief executive of the NUM between 1983 and 1989, including during the 1984 Miner's Strike. He later moved to France....
, who was the NUM official who had spoken to Libyan officials. Roy Greenslade
Roy Greenslade
Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism at City University London and has been a media commentator since 1992, most notably for The Guardian....
, the Mirrors editor at the time, said much later he believes his paper's allegations were false. This was long after an investigation by Seumas Milne described the allegations as wholly without substance and a "classic smear campaign".
It was also claimed that Arthur Scargill diverted money donated by Russian miners during the strike. The NUM received payments from the trade unions of Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
(which was Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
-occupied at the time). Soviet miners who sent money to the NUM would not have been able to obtain convertible currency without the support of the Government of the Soviet Union
Government of the Soviet Union
The Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was the de jure government comprising the highest executive and administrative body of the Soviet Union from 1946 until 1991....
and Thatcher claimed to have seen documentary evidence that suggests that Soviet-leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
authorised these payments. The diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev, a senior party official in the Soviet Union at the time, also lends credence to the interpretation that the funding was provided at the behest of the Soviet government.
The hint of a link tarnished Scargill and yet trust of him amongst striking miners remained firm. Scargill was perceived as a militant hero by the unions, and as a Marxist thug by most of the mainstream press. Scargill always denied these accusations and accused the government of fueling a smear campaign. However, the ex-head of MI5
MI5
The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...
Dame Stella Rimington
Stella Rimington
Dame Stella Rimington, DCB is a British author, who was the Director General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996. She was the first female DG of MI5, and the first DG whose name was publicised on appointment...
claimed in her autobiography, "We in MI5 limited our investigations to those who were using the strike for subversive purposes."
Consequences
Six pickets died during the strike, and three teenagers (Darren Holmes aged 15 and Paul Holmes and Paul Womersley aged 14) died picking coal from a colliery waste heap in the winter. The deaths of pickets David Jones and Joe Green continue to be viewed with suspicion. Jones was killed in OllertonOllerton
Ollerton is a 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....
, Nottinghamshire, by a flying brick during fighting between police, pickets, and non-striking miners, while Green was hit by a truck while picketing at Ferrybridge power station
Ferrybridge power station
The Ferrybridge power stations refers to a series of three coal-fired power stations situated on the River Aire in West Yorkshire, England. The first station on the site, Ferrybridge A power station, was constructed in the mid-1920s, and was closed as the second station, Ferrybridge B power...
in Yorkshire. The NUM names its memorial lectures after the two.
A taxi driver, David Wilkie
Killing of David Wilkie
David Wilkie was killed during the miners' strike in the United Kingdom, when two striking miners dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto his taxi whilst driving a strike breaking miner to his workplace. The attack caused a widespread revulsion at the extent of violence in the dispute...
, was killed on 30 November 1984. He had been taking a non-striking miner to work in the Merthyr Vale
Merthyr Vale
Merthyr Vale is a linear village in the Welsh county borough of Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan. Lying on the A4054 road it is on the east bank of the River Taff opposite Aberfan.-Ynys Owen:...
Colliery, South Wales when two striking miners dropped a concrete post onto his car from a road bridge above. He died at the scene. The two miners served a prison sentence for manslaughter
Manslaughter
Manslaughter is a legal term for the killing of a human being, in a manner considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is said to have first been made by the Ancient Athenian lawmaker Dracon in the 7th century BC.The law generally differentiates...
.
The impact of the strike was nowhere near as hard-hitting as previous strikes such as those of the early 1970s. With most homes equipped with oil or gas central heating and the railways long since converted to diesel and electricity, the only remaining significant sector of Britain's national infrastructure that was still reliant upon coal was the electrical generation industry under the Central Electricity Generating Board. The problem of potential power-shortages as a result of a coal strike had been recognised by the Thatcher government which insisted that Britain's coal-fired power stations create their own stockpiles of coal which would keep them running throughout any industrial action. This strategy turned out to be incredibly successful during the miner's strike as the power stations were able to maintain power supplies even through the winter of 1984. It also meant that the striking miners themselves, unable to pay their energy bills without wages, were the only ones who lost out.
During the strike, many pits permanently lost their customers. Much of the immediate problem facing the industry was due to the economic recession in the early 1980s. However, there was also extensive competition within the world coal market as well as a concerted move towards oil and gas
Natural gas
Natural gas is a naturally occurring gas mixture consisting primarily of methane, typically with 0–20% higher hydrocarbons . It is found associated with other hydrocarbon fuel, in coal beds, as methane clathrates, and is an important fuel source and a major feedstock for fertilizers.Most natural...
for power production. The Government's own policy, known as the Ridley Plan
Ridley Plan
The Ridley Plan was a 1974 report on the nationalised industries in the UK. The report was produced in the aftermath of the Heath government being brought down by the 1974 coal strike....
was to reduce Britain's reliance on coal; they also claimed that coal could be imported from Australia, America and Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
more cheaply than it could be extracted from beneath Britain. The strike subsequently emboldened the NCB to accelerate the closure of many pits on economic grounds.
Variation in observing the strike
| Area | Manpower | % on strike 19/11/84 | % on strike 14/2/85 | % on strike 1/3/85 |
| Cokeworks | 4,500 | 95.6 | 73 | 65 |
| Kent | 3,000 | 95.9 | 95 | 93 |
| Lancashire | 6,500 | 61.5 | 49 | 38 |
| Leicestershire | 1,900 | 10.5 | 10 | 10 |
| Midlands | 19,000 | 32.3 | 15 | 23 |
| North Derbyshire | 10,500 | 66.7 | 44 | 40 |
| North-East | 23,000 | 95.5 | 70 | 60 |
| North Wales | 1,000 | 35 | 10 | 10 |
| Nottinghamshire | 30,000 | 20 | 14 | 22 |
| Scotland | 13,100 | 93.9 | 75 | 69 |
| South Derbyshire | 3,000 | 11 | 11 | 11 |
| South Wales | 21,500 | 99.6 | 98 | 93 |
| Workshops | 9,000 | 55.6 | - | 50 |
| Yorkshire | 56,000 | 97.3 | 90 | 83 |
| NATIONAL | 196,000 | 73.7 | 64 | 60 |
No figures available for the 1000 N.C.B. staff employees.
Mining and mining communities after the strike
The coal industry was finally privatised in December 1994 to create a firm named "R.J.B. Mining", now known as UK CoalUK Coal
UK Coal plc is the largest coal mining business in the United Kingdom. The Company is based in Harworth, in Nottinghamshire. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a former constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.-History:...
. Between the end of the strike and privatisation, pit closures continued with a particularly intense group of closures in the early 1990s. There were 15 former British Coal deep mines left in production at the time of privatisation, however, by March 2005, there were only eight major deep mines left. Since then, the last pit in Northumberland
Northumberland
Northumberland is the northernmost ceremonial county and a unitary district in North East England. For Eurostat purposes Northumberland is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three boroughs or unitary districts that comprise the "Northumberland and Tyne and Wear" NUTS 2 region...
, Ellington Colliery at Ellington
Ellington, Northumberland
Ellington is a small village on the coast of Northumberland, England. Ellington is four miles from Ashington, six miles from Morpeth and twenty miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne....
, has closed whilst pits at Rossington
Rossington
Rossington is a civil parish and former mining village in the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England and is surrounded by countryside and the market towns of Bawtry and Tickhill.-Geography:...
and Harworth
Harworth
Harworth is a small town in the county of Nottinghamshire, in the Midlands of England in Bassetlaw district. It is approximately eight miles north of Worksop...
have been mothballed. In 1983, Britain had 174 working mines; by 2009, this number had decreased to six. During the strike, Scargill had constantly claimed that the government had a long-term plan to reduce the industry in this way. The miners' will to resist deteriorated rapidly and there was a very apathetic response to the intensive period of closures in the early 1990s, despite evidence that there was much more sympathy for the miners then than in 1984.
Nottinghamshire miners had hoped that their pits were safe, but they too were mostly closed in the 1985-1994 period. This was widely resented as a betrayal of the promises that had been made to working miners in the strike; they had been told that their jobs were safe and their industry had a future. The subsequent behaviour of the Conservative government was seen by most on the left, and in the "heavy" industries, to confirm fears about how they had been used to divide the miners' union.
The effect of the strike has been long and bitter for many areas that depended on coal. Many miners were forced into debt as the union did not make strike pay
Strike pay
Strike pay is the name of payments made by a trade union to workers who are on strike as help in meeting their basic needs while on strike, often out of a special reserve known as a strike fund...
ments to its members, only paying money to strikers on picket. The problem was compounded as the union's failure to hold an official ballot meant that the strike was illegal and social security rules prevented benefits being paid to participants of illegal strikes. Further, the rules meant that any benefits paid to partners or dependents of striking miners were calculated as if strike pay was being received.
The closure of pits also affected engineering, railways, electricity and steel production, which were all interlinked with the coal industry. Unemployment
Unemployment
Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...
reached as high as 50% in some villages over the following decade. Migration out of old mining areas left many villages full of derelict houses and earning the reputation as ghost town
Ghost town
A ghost town is an abandoned town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, or nuclear disasters...
s. The tensions between those who had supported the strike and those who had not, lasted for many years afterwards (and sometimes continues today, having been passed down to the next generation), eroding the strong sense of unity that had previously existed in such communities. A murder in the former mining town of Annesley
Annesley
Annesley is a village and civil parish in the District of Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, England, located between Hucknall and Kirkby-in-Ashfield. According to the 2001 census the parish had a population of 1,096. Nearby to the west is Annesley Woodhouse...
, Nottinghamshire in 2004 was a result of an argument between former members of the NUM and the UDM, an indication of continued tensions.
The 1994 European Union inquiry into poverty classified Grimethorpe
Grimethorpe
Grimethorpe is a large village which is part of the metropolitan borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, England. It has a population of 1,873....
in South Yorkshire as the poorest settlement in the country and one of the poorest in the EU. The county of South Yorkshire was made into an Objective 1 development zone and every single ward
Wards of the United Kingdom
A ward in the United Kingdom is an electoral district at sub-national level represented by one or more councillors. It is the primary unit of British administrative and electoral geography .-England:...
in the City of Wakefield
City of Wakefield
The City of Wakefield is a local government district of West Yorkshire, England, with the status of a city and metropolitan borough. Wakefield is the district's administrative centre. The district includes the "Five Towns" of Normanton, Pontefract, Featherstone, Castleford and Knottingley. Other...
district of West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire is a metropolitan county within the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England with a population of 2.2 million. West Yorkshire came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972....
was classified as in need of special assistance. In Merseyside
Merseyside
Merseyside is a metropolitan county in North West England, with a population of 1,365,900. It encompasses the metropolitan area centred on both banks of the lower reaches of the Mersey Estuary, and comprises five metropolitan boroughs: Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wirral, and the city of Liverpool...
, the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley
Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley
The Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley is a metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England. It comprises the towns of Kirkby, Prescot, Huyton, Whiston, Halewood and Cronton; Kirkby, Huyton, and Prescot being the major commercial centres...
, had contained the "Cronton
Cronton
Cronton is a village and civil parish within Borough of Knowsley, in England. The village is surrounded by green belt land. Over the county border in Cheshire, Widnes town centre is to the south-southeast.-History:...
" pit and the neighbouring Metropolitan Borough of St Helens
Metropolitan Borough of St Helens
The Metropolitan Borough of St Helens is a metropolitan borough of Merseyside, in North West England. It is named after its largest town St Helens, and covers an area which includes the settlements of Newton-le-Willows, Earlestown, Haydock, Rainhill, Eccleston, Clock Face, Billinge and...
contained Sutton Manor, Bold and Parkside collieries.
Other areas have recovered and now boast a good standard of living. Recovery was quickest in areas where the economy was more diverse, such as in Kent or the West Midlands
West Midlands (region)
The West Midlands is an official region of England, covering the western half of the area traditionally known as the Midlands. It contains the second most populous British city, Birmingham, and the larger West Midlands conurbation, which includes the city of Wolverhampton and large towns of Dudley,...
. Brodsworth
Brodsworth
Brodsworth is a village and civil parish in the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England, situated about five miles north-west of Doncaster...
boasted the largest mine in the country and is also enjoying relative affluence. Old colliery sites have often been turned into new industrial parks or retail parks. Xscape
Xscape (building)
Xscape buildings are large, strikingly designed and unusually shaped buildings. Typically they contain a real snow indoor ski slope, leisure facilities and related shops...
, an indoor ski-slope, forms part of an entertainments centre and outlet shopping complex built on the former site of Castleford
Castleford
Castleford is the largest of the "five towns" district in the metropolitan borough of the City of Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, England. It is near Pontefract, and has a population of 37,525 according to the 2001 Census, but has seen a rise in recent years and is now around 45-50,000. To the north...
's Glasshoughton
Glasshoughton
Glasshoughton is an area of Castleford in West Yorkshire, England, that borders on Pontefract. It is home to the Xscape indoor ski slope and leisure centre, the Junction 32 Outlet Shopping Village, a DIY superstore, a hotel, a pub and a number of fast food restaurants, which were built on the site...
colliery.
Whilst the strike was on, public opinion in the Home Counties
Home Counties
The home counties is a term which refers to the counties of South East England and the East of England which border London, but do not include the capital city itself...
(except Kent) was mixed, whereas in the Welsh valleys
South Wales Valleys
The South Wales Valleys are a number of industrialised valleys in South Wales, stretching from eastern Carmarthenshire in the west to western Monmouthshire in the east and from the Heads of the Valleys in the north to the lower-lying, pastoral country of the Vale of Glamorgan and the coastal plain...
, Yorkshire and other areas actually affected by the strike, support was high. It has become a symbol of the perceived indifference that the Conservative Party under Thatcher had to problems of unemployment and poverty. The Daily Mirror, which had been hostile towards the strike at the time, began a campaign to raise awareness of the social deprivation in the coalfield
Coalfield
A coalfield is an area of certain uniform characteristics where coal is mined. The criteria for determining the approximate boundary of a coalfield are geographical and cultural, in addition to geological...
s. The Coalfields Regeneration Trust
Coalfields Regeneration Trust
The Coalfields Regeneration Trust is an independent grant-making organisation that was established in 1999 to improve the quality of life in Britain’s coalfield communities...
is an organisation that makes grants to aid the redevelopment of former mining areas.
Although mining is now only a very small industry in Britain, as of 2003 it was reportedly more productive in terms of output per worker than the coal industries in France, Germany and the United States
Andrew J. Richards' book, Miners on Strike, dedicated a chapter to how unusual it was in 1984 for a large-scale strike to be launched in protest at job cuts. In Britain, trade unions had traditionally launched strikes for claims on wage rises and rights at work, but strikes in defence of jobs had been very rare. Since the example of the 1984-5 miners' strike, union leaders have been much more likely to call for action in defence of jobs. Coincidentally, 1984 was the year when Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
economists Richard B. Freeman
Richard B. Freeman
Richard B. Freeman is one of the leading labor economists in North America. The Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and Co-Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, Freeman is also Senior Research Fellow on Labour Markets at the Centre for...
and James Medoff published the book What do Unions do?, where such a strategy was seen as good for productivity and less of a pressure on inflation.
Film and television
The strike was the background for the 2000 film Billy ElliotBilly Elliot
Billy Elliot is a 2000 British drama film written by Lee Hall and directed by Stephen Daldry. Set in the fictional town of "Everington" in the real County Durham, UK, it stars Jamie Bell as 11-year-old Billy, an aspiring dancer, Gary Lewis as his coal miner father, Jamie Draven as Billy's older...
. Several scenes depict the chaos at the picket lines, clashes between armies of police and striking miners, and the shame associated with crossing the picket line. The film also showed the abject poverty associated with the strike, the harshness and desperation of not having coal for heat in winter as well as depicting the contrast between miners and the middle-class.
The strike is also involved in the background to the plot of the 1996 film Brassed Off
Brassed Off
Brassed Off is a 1996 British film written and directed by Mark Herman. The film, a British-American co-production made between Channel Four Films, Miramax Films and Prominent Films, is about the troubles faced by a colliery brass band, following the closure of their pit...
, which is set ten years after the strike when all the miners have lost the will to resist and accept the closure of their pit with resignation. Brassed Off was set in the fictional "Grimley", a thinly disguised version of the hard-hit ex-mining village of Grimethorpe
Grimethorpe
Grimethorpe is a large village which is part of the metropolitan borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, England. It has a population of 1,873....
, where some of it was filmed.
The satirical Comic Strip
The Comic Strip
The Comic Strip is a group of British comedians, known for their television series The Comic Strip Presents.... The core members are Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson and Jennifer Saunders, with frequent appearances by Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane and...
Presents episode "The Strike
The Strike
The Strike is one of the short comedy films – written by Peter Richardson and Pete Richens, and directed by Richardson – which made up the long-running Channel 4 television series The Comic Strip Presents......
" (1988) depicts an idealistic Welsh screenwriter's growing dismay as his hard-hitting and grittily realistic script about the strike is mutilated by a Hollywood
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Hollywood is a famous district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema...
producer into an all-action thriller starring Al Pacino
Al Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy, Tony Montana in Scarface, Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice in Dick Tracy and Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way, though he has also appeared...
(played by Peter Richardson) as Scargill, and Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...
(played by Jennifer Saunders
Jennifer Saunders
Jennifer Jane Saunders is an English comedienne, screenwriter, singer and actress. She has won two BAFTAs, an International Emmy Award, a British Comedy Award, a Rose d'Or Light Entertainment Festival Award, two Writers' Guild of Great Britain Awards, and a Peoples Choice Award.She first came into...
) as his wife. The film parodies Hollywood films by over-dramatising the strike and changing most important historic facts. The film won a Golden Rose
Golden Rose
The Golden Rose is a gold ornament, which popes of the Catholic Church have traditionally blessed annually. It is occasionally conferred as a token of reverence or affection...
and Press Reward at the Montreux Festival.
The 1984 episode of the 1996 BBC television drama
BBC television drama
BBC television dramas have been produced and broadcast since even before the public service company had an officially established television broadcasting network in the United Kingdom...
serial Our Friends in the North
Our Friends in the North
Our Friends in the North is a British television drama serial, produced by the BBC and originally broadcast in nine episodes on BBC Two in early 1996...
revolves around the events of the strike, and the scenes of clashes between the police and striking miners were re-created using many of those who had taken part in the actual real-life events on the miners' side. In 2005, BBC One broadcast the one-off drama Faith, written by William Ivory and starring Jamie Draven
Jamie Draven
Jamie Draven is an English actor whose career in films and television began in 1998. One of his early notable parts was as Billy's elder brother, Tony, in the hit 2000 film Billy Elliot and as Jamie Dow in Ultimate Force.A native of the southern Manchester district of Wythenshawe, he is the...
and Maxine Peake
Maxine Peake
Maxine Peake is an English stage, film and television actress known for playing Veronica in Channel 4's Manchester-based drama series Shameless, Twinkle in Victoria Wood's sitcom Dinnerladies, and, most recently, barrister Martha Costello in BBC legal drama Silk.-Early life:Peake is the second of...
. Many of the social scenes were filmed in the former Colliery town of Thorne, near Doncaster. It viewed the strike from the perspective of both the police and the miners.
Airline Virgin Atlantic's 2009 television ad titled "Still Red Hot" commemorating its 25th year opens with a scene set in 1984 in which a newsagent yells the news of the day: "Miners' strike! Miners' strike!", showing the headline of a nondescript newspaper: "IT'S THE PITS".
Theatre
The film Billy ElliotBilly Elliot
Billy Elliot is a 2000 British drama film written by Lee Hall and directed by Stephen Daldry. Set in the fictional town of "Everington" in the real County Durham, UK, it stars Jamie Bell as 11-year-old Billy, an aspiring dancer, Gary Lewis as his coal miner father, Jamie Draven as Billy's older...
was turned into a musical, Billy Elliot the Musical
Billy Elliot the Musical
Billy Elliot the Musical is a musical based on the 2000 film Billy Elliot. The music is by Sir Elton John, and book and lyrics are by Lee Hall, who wrote the film's screenplay. The plot revolves around motherless Billy, who trades boxing gloves for ballet shoes...
by Elton John
Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE, Hon DMus is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor...
, and has been successful on London's West End
West End theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English speaking...
. The musical has been brought to Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
and won a Tony Award
Tony Award
The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway...
in 2009 for Best Musical
Tony Award for Best Musical
This is a list of winners and nominations for the Tony Award for Best Musical, first awarded in 1949. This award is presented to the producers of the musical.-1940s:* 1949: Kiss Me, Kate – Music and lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Samuel and Bella Spewack...
(the highest award given to musicals in the U.S.).
Literature
There is a book based on Lee Hall's screenplay Billy Elliot. The book by the same title is by Melvin BurgessMelvin Burgess
Melvin Burgess is a British author of children's fiction. His first book, The Cry of the Wolf, was published in 1990. He gained a certain amount of notoriety in 1996 with the publication of Junk, which was published in the shadow of the film of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, and dealt with the...
, published in 2001.
A 2005 book, GB84, by David Peace
David Peace
David Peace is an English author. Known for his novels GB84, The Damned Utd, and Red Riding Quartet, Peace was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta in their 2003 list...
combines fictional accounts of pickets, union officials and strike-breakers. Graphic details are provided of many of the strike's major events. It also suggests that the British Intelligence services were involved in undermining the strike, including the making of the alleged suggestion of a link between Scargill and Muammar al-Gaddafi
Muammar al-Gaddafi
Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar Gaddafi or "September 1942" 20 October 2011), commonly known as Muammar Gaddafi or Colonel Gaddafi, was the official ruler of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then the "Brother Leader" of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011.He seized power in a...
.
Val McDermid
Val McDermid
Val McDermid is a Scottish crime writer, best known for a series of suspense novels starring her most famous creation, Dr. Tony Hill.-Biography:...
published the novel A Darker Domain
A Darker Domain
A Darker Domain is a 2008 psychological thriller novel by Scottish crime writer Val McDermid. Reviewers often noted the fast paced style of the novel as it flashes back and forth between two plot lines, a contemporary crime in 2007 and the investigation of a cold case from 1984. The novel is set in...
in 2008 which has one of its plot lines set in the strike. Multiple reviewers gave the book acclaim for exploring the social and emotional repercussions of the strikes. One reviewer pointed out that McDermid was raised in Fife
Fife
Fife is a council area and former county of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries to Perth and Kinross and Clackmannanshire...
, so much of her understanding of the events must have been shaped by her childhood there.
Visual art
In 2001, British visual artist Jeremy Deller worked with historical societies, battle re-enactors, and dozens of the people who participated in the violent 1984 clashes of picketers and police to reconstruct and re-enact the Battle of Orgreave. A documentary about the re-enactment was produced by Deller and director Mike Figgis and was broadcast on British television; and Deller also published a book called The English Civil War Part II documenting both the project and the historical events it investigates (Artangel Press, 2002). Involving the re-enactors, who would normally recreate Viking battles or mediaeval wars, was a way for Deller to situate the recent and controversial Battle of Orgreave (and labour politics themselves) as part of mainstream history.On 5 March 2010, the 25th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike, a new artwork by British visual artist, Dan Savage was unveiled in Sunderland Civic Centre. Commissioned by Sunderland City Council, Savage worked with the Durham Miners Association to create the large scale commemorative window, which features images and symbols of the strike and the North East's mining heritage.
Popular music
The strike has been the subject of songs by many music groups. Of the more well known are the Manic Street PreachersManic Street Preachers
Manic Street Preachers are a Welsh alternative rock band, formed in 1986. They are James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire, Richey Edwards and Sean Moore. The band are part of the Cardiff music scene, and were at their most prominent during the 1990s...
' "A Design for Life
A Design for Life
"A Design for Life" was released by Manic Street Preachers in 1996 and was the first single release from the Everything Must Go album of May that same year.The title was inspired by the Joy Division EP record "An Ideal for Living"...
", and "1985", from the album Lifeblood
Lifeblood
- Personnel :Manic Street Preachers*James Dean Bradfield – lead vocals, guitar*Sean Moore – drums, drum programming*Nicky Wire – bassAdditional personnel*Patrick Jones - additional lyrics on "Fragments"*Nick Nasmyth - keyboards*Jeremy Shaw - keyboards...
; Pulp
Pulp (band)
Pulp are an English alternative rock band formed in Sheffield in 1978. Their lineup consists of Jarvis Cocker , Russell Senior , Candida Doyle , Mark Webber , Steve Mackey and Nick Banks ....
's "Last day of the miners' strike"; Funeral for a Friend
Funeral for a Friend
Funeral for a Friend are a Welsh post-hardcore band, from Bridgend. Formed 2001, they have released five studio albums, seven EPs, sixteen singles, one DVD, and one compilation album.-Formation and Early Years:...
's "History
History (Funeral for a Friend song)
"History" is the seventh track and third single off Funeral For A Friend's second album Hours. It reached number 21 on the UK Singles Chart.-Music video:...
", and Ewan MacColl
Ewan MacColl
Ewan MacColl was an English folk singer, songwriter, socialist, actor, poet, playwright, and record producer. He was married to theatre director Joan Littlewood, and later to American folksinger Peggy Seeger. He collaborated with Littlewood in the theatre and with Seeger in folk music...
's "Daddy, What did you do in the strike?". Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne
Newcastle upon Tyne is a city and metropolitan borough of Tyne and Wear, in North East England. Historically a part of Northumberland, it is situated on the north bank of the River Tyne...
native Sting recorded a song about the strike called "We Work the Black Seam" for his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles
The Dream of the Blue Turtles
The Dream of the Blue Turtles is the first solo album by British pop singer-songwriter Sting, released in the United States on 1 June 1985, a year after The Police had unofficially disbanded...
, in 1985. Billy Bragg
Billy Bragg
Stephen William Bragg , better known as Billy Bragg, is an English alternative rock musician and left-wing activist. His music blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs, and his lyrics mostly deal with political or romantic themes...
's version of "Which Side Are You On?
Which Side Are You On?
"Which Side Are You On?" is a song written by Florence Reece in 1931. Reece was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky. In 1931, the miners of that region were locked in a bitter and violent struggle with the mine owners. In an attempt to...
", neatly encapsulated the strikers' feeling of betrayal by the perceived indifference of wider elements within British society. Also in 1985, English punk group The Mekons portrayed the miners' situation in the song "Abernant 1984/5" on the album Fear and Whiskey
Fear and Whiskey
Fear and Whiskey is a 1985 album by Mekons, which marked their return from a several-year hiatus. It is credited as being the first alternative country album, as it blends the bands previously-established punk rock style with a country & western sound. The album was initially released by Sin...
.
The folk song "The Ballad of '84" contains the view that David Jones and Joe Green died as a result of the police's handling of events. U2
U2
U2 are an Irish rock band from Dublin. Formed in 1976, the group consists of Bono , The Edge , Adam Clayton , and Larry Mullen, Jr. . U2's early sound was rooted in post-punk but eventually grew to incorporate influences from many genres of popular music...
's song "Red Hill Mining Town
Red Hill Mining Town
"Red Hill Mining Town" is a song by the rock band U2. It is the sixth track from their 1987 album, The Joshua Tree.-Background and recording:...
" from their Joshua Tree
The Joshua Tree
The Joshua Tree is the fifth studio album by rock band U2. It was produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and was released on 9 March 1987 on Island Records. In contrast to the ambient experimentation of their 1984 release The Unforgettable Fire, U2 aimed for a harder-hitting sound on The Joshua...
album is about the strike, according to lead singer Bono
Bono
Paul David Hewson , most commonly known by his stage name Bono , is an Irish singer, musician, and humanitarian best known for being the main vocalist of the Dublin-based rock band U2. Bono was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his...
. On 7 July 1984 the anarcho-punk band Crass
Crass
Crass are an English punk rock band that was formed in 1977, which promoted anarchism as a political ideology, way of living, and as a resistance movement. Crass popularised the seminal anarcho-punk movement of the punk subculture, and advocated direct action, animal rights, and environmentalism...
played their final show in Aberdare
Aberdare
Aberdare is an industrial town in Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Dare and Cynon. The population at the census was 31,705...
, Wales at a benefit for striking miners.
Chumbawamba
Chumbawamba
Chumbawamba is a British musical group who have, over a career spanning nearly three decades, played punk rock, pop-influenced music, world music, and folk music...
recorded several pieces in support of the miners. These include the cassette only "Common Ground", recorded as a benefit for the miners. They also recorded a song called "Fitzwilliam", which described the Yorkshire village of that name after the strike. Fitzwilliam
Fitzwilliam, West Yorkshire
Fitzwilliam is a small village on the edge of West Yorkshire, England. It is located in the City of Wakefield district. Technically, it is part of the town of Hemsworth and governed by Hemsworth Town Council as well as Wakefield M.D.C., but the Land Registry and Post Office recognise Fitzwilliam...
eventually saw around a third of its housing stock demolished due to the dominance of derelict properties. They also made a song called "Frickley" about the football club Frickley Athletic
Frickley Athletic F.C.
Frickley Athletic F.C. are a football club based in South Elmsall, in West Yorkshire, England. They were established in 1910 as Frickley Colliery F.C., and changed to their present name in 1974.-History:...
, which referenced the continued distrust of the police by those in mining areas after the strike. they also recorded an acapella song entitled coal not dole, a popular slogan used by the miners throughout the strike.
Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and Gong/Mothergong...
, Tim Hodgkinson
Tim Hodgkinson
Tim Hodgkinson is an English experimental music composer and performer, principally on reeds and keyboards. He is best known as one of the core members of the British avant-rock group Henry Cow, which he formed with Fred Frith in 1968...
and Lindsay Cooper
Lindsay Cooper
Lindsay Cooper is an English bassoon and oboe player, composer and political activist. Best known for her work with the band Henry Cow, she was also a member of Comus, National Health, News from Babel and David Thomas and the Pedestrians...
from Henry Cow
Henry Cow
Henry Cow were an English avant-rock group, founded at Cambridge University in 1968 by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. Henry Cow's personnel fluctuated over their decade together, but drummer Chris Cutler and bassoonist/oboist Lindsay Cooper were important long-term members...
, along with Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career...
and poet Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British anti-authoritarian Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's anti-Bomb movement...
recorded The Last Nightingale
The Last Nightingale
The Last Nightingale is an album by various artists recorded and released in 1984 to raise money for striking coal miners in the 1984–1985 UK miners' strike. It features Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson and Lindsay Cooper from the English avant-rock group Henry Cow, singer and musician Robert Wyatt,...
in October 1984 to raise money for the striking coal miners and their families.
Dire Straits
Dire Straits
Dire Straits were a British rock band active from 1977 to 1995, composed of Mark Knopfler , his younger brother David Knopfler , John Illsley , and Pick Withers .Dire Straits' sound drew from a variety of musical influences, including jazz, folk, blues, and came closest...
' "Iron Hand", from their 1991 album On Every Street
On Every Street
On Every Street is the sixth and final studio album by British rock band Dire Straits, released in 1991 . It made #1 on the UK Albums Chart.-History:...
, refers to the Battle of Orgreave. Folk singer John Tams
John Tams
John Tams is an English actor, singer, songwriter, composer and musician.- Folk musician :John Tams was a member of Derbyshire folk group Muckram Wakes in the 1970s, then worked with Ashley Hutchings as singer and melodeon-player on albums including Son of Morris On, and as a member of the...
' "Harry Stone-Hearts of Coal" which featured on his 2001 album Unity and which won "Best Original Song" at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards
BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards
The BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards celebrate outstanding achievement during the previous year within the field of folk music. The awards have been given annually since 2000 by British radio station BBC Radio 2....
is set against the backdrop of the Battle of Orgreave.
Banner Theatre
Banner theatre
Banner Theatre is a community theatre company based in Birmingham, England. The theatre was founded in 1974.-History:Founded in 1974, the theatre works with marginalized and disadvantaged communities using a combination of documentary theatre, music and recorded voices...
recorded two cassettes - "Here We Go" in 1985 and "Saltley Gate" in 1993, with many songs from the pen of Dave Rogers. The best known are "Saltley Gate" about the mass Birmingham picket, "Maerdy, the Last Pit in the Rhondda" and "Busking for the Miners" which celebrates how Birmingham people supported the miners' struggle. "Monday Morning Rain" was written for Banner's 1989 show "In the Reign of Pig's Pudding" and is a poignant song about the effects of unemployment after pit closures - it is included in the album "Elixir of Life". Rogers also wrote songs for the New Vic Theatre
New Vic Theatre
The New Vic Theatre is situated in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. It was purpose-built as a theatre in the round and opened in 1986, replacing a converted cinema, the Victoria Theatre, Hartshill, Stoke-on-Trent.-History:...
production "Nice Girls", relating to the protest camps set up outside threatened pits by women from all over Britain in 1993. Banner toured these camps and created the song "Women on the Line" - this was later included in their video ballad "Burning Issues" which marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1984/5 Miners Strike and was developed with former mining communities in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and South Wales.
The strike also inspired two entire albums. Freq, recorded in 1984 by ex-Hawkwind
Hawkwind
Hawkwind are an English rock band, one of the earliest space rock groups. Their lyrics favour urban and science fiction themes. They are also a noted precursor to punk rock and now are considered a link between the hippie and punk cultures....
singer and lyricist Robert Calvert
Robert Calvert
Robert Calvert was a writer, poet, and musician.-Biography:Born Robert Newton Calvert in Pretoria, South Africa, Calvert's parents moved to England when he was two years of age and later attended school in London and Margate. He began his career by writing poetry and in 1967 formed a Street...
. Alternating with songs such as "All the machines are quiet" and "Work song" are five short tracks taken from speeches and demonstrations recorded amongst the miners themselves. The industrial group Test Department recorded the 1984 album Shoulder to Shoulder, in collaboration with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir. The album combined harsh industrial rhythms with the traditional songs sung by the male choir, and also included poetry and speeches from the strike.
Soul/punk/pop/rockabilly band The Redskins
The Redskins
The Redskins were a 1980s English band, notable for their left-wing politics and catchy, danceable songs. Their music combined influences from soul, rockabilly, pop and punk rock.- History :...
, who were notable for their left-wing views and lyrics, supported the struggle of the miners and the union. Their song "Keep on Keepin' On" was a rallying support for the strike, and the band played benefits in support of the strike. The punk/Oi!
Oi!
Oi! is a working class subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. The music and its associated subculture had the goal of bringing together punks, skinheads and other working-class youths ....
band Angelic Upstarts
Angelic Upstarts
Angelic Upstarts are an English punk rock/Oi! band formed in South Shields in 1977. The band espoused an anti-fascist and socialist working class philosophy, and have been associated with the skinhead subculture...
recorded a song supportive of the miners called "One More Day". Welsh punk rockers Foreign Legion
Foreign Legion (band)
Foreign Legion was a punk band from South Wales, often referred to as the longest running punk group in Wales.-1984–1991:Foreign Legion formed in 1984 from the ashes of a band called Society . The band released their first EP on their own label 'Rent a Racket'. Their first full-length album...
's song "Another Day" is about the strike.
Paul Weller of the style council was a big supporter of the miners and wrote a song called "Stones Throw Away" which can be heard on the number one album "Our Favorite Shop" from 1985.
British pop trio Soho
Soho (band)
Soho were an English pop trio, consisting of the sisters Jacqueline Cuff and Pauline Cuff, with Timothy London. Other members of the group over the years have been Dukie D , Liam Gillick , Eds Chesters , Leigh Gorman and...
gave mention to the miners' strike in their 1990 hit song "Hippychick".
Bradford-based rock band New Model Army
New Model Army
The New Model Army of England was formed in 1645 by the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War, and was disbanded in 1660 after the Restoration...
wrote and released two songs about the strike: "1984", from their "The Price" EP of that year, and "The Charge", from their eponymously titled EP of 1987. "1984" was a graphic portrayal of villages under siege, phone-tapping and the strikers’ growing sense of bitterness and frustration. "The Charge" dealt with the aftermath of the strike, feelings of betrayal and the way of life that was lost with the miners’ defeat.
See also
- Mick McGaheyMick McGaheyMichael "Mick" McGahey was a Scottish miners' leader and life-long Communist, with a distinctive gravelly voice. He described himself as "a product of my class and my movement".-Early life:...
- Peter HeathfieldPeter HeathfieldPeter Heathfield was a British trade unionist who was general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers between 1984 and 1992, including the period of the miners' strike of 1984/85....
- Betty HeathfieldBetty HeathfieldBetty Heathfield was a leading figure in the Miners' Wives Support Groups during the UK miners' strike ....
- List of collieries in Yorkshire 1984-present with dates of closure
- U.S. Coal Strike of 1902Coal Strike of 1902The Coal Strike of 1902 was a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners were on strike asking for higher wages, shorter workdays, and the recognition of their union...
- Winter of discontentWinter of DiscontentThe "Winter of Discontent" is an expression, popularised by the British media, referring to the winter of 1978–79 in the United Kingdom, during which there were widespread strikes by local authority trade unions demanding larger pay rises for their members, because the Labour government of...
- Cultural depictions of Margaret ThatcherCultural depictions of Margaret ThatcherThis page is a list of depictions of Margaret Thatcher onstage, in film and in other forms of fiction.-Film:*The Iron Lady - Meryl Streep*Back in Business - Caroline Bernstein...
- 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protestsThe 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests were a series of anti-austerity protests that took place in the United Kingdom in early 2011...
Further reading
Pages 18–19 give details of the 1991 payouts to miners from the Battle of Orgreave. A novel. Compilation of eyewitness accounts of the miners' strike from both sides of the dispute A critique of policing methods in the coalfields during the strikeExternal links
- Miner's Advice - website providing help and information to ex-coal miners
- The official NUM website
- A look at present day mining
- Women in the miners' strike 1984/85 in the north-east of England
- Norman Strike's Diary - an online version of a diary kept by one of the striking miners
- Sources for the Study of the Miners Strike in South Yorkshire Produced by Sheffield City Council's Libraries and Archives
- Cabinet office documents from 1984 concerning the strike (PDF format)