1980s miners strikes?

[CaulkheadUpNorf]

I'm watching Pride, which is set 1984-5, which is before I was born, and it's made me realise I know nothing about the miners strikes.

If you remember it, were affected by it, what was it like? Or are there some things I can read to find out more? There's very little online

I joined a law firm straight from college and there was never any question of joining any union

I remember it well. My mother's family were all miner's in the north east (my grandad had black lung from working in the pits) and my DH was a police officer who spent most of our first year of marriage being sent to various pits during the strike.

My DH said when he was sent to a Nottingham colliery relationships between the police and the miners were ok. They used to jostle each other on the picket line but afterwards it was quite cordial. That was until the Met Police arrived. DH said they were very heavy handed and seemed to inflame the situation.

He spent most of our first year of marriage in PSU vans and used to come home very distant and mentally and physically drained.

My uncles who worked in the pits were the same, mentally and physically exhausted. My grandad hated Scargill but it killed him to see the pits closing. We kept in touch with our family in the north during the strike and it was a tricky situation. Luckily they knew DH well enough to know he wasn't a violent man and that he also had a lot of sympathy for the miners - as did a lot of police officers I suspect. We came out OK as a family but wouldn't want to go through it again.

I don't think Billy Elliott is an absolutely historical record, for all it's based on a true story

This is a good eye witness account by a miner's wife:

www.amazon.co.uk/Norma-Dolbys-Diary-Account-Miners/dp/0860918807?tag=mumsnetforum-21

The police were sent in with a mandate they particularly did not wish to pursue, but their own jobs and pensions were also on the line. Many were drafted in from all over the country, away from their families for weeks on end and billeted in army barracks, ten man rooms, no privacy. The stress was immeasurable. I saw the insides of Sutton Coldfield barracks after their strike was concluded. It was like a bomb had gone off, completely smashed to pieces.

the strike

Sticking with the medium of films, Brassed Off is good for showing the after effects 10 years down the line when many pits were closed prior to privatisation of British Coal

For those thinking both sides were as bad as each other: www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/18/scandal-of-orgreave-miners-strike-hillsborough-theresa-may
They really weren't.

sleepingtiger I didn't realise that. I guess I hadn't thought about how long the extra police would have to be there for.

I'm from South Wales, was 21 at the time and would say it's very accurate in its portrayal of the people and community spirit. DH agrees and he worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau in the area portrayed by the film. Not so sure about the singing of Bread And Roses though.

Some of the local mines reputedly had very expensive machinery left underground very heavily greased up because there was still plenty of coal left.

Like a pp the South Wales valley that we're from was a vibrant, busy community with men working in a number of local pits when I was born. We moved away and my grandad was retired by the time of the 84 strike.
The pits all closed before I left school. The whole valley is awful now. Everything is closed. People left. It was pensioners and unemployed people left. House prices are rock bottom. There was no reason for that community to exist without coal.
There is no question that Thatcher and Scargill were conducting a bitter personal feud and there's a great book about it all by Patrick Hannah 'When Arthur met Maggie' in which both of them get a rough ride.
At the time of the strikes, if the coal industry had had the same subsidies as BNFL, we could have shipped everything we produced to Australia and paid them to take it.
Many of those pots could have been mothballed and brought back into production at a profit as the price of good coal rose but they couldn't be reopened as they'd been shut down completely.
The men were signed off on the sick and there was no significant investment to regenerate, retrain or move those communities and so we have these blighted areas 30+ years later.

My dad was a miner and during the strike did go to work so was a 'scab', apparently my mum used to worry herself so much due to how some miners who did carry on working had bricks dropped onto their windscreens and all sorts from those who did picket (a small minority who were aggressive.) I'm from a town in the East Midlands that was close to several collieries, all of which were closed. My parents could not stand Scargill and my dad in particular didn't mourn the death of Thatcher in 2013 due to how they were treated.

As a result of being a miner for many years, he has some lasting health problems for which he's received some compensation for I believe such as deafness and vibration white finger. I must say though I was only a toddler during the last few years before changed jobs so I'm going on from what I've been told and also what I remember (a vivid memory being my dad wearing those bright orange overalls miners wore and leaving for work in the evening wearing one, and my mum pegging them on the line when they had been washed.)

I remember it as my XH who was Met Police was up there policing it for weeks on end. I was glad to have weeks of peace to myself.

Wrt unions it was mainly the big nationalised industries that were still unionised in the 70s and 80s. Coal, steel, shipbuilding, cars etc.
Most professional type jobs had professional bodies like doctors which were vieweviewed differently. Pilots still have a union which always seemed a bit anachronistic to me but presumably comes from the days when BA (and predecessors) were government owned.
These days it tends to be government (or former government) employees that still have the unions like Unison, RMT & Unite.

My Dad was a ship builder and a trade unionist and we marched in solidarity with the miners. The effects of the strike can never be underestimated.

A few years after the miners' strike ended the shipbuilders went on strike. The union used to give their members money every week but it was nowhere near what the shipbuilders would have earned. I'd been left £1000 by a relative - I was about 14 - and my parents took me to the bank one day and got me to withdraw it so they could pay the mortgage*. That strike was only four months long and people even in that short space lost their houses but we'd have rather starved than been scabs.

*My sister (PFB) didn't get tapped for her cash!

Emotions ran high during the strike, in some ways I think the Pride film does not represent or covey what happened, the story that it shows is one of London meets the coalfield and focuses upon one village with a sort of positive feel good outcome, which was not the experience of many.

Not a mining area (well, not for 70 years). I remember seeing it on the news and an assembly at primary school when it had been running for a year.

Millionsmom

Biscuit me all you like but the government used the police as a political weapon.
The police were viscous (as were some strikers).
The way that the miners treated those that refused to strike was atrocious.

So lets not pretend that any side was pure in what they did.

There were cunts on both sides. Ask David Wilkie - oh no, you can't - he was killed by two striking miners.

DH is from a Yorkshire mining town and has a loathing for Scargill and his henchmen. Houses trashed, wives and even children threatened with violence.

I was only a kid, and lived a fair way away from the mines, but my friend's dad was a policeman busses in to the strike areas to help the local police cope.

He used to come home covered (absolutely covered) in excrement and filth. He would strip in the garage, wordlessly and blank-eyed walk to the shower, and only begin to look human again when he emerged. Policing the strikes was a hugely unpleasant task

I remember it too. I was living in Nottinghamshire in a mining area at the time (Mansfield area|). Although my dad wasn't employed in the mining industry, we owned a general store and off license and his business was badly affected. I don't think in Notts we were as badly affected as some areas, because there was a thriving hosiery and knitwear trade in the area at the time and a lot of the women worked in that trade while the men were employed in the mines. That meant that many households had some money coming in. But it did cause huge divisions in communities and between members of families which never really healed. There is no mining left in that area now. Difficult times for many of my friends and contemporaries.

I lived in the middle of the Derbyshire / Nottinghamshire coal field. My uncle and Grandad were both miners. Grandad had retired by 1984 and was suffering from ill health - he later died of pneumaconiosis aged 74. We used to go shopping on a Saturday and the police used to set up road blocks. Aged 12 I saw my Grandad pulled from the car and bent over the bonnet to be 'searched' by a police officer with a Southern accent who called him a cunt. He had lost an eye fighting for his country in WW2.
We had soup kitchens etc .... people were completely on their arses. I don't live there now but no, the communities never recovered. Particularly damaging was the idea that they were 'the enemy within', traitors to their country. Lets not forget, the strike was about Scargill's belief that there was a plan to close down pits on a massive scale. And he was right. The vast majority of those pits were still profitable. The miners were persecuted in order for Thatcher and her ilk to send the message to other unions.

We lived down south and was only four when the strike started, so I don't really remember much about it. I do however have vivid recollections of the run up to Christmas that year.

Mum had seen some pictures of miners' children playing outside in the freezing cold, with no winter clothes (or clothes that were much too small), and it really upset her. So she bought bucket loads of wool and spent all of November and December knitting jumpers, hats and gloves. Dad learned to knit so he could help with scarves. I remember going to town on the bus to help choose the wool (very exciting - we usually got everything in the village so the bus was a novelty!).

I'm not sure where they ended up, but I know the lady in the village post office was very helpful in finding out where things were needed and making sure they got there.

I asked mum about it when I was a bit older, and she said 'I couldn't do anything to help the miners, but I could at least help keep their bairns warm while they fought'

My uncle was a builder living in one of the many pit villages in South Yorkshire everyday at least once but sometimes multiple times a day he was stopped in his van by the police to check he wasn't bringing in people to join the picket lines or supplies for the families. He was beaten up by the police in more than one occasion.

The Miners Strike saw a massive shift in the law, concerning the right to strike, picket and protest. Thatcher labelled the Left 'a threat to democracy' without a trace of irony or hypocrisy.

The Army were drafted in to police lines, in police uniform but without any ID or number on their uniform. Agent provocateurs in the picket lines were placed to start trouble.

libcom.org/library/come-and-wet-this-truncheon-dave-douglass

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/03/miners-strike-thatcher-real-enemy-within-extremism