Coal Queens
Women's narratives of the miner's strike on the 40th anniversary
Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture.
On 6th March 1984, the UK government led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announced the plan to close 20 collieries around the UK meaning that many of the mining communities would lose their main source of employment.
The number of miners in the UK had reduced over subsequent years since the strikes of the 1970s, which had been successful in preventing the closure of many pits, and this led to calls for strikes this time around. Many of the richest coal fields had already been worked out. Despite no official vote being held, on 12th March 1984, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) led by Arthur Scargill declared a national strike.
Anticipating a possible backlash against pit closures, the UK government had amassed a stockpile of coal in order to keep industry going. They had learned from the 1970s strikes, where power cuts had caused major problems for the country.
Picket lines began to be erected, and although many pickets were non-violent, there were some violent clashes between striking miners and police, often sent in from London to the mining areas. The largest strike numbers were seen in Scotland, Yorkshire, North East of England and South Wales. The strike had begun after the closure of Cortonwood Pit in South Yorkshire, and many of the miners from this community became ‘flying pickets’; striking miners who ‘flew’ to other pits to picket, in particular Nottinghamshire and the Midlands where there was less support for the strike. These flying pickets hoped to prevent more miners returning to work, and the strikes often involved violent confrontations between both the police and pickets, as well as the anger aimed at the returning strikers, who were seen by many as ‘scabs’, letting the strikers down by giving in to the government.
An example of the difficulties faced by miners returning to work to support their families can be seen in this scene in the 2000 film Billy Elliot, which shows a desperate father arriving at work on a bus where picketing miners throw missiles at the vehicle, joined by one of the men’s striking sons. Many strike-breakers were never forgiven by their community or fellow miners for breaking the strike. The 1996 film Brassed Off is set in a Yorkshire mining town and also gives a good background for the reality of the strike amongst a close-knit mining community.
One of the most shocking and violent clashes of the strike took place at Orgreave pit in South Yorkshire in June 1984. Police officers were caught on camera using excessive violent force against pickets, and the evening news featured these shocking images. There were often rumours that the police force asked news cameras to turn off their cameras, as well as reports of ‘taunting’ of the struggling miners. Lawsuits have since been brought against South Yorkshire Police, with compensation being awarded.
In the summer of 1984, as the battle of Orgreave broke, I was a ten year old at a local primary school in a nearby village. My village had been built around a former working pit, and some of my friends at school still lived on the housing estate built for the mining families. I have vivid memories of pickets running through the street past my school gates, away from police on charging horses, the battle-cry of the truncheon against the shields that became the sound of the strike.
Many more miners began drifting back to work by September 1984, due to the hardship faced to feed their families and heat their homes. As mining families stopped receiving deliveries of coal to heat their pit-homes, they began burning furniture and household items, books, clothing; anything they could to keep warm as they faced another harsh winter - and Christmas - with often little to no income.
The meagre union pay ran out entirely by January 1985, leading to more returnees.
As with all narratives in history, I am interested in how the strikes affected the women of these communities, who were often the backbone of the family.
As the 1842 Miners and Collieries Act had made it unlawful for women to work underground within the mines, there were far less women actually employed by the coal industry, although some, such as cleaners, administrative workers, and cooks did support the miners by also striking alongside them.
However, this does not do justice to the sheer amount of involvement the women of these communities became involved in within the strikes.
Many women became activists within the strike. As with the earlier Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s, women became a driving force during the strike, attending meetings and setting up marches and rallies to support the striking miners and their families. There were rallies which became women only, and the women described these as having a ‘gala’ feel to them. Many of these women, more used to being at home with their families, became involved in public speaking, finding a voice they didn’t know they had. Some of the women even became official pickets, facing countless arrests and violent clashes. Women’s participation at picket lines was controversial, marking the ways in which gendered roles within these communities changed during and after the strike.
However, though a spotlight has often been shone on these women, there were also much quieter, determined women involved in their own battles on the home front.
Between 2014 and 2019, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Natalie Tomlinson and Victoria Dawson interviewed women from former mining communities to talk about their experiences during that difficult and harrowing year. Although the interviewers reported many stories of anger, sorrow, and despair, they also told stories of joy and surprising gains from the strike.
The women involved in the activism side of the strike reported strong feelings of solidarity and the rewards of becoming involved. Women organised soup kitchens for the mining families to be provided with a decent meal, and began food parcel distribution centres. It is thought that their contribution to feeding over 140,000 miners and their families was vital to the strike effort.
Many of the wives and mothers who became activists within their communities feared not just for their husbands’ livelihoods, but that of their sons. Within such close-knit communities, it wasn’t unusual for whole families to work at the local pit, so the effects if the government got their way to close them all had far-reaching consequences.
Many other women found employment outside the home in order to go some way to providing financial support following the loss of a regular wage from their husbands. As the interviewers were keen to point out, the women within the home also provided huge emotional support and morale to the flagging miners and the community during this time, and their efforts should also be acknowledged. They often found themselves struggling to make ends meet, and providing meals for their husbands and children from very little.
For the women involved in the support movement, their involvement became an important social network of practical and emotional support. Such women often felt isolated from the ‘man’s world’ of the picketing miners, and coming together with other women helped to relieve some of this isolation. As with all organisations, however, there were some unpleasant sides: rumours of the support group activists and NUM officials taking the best of the food donations, for example.
There were stories from women who continued to work within the mining industry during the strike, who reported the difficulties they faced afterwards, as they were in a minority and often didn’t feel they could speak about their experiences openly. For a fantastic introduction to the women affected by the strike, the book Queen Coal by journalist Triona Holden, who spent time with the women of the mining communities, creates a fascinating portrait of their lives and work.
Many families complained that the cold that winter was one of the worst things they faced, reporting that they often went to bed early with a hot water bottle in order to keep warm, and sons of the mining families often went ‘coal picking’ or ‘riddling’ in order to find pieces of coal to burn on their open fires, the only source of heat in many of their homes.
Though there were not vast numbers of women who officially joined the Women’s Movement following the strikes, many did report that they had found their voice and felt their lives had been changed irrevocably because of the strike.
The strike officially ended on 3rd March 1985, almost a full year after it started. The Thatchers’ government had held out and succeeded in breaking the strike, and eventually, most UK pits were officially closed, and 2015 saw the closure of the last deep colliery in the UK. The industry that had driven the industrial revolution in Britain in the nineteenth century was all but over. Many manufacturing industries folded with it, with more women entering the workforce and less unionisation within the workplace, as the world of work turned more towards office roles than industry.
The strike had led to the arrest of over 11,000 people, with just over 8,000 charged with offences, and only 150-200 receiving custodial sentences.
On 8th March 1985, a long-planned rally for International Women’s Day went ahead by the National Women Against Pit Closures. Arthur Scargill attended, thanking the women for their valuable support of the strike, despite their losses. At the end of his speech, the women sang ‘We are women, we are strong’, from a song by Mal Finch, ‘Women of the Working Class’ that had become the unofficial theme tune of the women’s support movement.
Most of the women’s support groups folded following the end of the strike, although The National Women Against Pit Closures continued until 1988. As with the end of the war, when women had left their homes in droves to help in the war effort, so many women found themselves once again isolated within their own homes, losing their contact with other activists and with that, their support networks. Worse still, many of the banks and local authorities who had given some financial support to the mining families during the strike wanted their debts repaid, and women reported that it took many years before they got back on their feet financially. Many miners had lost their jobs during the strike, and so were left with no redundancy pay or pension.
Some of the key women involved within the movement recalled that their gender roles within the home had been reversed, with their husbands spending more time at home with their children whilst they had been travelling the country rallying support. This brought a new-found sense of self-confidence for some.
Many women reported that though the year of the strike brought profound hardship, it also brought them closer to their communities, and gave them something to be proud of for the rest of their lives.
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We lived in Barnsley for six years a decade ago, and the economic and social scars are still only too visible across what were the South Yorkshire coalfields. There was still chronic unemployment for men, young and old. There were many hairdressers and coffee shops run by women, while the men hung around on street corners. The new 'industries' were vast call centres, better than working down a mine, but no substitute for communities. I went to a talk by Catherine Bailey who wrote that brilliant book, Black Diamonds. She and the local librarian had been out to Grimethorpe Primary School, and they had taken a lump of coal with them, because the children didn't know what coal was....
Thanks Kate. Have you come across Joan Hart’s “At the coal face: a memoir of a pit nurse”? Hart worked in Doncaster in 1970s and onwards including during the strike era. Worth a read.