During my PhD studies, I carried out interviews with a Welsh
mining family who had been involved in the strike of 1984-85. The focus of the research
was the way that participation in collective action – including protests,
demonstrations, direct actions, riots and picket lines – served to change the
social relations through which people defined themselves and thus inadvertently
changed participants’ identities. The interviews uncovered some powerful
personal stories – of people falling out with their scabbing neighbours and
never speaking to them again, of ‘housewives’ who became people with
independent interests and careers, and more. As part of the investigation I also
carried out an analysis of secondary sources in which miners and their families
described how the strike transformed their understandings. This analysis made
up part of a literature review chapter in the thesis, but it has never been
published before. I thought that today’s 30th anniversary of the
start of the strike would be a good time to make it widely available.
1 An outline of the dispute
The
following summary account of the miners' strike is based largely on that in
Green (1990). For a fuller account, see, for example, Goodman (1985).
In early March 1984, one of the
longest industrial disputes in British history began when Yorkshire miners came
out on strike against a National Coal Board (NCB) plan to close two of the pits
in the Yorkshire area. A week later, the NCB announced that a further 21,000
jobs would be lost in the industry.
Part of the longer term background
to the dispute was the recent history of strikes involving the National Union
of Mineworkers (NUM). In 1972, an overtly political miners’ strike had won improved
pay and conditions in the face of opposition from Edward Heath's Conservative
government; and, in 1974, another such strike forced Heath's government out of
office. Accounts written subsequent to the 1984-5 strike (e.g., Goodman, 1985)
suggest that the Conservative government of the time had a strategy of building
up coal stocks prior to the strike as part of a plan not simply to force
specific pit closures but to defeat the miners as the most powerful section of
the British working class, thereby to ensure that the events of 1972 and 1974
could not be repeated.
Although the strike soon spread from
Yorkshire to other areas, in certain regions support for it among NUM members
was relatively weak. In particular, the failure of Nottinghamshire area miners
to support the strike consistently became a point of intense conflict.
Solidarity was obviously essential to the strike, since working mines reduced
the strikers' bargaining power considerably. Moreover, the importance of the
strike was frequently expressed as not only about ‘jobs’ but about whole
‘communities’, since many if not most of the collieries were served by villages
that only existed for the coal industry. In not supporting the strike,
therefore, workers in the relatively profitable Nottinghamshire pits were seen
by others to be condemning their livelihoods.
When other miners first went to the
Nottinghamshire pits, they had some success in persuading the Notts miners to
join the strike. However the NCB obtained an injunction preventing miners picketing
outside of their own area. Miners continued to come to Nottinghamshire, but so
also did large numbers of police. In fact, an emergency force was mobilized,
taking police from other forces to the Nottinghamshire coalfields. Police
activities included preventing pickets getting near working miners not just at
the colliery gates, but at roadblocks often hundreds of miles from where the
pickets intended to go; thus police as far south as the Dartford Tunnel stopped
Kent miners from going north. Following a ballot in which most Nottinghamshire
miners voted to continue working but about a quarter came out on strike, a
further 8000 police were deployed in the county.
Throughout the strike, although the
trade union movement as such conspicuously failed to support the miners through
solidarity strikes, support was mobilized in other ways by people around the
country raising funds. Miners and their families also toured Britain and Europe
appealing for support. Miners, their families and supporters also took part in
marches and rallies in London and across the country. In the pit villages,
communal soup kitchens were set up, organized in particular by miners' wives.
Meanwhile, the popular press carried out a vilification campaign against the
strikers: violence by strikers was exaggerated or taken out of context; police
violence against miners was played down; and working miner violence against
strikers went unreported (e.g., Green, 1990, pp. 157-77).
Indeed, the strike is widely
remembered for picket line violence. The most notable such event, however, the
so called ‘Battle of Orgreave’, took place at a coking works rather than a pit.
Striking miners had been having some success in their campaign to stop the
movement of coal, iron and steel. When they heard of a massive operation to
move stocks from the coking plant in Orgreave, thereby undermining the strike,
a huge picket was called. Two and half weeks of bitter clashes with police
culminated finally in an enormous confrontation involving thousands of strikers
and riot police on 18th June 1984. At the end of this event, dozens of miners
were arrested and injured. Although the events was referred to as a ‘riot by
miners’ in the mass media, the strikers themselves referred to it as an
‘ambush’ (e.g. Jackson & Wardle, 1986, p. 34). Significantly, the charges
against all those accused of riot were thrown out in court (Northam, 1988, p.
53). Northam (1988, pp. 53-59) points out that a variety of sources (including
former senior police officers) now agree that the police initiated the violence
at this event.
After the failure to prevent the
movement of the coke and with the growing realization that more Notts miners
could not be persuaded to come out, the strike became increasingly defensive.
After the non-occurrence of a hoped-for dock workers' strike, miners largely
returned to picketing their own pits in an effort to counter the NCB's renewed
‘back to work’ campaign. The police therefore moved with most of the strikers
to Yorkshire, where further confrontations took place, often in the streets and
gardens of the pit villages. Some commentators speak of police ‘running riot’
or ‘besieging’ the miners and their families (e.g., Coulter, Miller &
Walker, 1984; Douglass, 1986; Waddington et
al., 1989, p. 8).
In September, the courts ruled that
the strikes in Yorkshire and North Derbyshire were unlawful. When the NUM
ignored this ruling, its funds were sequestrated. In November, the High Court
replaced the union's elected officials with a receiver.
In 1985, there were increased claims
by the NCB and government of a drift back to work. Those who remained on strike
finally marched back to work behind their union banners in March. However,
Goodman (1985, p. 192) notes that even when the strike was over, some 10,000
men still stayed out.
The literature on this dispute
contains many vivid accounts of changes in the ideas and practices of strikers
and their families. For ease of organization, the types of changes found in
accounts of the experiences of those involved in the strike are divided here
into four sections: conceptions of the police; conceptions of the state and its
institutions; relations with other social groups; and the experiences of the
women involved.
2 Relations with the police
The
most salient finding in the literature on the experience of the strikers and
their families is the reversal from seeing the police as protecting their
rights to seeing them as an antagonistic outgroup (Coulter et al., 1984, pp. 188-9, 207-8; Evans, Hudson & Smith, 1985,
pp. 192-3; Green, 1990, pp. 45-82; Salt & Layzell, 1985, pp. 43-5):
At one time if a policeman was getting a good hiding from some of the
lads I'd have given him a hand - now I'll give the lads a hand.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 47)
Green (1990) interviewed 51 picketing
strikers in a Nottinghamshire village, and found that 44 reported this complete
reversal in opinions on the police (p. 46). Among the types of experience that
seem to account for this change, Green (1990, p. 50) notes first the shock
amongst strikers at the sheer numerical presence of the police at the pickets,
to allow working miners to get into the collieries. Green reports that, on some
of the pickets, police outnumbered striking miners by more than two to one:
I couldn't believe - couldn't understand what they wanted them for.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 51)
Secondly, there was the violence of
the police towards the striking miners, which came to be expected and seemed to
have no limits:
Most of them are like animals on picket lines - swinging their fists
around - they're not bothered about who they hit. I've been down on Ollerton
picket line and I've seen them dragging women around and ripping their coats.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 53)
Many of the striking miners report
that police used violence and provocation as a tactic to produce arrests. For
example, a police cordon pushed a picket line towards a hawthorn hedge, and
when the miners tried to protect themselves by pushing back they were arrested
(Green, 1990, p. 55). Many miners also felt they had been arrested without even
doing anything:
I was standing with my hands in my pockets when they got me - I never
said a word.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 57)
The arrests themselves were not seen
by the striking miners as isolated acts of coercion; rather they were part of a
general strategy of reducing picket-line numbers (Green, 1990, p. 56).
Stringent bail conditions imposed on arrested miners served as evidence for
this perception. Most of Green's striking interviewees felt that their civil liberties
- the rights they expected to have to strike and picket - had been curtailed by
the police action (p. 60).
The curtailment of rights extended
beyond violence, intimidation, provocation and arrest to the police's physical
control of whole districts. The fact that police were seen to intervene by
moving and excluding people from places that were nowhere near the collieries
reinforced the perception that their actions were arbitrary abuses of power
(Green, 1990, pp. 62-3):
I couldn't even get out of my own village to the mine which is only a
mile away without providing proof that I lived in Cotgrave... In South Africa
they keep men in zones and they've got to stay in those zones, now the police
are doing it in Britain.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 61)
Miners' new evaluations of the
police took the form of seeing them as a political agency out to impose the
government's will rather than enforce a neutral system of law and order (Green,
1990, pp. 66-8); most saw strike-breaking as the police's central function
during the dispute. Hence also many refer to a ‘police state’ (Green, 1990, pp.
68-70).
Waddington et al. (1989, p. 136) describe how the conflict between the
police's behaviour towards the strikers and the latter's conception of their
‘community rights’ (e.g., to pick coal from around the colliery) led miners to
turn from simply defending themselves to make more pre-emptive attacks on the
police where possible. The illegitimacy of the police action made ‘violence’
legitimate. Similarly, in an account of the Orgreave ‘police ambush’:
Of course stones were thrown, we're miners not angels. When you've seen
men trampled by horses or beaten by riot police purely for demonstrating, every
instinct in you cries out against it. Of course you want to defend them just as
you want to defend yourself.
(Quoted in Jackson & Wardle, 1986, p. 36)
The strikers' perception that the
police's interventions as a whole were systematically favouring the working
miners is consistent with Green's finding (1990, p. 49) that working miners had
no such complaints about police behaviour; rather they perceived the police
more positively during the strike than before.
Despite all this - or perhaps
because of it - many of Green's (1990) respondents reported feeling greater determination
to continue the strike:
It's the policing that's made strikers more determined not to give in to
Thatcher and MacGregor.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 76)
3 The state and other institutions
Another
prominent finding concerns the connections striking miners and their families
made between the NCB and a whole series of other agents previously thought to
be neutral or on their side. Part of the background to this was the claim of
the government not to be involved in the dispute; the official and oft-repeated
line was that the dispute was between the NCB and the NUM (Green, 1990, p.
129). The understanding of the struggle changed for those involved as the
dynamic of the strike seemed to include more agents and elements than claimed
by the NCB and government. As illustrated in the following quote, the loss of
legitimacy of these institutions gave a new significance to suggestions (from
the government and popular media) that the strikers were an oppositional force:
in the context of wider illegitimacy, such opposition was fully justified:
my God, we've learned a lot over the past twelve months. We have
discovered that the enemy that we face has got many, many heads. It is not just
the Coal Board, and the DHSS, but the newspapers, the media and the Government.
And if we are ‘the enemy within’ then I'm damned well proud to be ‘the enemy
within’.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 74)
As a single-industry trade union,
the NUM has never been able to afford strike pay; striking miners and their
dependants were therefore forced to rely on the Department of Health and Social
Security. However, the difficulties miners' families experienced in getting
payments from the DHSS (Salt & Layzell, 1985, pp. 17-8) led most of the
striking miners and their families interviewed by Green (1990, p. 122) to
conclude that the department was a political organ:
I think that Social Security have been told what to do by the government
and I think she [Thatcher] is using it to starve the miners into going back to
work.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 120)
Source: Miners' Strike rally, 1984. Author: Nick from
Bristol, UK: http://www.flickr.com/people/34517490@N00
It was not just that the DHSS was reluctant to inform miners' families of their entitlements, but also that the Social Security Act of 1980 deducted £15 from their payments on the assumption that the union would offer the miners strike pay. Again this was understood as an attack by the government on the strike:
Whether direct orders went out or not, an attempt was made to heap as
much agony on the miners and their families as they possibly could do... just
one more example of the state attempting to beat the miners with a big stick.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 121)
Mass media account of events at
which the strikers had been present were so at odds with their own perceptions
of what happened - and so damaging to the miners' case - that the strikers
concluded that it was deliberate; the mass media became perceived a partisan
force rather than a neutral reflector of news:
We don't even bother buying a paper now, unless we want football scores
or something. They only print what they want. It's a type of prostitution isn't
it?
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 20)
And now I'd never believe a thing you hear on the television. Nor in the
press.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 19)
For many miners, the strike provided
their first experience of the law courts. The way they felt they were treated
led to the common conclusion that the legal system as a whole was inherently
biased against them; miners were apparently convicted and imprisoned on the
basis that they were strikers rather than on the weight of evidence. Green
(1990, p. 105) found that 89 per cent of the strikers (54 men) and all fifteen
of the women she interviewed no longer saw the law as a politically neutral
instrument:
We knew before the News came on that if it was a miner on in court
they'd had it.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 46)
The TUC and the majority of trade unionists are law abiding people, they
don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end. They automatically assume
that if you go to court and are found guilty then you are guilty; you deserve
it; you don't get arrested for nothing. You tell them, you say, ‘The courts are
bent, the police are bent, the police are very capable liars, they are trained
to lie.’ At first, they don't believe you, but the experience of the strike has
changed some officials, some now have a more developed consciousness.
(Quoted in Walker, 1985, p. 132)
Given this constellation of factors
- the apparent interest of the police, media and government departments in
undermining the strike - plus other ingredients mentioned by the miners, such
as the appointment of known union-breaker Ian MacGregor as NCB chairman, many
strikers came to conclude that the government did not simply want to close
particular pits but to destroy the NUM, or, by extension, the whole trade union
movement and working class of the country:
I firmly believe that Margaret Thatcher wanted confrontation with the
NUM as a means to beating the trade unions. Her intention is to smash the trade
union movement and if she could beat the commandos of the trade union movement
I think she was on a good way to doing it.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 126)
Interestingly, however, Green (1990,
p. 127) found that, while among the men the tendency was to discuss the effects
of the government's role on just the trade union movement, strikers' wives
tended to refer more to the effects on the working class as a whole:
The whole of the working class, she wants down there in the gutter. If
she wins, that's what we'll get.
(Women's Action Group Secretary, quoted in Green, 1990, p. 120)
Green
(1990) suggests that this may be due to the fact that the role of women in the
dispute was largely outside the NUM.
Finally, there is the question not
only of agents thought to be neutral but those thought to be on the strikers'
side. A number of those involved report becoming politicized in the sense of
joining and becoming active within the Labour Party (e.g. Salt & Layzell, 1985,
p. 74); but there were also feelings of betrayal in relation to the labour
movement, which, at a number of levels, failed to support the strikers in the
way that it was expected to do. By not supporting the strike, elements of the
labour movement effectively sustained the material and ideological case of the
government and the NCB:
You thought that the Labour council was all for you but they wouldn't
let us have a strike centre.
(Quoted in Coulter et al.,
1984, p. 201)
I felt anger at the men who should have been
supporting us, the Kinnocks and Willises [the then leader of the Labour Party
and general secretary of the Trades Union Congress respectively] pompously
condemning picket line violence when they had never been on or near a picket
line, when openly and arrogantly the state was intent on smashing working class
organization. How dare they pretend to represent, to speak for the working
class?
(Quoted in Jackson & Wardle, 1986, p. 36)
By
extension, if the traditional representational politics of the labour movement
are not seen to express the strikers' interests, then direct action becomes
seen as all the more necessary as a mode of political intervention:
I thought ‘I voted for someone to do that job for me’. But I would admit
that the strike has taught me that if I want to get better things back into the
Rhondda Valley then in some way I must be there so I can make my protests. I've
got to do it myself.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 74)
4 Relations with other groups
A
number of accounts of the strike note a shift among strikers and their families
towards a more positive conception of or identification with previously
differentiated or despised social categories. In the first place, this kind of
change seems to have operated through the support such groups gave to the
miners. Meeting members of these groups in the context whereby each supports
the other’s opposition to the government enabled the strikers to see ‘them’ for
the first time as ‘like us’:
On the last march we went on, just before the end of the strike, there
were more different supporters there than I'd seen. There was lesbians and
gays, and every colour under the sun... all got their little banners ‘We
support the miners’. It was fantastic.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 35)
Before the strike, if I'd have known I was going to talk to some lesbians,
I'd have died. But they're only like us. They are normal people. They're just
like you and me. And they talk like you and me. That's something I've learned.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 75)
Secondly, the unexpected antagonism
of the police toward the strikers as a group enabled them to see themselves as
like other groups in conflict with the police; where before these groups might
have been seen as ‘troublemakers’ now it became easy to regard them instead as
‘persecuted’, like the miners:
I used to have a very immature attitude to black people. When the riots
went off in Brixton, I thought that black people were to blame. My view has
definitely changed on that: I now know that it had to do with the policing.
(Quoted in Coulter et al.,
1994, p. 200)
I'm starting to have sympathy for those in Belfast [Republicans] who
I've no love for, because I was shot and wounded in Belfast.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 75)
Women have become aware of a wider political arena... They draw
comparisons with Northern Ireland. Those police have been trained over there to
use their tactics on us here. To keep us down. They realise that the black
communities in London have been harassed for years and years and years by the
police and they know what it's like now themselves
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 76)
5 Women's experiences
The
experiences of women during the strike are discussed here in a separate section
because they not only changed in relation to the police and government in the
same way as the men (above) but they also changed in relation to the men.[1]
Green (1990, p. 188) found that, for the miners' wives she interviewed, the
break with old ideas was more dramatic than the break experienced by the miners
themselves. Others also observed this dramatic change which in all cases seems connected
to feelings of confidence (e.g., Loach, 1985; Salt & Layzell, 1985):
When I look at myself now, I just can't believe I'm the same person.
I've grown so big with the knowledge I've got from it. I've never been so motivated
to get on with things before. Now there's nothing I can't do, I don't think.
Absolutely nothing!
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 9)
Coulter et al. (1984, p. 203) note how for many of the women it was their
first involvement in a strike and in politics. They got involved on two levels:
firstly in giving moral support to their striking husbands (in fact many of
them insisted that their husbands take part in the strike, and were important
in resisting returns to work; Goodman, 1985, p. 90); and second in providing
practical support, including raising funds and participating on picket lines
and demonstrations. Coulter et al.
argue that their involvement was crucial to the strike, but also that it
enabled them to create an identity for themselves different from the one given
to them by society:
I feel I've changed a lot during the strike. Before, I was a quiet
housewife, staying at home and looking after the children... Now I feel I can
have a say in what happens in the community.
(Quoted in Coulter et al.,
1984, p. 203)
The women's support groups entailed
a shift from the privatized home to a new, collective sphere. Coulter et al. argue that the way the servicing
of the men was made a public and joint enterprise provided the means for women
to look with a fresh perspective at their own roles as housewives:
Being here, I see what women have to put up with. We're just unpaid
bottle washers and cooks. I won't go back to staying in the home after the
strike - it'll be different. I feel as though I want something totally separate
from the home.
(Quoted in Coulter et al.,
1984, p. 211)
At a meeting at the Easington Miners' Welfare, Mick McGahey, the
Vice-President of the NUM, addressed an audience which contained a large number
of women. He swept his arm across the front row and referred to the ‘housewives
in the country who understand the problems.’ The first question was asked by
one of the women. She made the situation plain: ‘we no longer regard ourselves
as “housewives”; we are soldiers in the struggle.’
(Beynon, 1984, p. 109)
within weeks of the strike starting, South Wales women threw off all
that garbage about being ‘behind’ their men and began occupying coal board
offices, blockading steel-works' gates and touring Europe putting the case for
the defence of their communities.
(Howells, 1985, p. 139)
The support groups - as women-only
groups, independent of both the men and the NUM - gave the women confidence in
themselves as women:
Linda who lives down the road, we took her to London and she hardly
opened her mouth. She does now. If she hears anyone pullin' us down she'll
stand up to 'em. Her mam has said, ‘God, this has really brought you out of
your shell.’ We'd have all cracked up if we'd not had the group.
(Quoted in Loach, 1985, p. 177)
Green (1990, p. 189) notes that many
miners' wives refused to believe their husbands' stories about police brutality
until they joined them on the picket line and experienced it first hand. Two of
the first all-women picket lines at Ollerton and Beavercotes collieries were
arranged because those involved felt that the police would be more gentle with
them than with the men; this would then give them a better chance of talking to
and persuading the working miners to join the strike. The fact that these expectations
of the police response turned out to be mistaken strengthened their solidarity
with the men on strike (Green, 1990, p. 190) and led to same reversal of
opinion towards the police as expressed by the miners themselves (e.g., Evans et al., 1985, pp. 192-3):
when the women got there and started singing, the [working miners] were
embarrassed and one or two did turn round and go back. So the police surrounded
the women so you couldn't see the women at all. And the men started going in
again.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 49)
Before the strike I used to think the police were all right, I thought
if I was burgled I'd phone them and I was under the impression that they'd come
and help me. Now I hate them. I'll never talk to a policeman again.
(Quoted in Green, 1990, p. 48)
I used to think the police kept you in because you'd really done
something wrong. Now I think they hold you to let your bruises go before they
let you out.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 45)
In becoming ‘politically active’ through
the strike, the women also extended their conception of ‘the political’ - again
the support of groups they would not otherwise have had contact with and the
ruthlessness of the government and its agents seem to have played a role in
this:
Before the strike, I wasn't involved in politics. It's changed me - now
I know a lot more people and it's made me more aware of things. The Greenham
Common women came to see us... I hadn't considered what they were doing as
political, now I do.
(Quoted in Coulter et al.,
1984, p. 214)
I never realised I was politically involved until this. Now it cuts deep
and I feel I have to voice my opinion about Thatcher's dictatorship.
(Quoted in Coulter et al.,
1984, p. 215)
We thought we could create a better world for all of us, but I don't
think we counted on the awesome power of the State or the enemy we were up
against.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 77)
My attitudes have changed through the strike. I thought I was a
socialist before. Now I know what socialism is - it's a whole way of life, and
we're living it in our valley right now.
(Quoted in Evans et al., 1985,
p. 188)
The support groups, as the main
source of the women's new-found confidence, were something the women found they
wanted to keep in place after the strike. They also wanted to apply the groups
to other matters, in effect changing the functions of the structures they had
created:
We've got a strong pressure group which we can use to protect our
communities and fight for what it needs in all sorts of ways.
(Quoted in Evans et al., 1985,
p. 202)
We've been so strong now that it would be pointless not to stay
together.
(Quoted in Evans et al, 1985,
p. 202)
The Miners Women's Support Groups have progressed from a domestic base
in terms of a defence of their husband's or son's jobs to an aspect of what
Arthur Scargill called a fight for Socialism.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 77)
The new confidence meant that new
choices became available for the women. Since the confidence was bound up with
their identity as women, rather than
as just their husbands' wives, the new choices reflected this identity, leading
many to understand their actions in terms of feminism, whether or not they
endorsed this perspective entirely:
I'm not prejudiced against men but I think that there's a place for
women to work together because it adds to their strength. For so long I think
women have been seen as second class citizens. I feel now I want to go out and
fight with women to get a better place in society so that we can have an equal
place... If you don't fight you won't get anywhere.
(Quoted in Coulter et al.,
1994, p. 217)
We've become feminists in our own kind of way but we're not true
feminists ... I've got mixed feelings because now I want to be equal to [my husband],
but I want him to still wear the trousers in the house.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 78)
When we used to go on the marches earlier on, the lads used to say ‘Get
tha tits out for the lads’... Then the men stopped saying it because the Camden
lasses told them there and then. At first, I thought it were rude. But as the
months went by I got to understand their point of view. That it was against
women.
(Quoted in Salt & Layzell, 1985, p. 78)
As these quotes indicate, these kind
of changes in identity sometimes meant conflict or at least divergence in
relation to their husbands. In interviews Chrys Salt carried out for a BBC
radio documentary (‘Striking Out’, broadcast 1992), examples of change among
miners’ wives included refusing to shave their legs, changing their styles of
clothes, taking up careers and further education, leaving a husband and
becoming a lesbian. In other words, out of the long dispute, as it played
itself out in the relations between the police and the strikers and their supporters,
and within the groups of strikers and supporters themselves, new ways of
understanding self and other were being forged, and new modes of expressing
selfhood were being developed:
Everybody is finding new ways of saying things. The vocabulary of the
women and the poetry that they are producing is amazing. Through the conflict
people are crying out with the truth
(Quoted in Searle, 1985, p. 96)
References
Beynon, H. (1984). The miners' strike in
Easington. New Left Review, 148, 104-115.
Coulter, J., Miller, S., & Walker, M. (1984).
State of siege: Politics and policing of
the coalfields: The miners' strike 1984. London: Canary.
Douglass, D. (1986). Come and wet this truncheon: The role of the police in the coal strike
of 1984/1985. London: Canary.
Evans, J., Hudson, C., & Smith, P. (1985).
Women and the strike: It's a whole way of life. In B. Fine & R. Millar (Eds.),
Policing the miners' strike. London:
Lawrence & Wishart.
Goodman, G. (1985). The miners' strike. London: Pluto Press.
Green, P. (1990). The enemy without: Policing and class consciousness in the miners' strike.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Howells, K. (1985). Stopping out: The birth of a
new kind of politics. In H. Beynon (Ed.), Digging
deeper: Issues in the miners' strike. London: Verso.
Jackson, B., & Wardle, T. (1986). The battle for Orgreave. Brighton:
Vanson Wardle.
Loach, L. (1985). We'll be here right to the
end... and after: Women and the miners' strike. In H. Beynon (Ed.), Digging deeper: Issues in the miners' strike.
London: Verso.
Northam, G. (1988). Shooting in the dark: Riot police in Britain. London: Faber and
Faber.
Salt, C. & Layzell, J. (1085). Here We Go! Women's Memories of the 1984/85 Miners Strike. London:
Co-operative Retail Services.
Searle, C. (1985). Book review: Out of the locker:
Poetry of the British miners' strike, 1984-5. Race and Class, 26, 85-97.
Waddington, D., Jones, K., & Critcher, C.
(1989). Flashpoints: Studies in public disorder.
London: Routledge.
Walker, M. (1985). A turn of the screw: The aftermath of the 1984-85 miners' strike.
London: Canary.
For pictures, see John Harris's photo-essay at http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.07/Essays/0507.MinersFinal.pdf
[1] ‘At a time of unrest and strike actions the proletarian woman,
downtrodden, timid and without rights suddenly grows and learns to stand tall
and straight ... participation in the workers movement brings the woman close
to her liberation, not only as a seller of her labour power but also as a
woman, a wife, a mother and a housekeeper’ (Kollontai, 1977; quoted in Green,
1990, pp. 188-9)
