This year commemorates the 40th anniversary of the British coalminers strike, a year-long period of industrial action taken by the National Union of Mineworkers against the state-owned National Coal Board.
In lieu of welfare payments and strike pay, many miners fell on hard times, and female-led support groups arose to meet the needs of the struggling strikers and hard-up families.
These groups, who were often the wives and mothers of strikers, set up canteens in churches and townhalls where they prepared daily warm meals for miners and their families. They organised fundraising events, such as darts marathons and poetry recitals. They went onto picket lines, and they approached the public on local high streets asking for donations to fund their canteens and charitable causes.
Gradually, these groups grew into the Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) campaign, a country-wide movement that voiced opposition to the closure of mines through marches and rallies, and intersected with other political movements, such as the Greenham Women.
The impact of the miners’ strike on women
The heroic efforts of the campaign led to some significant changes in mining communities, especially for miners’ wives and mothers. For many, the strike broadened their worldview; they became more politically active and confident in their ability to enact change themselves.
Reflecting back on the strike in an interview in 2009, Jean Gittins from Kippax shared that, in spite of the hardship, the strike was the best year of her life. During the strike, she wrote poetry based on her experience as the wife and mother of miners and increasingly performed her poems to packed out audiences, from church halls to Hyde Park.
For many households, the circumstances of the strike introduced a fairer distribution of household labour. One housewife turned activist named Rose from Featherstone described how before the strike her husband expected “his dinner had to be on the table or else. But since the strike’s been on, it’s all different. He cleans up. I can go out now, and when I come back in, he’ll make a cup of tea for me”.
For some, the changes brought about by the strike were irreversible. Feeling galvanised by the movement, they went on to enrol in college and university and have careers in social policy, politics and diplomacy.
For Jean, Rose and so many more, the strike was a transformative period of time. While they learnt a lot about themselves, their efforts also dispelled any doubts about miners’ wives’ capabilities for collective action. So much so, that the Trade Union Congress publicly acknowledged that the strike would not have lasted so long without them.
The challenge of writing about the miners’ strike
Writing a history of the strike is challenging. It often depends on using oral and written testimony from striking miners and their families, which can complicate the task of telling the whole story for a number of reasons.
For one, people’s memories fade over time. A person’s recollection of the strike now is unlikely to be as accurate as it was in the immediate aftermath. For another, people had very different experiences of the strike. Although for many it was a transformative period, for others it is not something they feel nostalgic for. These individuals may be less likely to share their stories, as they feel the strike is better left in the past. While publishing individuals’ stories is important, there is the danger that certain voices are heard above others.
Over the years, the miners’ strike has taken on an almost mythical quality in our national understanding. With inequality ever on the rise in Britain, the efforts of the miners and their families has become something of a metonym for the importance of solidarity and collective action. There is a national appetite for stories about empowered miners’ wives and mothers, which means positive experiences of the strike are often elevated above others.
As individual memory has faded and popular memory has become stronger, it has become harder to distinguish between fact and fiction. How much of an individual’s testimony is their own and how much comes from documentaries, books and poetry collections?
For their book, Women and the Miners’ Strike 1984–1985 (2023), authors Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson tried to get closer to the truth. They interviewed over 100 female activists involved in the strike across the country, with their findings illuminating a perhaps unexpectedly complex picture of how women experienced the strike.
Miners’ wives had professional lives as well as domestic roles
The book complicates the popular image of mining communities in the early 1980s as one of strict gender division, in which miners’ wives would take care of the home while their husbands worked. In reality, the book shows how the majority of women in coalfield communities worked at-least part time in industries auxiliary to the mining industry. One such woman described is Kay Chase, who worked in the canteen at Deep Navigation Colliery in South Wales.
While the strike suspended the norm for some women, the book also reveals that they often had to balance their involvement with their roles as wives and mothers. Interviewees Maggie Stubbs and Anne Kirby both stated that the division of labour in their households changed little during the strike.
While the strike opened new avenues for many, the book shows that the roles women did in support groups were often closely linked to jobs they had in their professional lives. Interviewee Kim Hickling described how older women and canteen workers would organise the cooking in kitchens and direct those with less experience.
Miners’ wives were already politically active
The book also challenges the representation of wives and mothers as politically inexperienced, by showing that miners’ wives had taken an active interest in local politics long before the strike started. The authors point to the formation of support groups in Kent and Easington in response to the 1972 and 1974 strikes. And they draw from the testimony of Betty Cook, who had been elected as a shop steward for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers in the 1970s, as an example of an activist who had nearly a decade of experience as a union official under her belt by 1984.
The book shows that those who worked in industries related to mining, like canteens which provided hot meals for miners, also tended to be unionised. Kay Chase, describing her experience of joining the strike as a canteen worker, said, “the men were picketing on the gates. Of course, we wouldn’t walk through the pickets, but we were not getting into work. Eventually our union called us out as well.”
Finally, they describe the influence of those with feminist leanings in the early days of the movement, such as Jean McCrindle who taught at the Northern College in Barnsley. But they make sure to emphasise that WAPC was far from a feminist campaign by including the voices of those like Aggie Currie, who said: “I’m not a feminist, I’m a woman who’s got a mind of me own. I’ve got nowt against feminists. I’ve never really thought about it to be quite honest.”
Listening to all voices to understand the past
A multifaceted and complicated image emerges from the authors’ analysis, highlighting the breadth of perspectives in mining communities during the strike. A rich and textured portrait of the WAPC movement is created by hearing from the widest range of voices, including those which went against the grain.
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of maybe the most important episode of industrial strife in living memory and say farewell to our nation’s last coal mine, let us remember the value of listening to all voices in moments of social unrest. Understanding our past is the only way to understand our present.
As contemporary voices become fewer, poetry from the strike represents another resource for understanding lived experience. Though the strike did not impact all women equally, their lives would never be the same. Here is Jean Gittins reflecting on the exceptional, but differing impacts of the miners’ strike on the ‘women of the Coalfields’:
Here we go, the women of the Coalfields
History has never seen the like
Women of the working class arising
Phoenix from the ashes of the strike
They are daughters of the working classes
Loyal miners mothers, miners wives
Wakened by the strike to new awareness
Now go on, to reconstruct their lives
Some have got an appetite for learning
Some, have reached the giddy heights of fame
Some, are happy caring or the people that they love
But, their lives can never be the same
Tho’ the changes may come very slowly
In the liberation they have earned
They have gained a confidence they didn’t have before
Last year’s lessons, cannot be ‘unlearned’
October 1985
