Miners’ strike rally in London in 1984

IT all happened a long time ago, harking back to an era barely recognisable today of trade union militancy and an industry that helped underpin Britain’s wealth for 200 years.

But this year as it marks its 40th anniversary, the miners’ strike is being revisited with a flurry of books, exhibitions and documentaries, which pick over the events of the year-long dispute and delve into its grim aftermath.

One such study is Backbone of the Nation by Oxford don Robert Gildea, who interviews miners and their families from South Wales to the Midlands, Yorkshire, County Durham and Fife, showing how they organised to protect their livelihoods, how miners’ wives played a key part in the struggle, and how a network of activists across the country mobilised to support them.

Without romanticising the miners and their often dangerous work or papering over hubris and divisions within the ranks, Gildea nails his colours firmly to the mast, seeing Mrs Thatcher’s determination to crush the strike as part of an deindustrialisation and privatisation agenda that would ultimately clear the way for today’s atomised gig economy, with the military-style crackdown of the Orgreave mass picket – still the subject of a justice campaign – setting the tone of the state’s response.

Hailed as the first oral history of the dispute, Gildea talked to more than 130 miners for the book, including strike-breakers from the Nottingham coalfields, evocatively charting a timeline that begins with the government and National Union of Mineworkers manoeuvring for battle.

At its peak, 142,000 men had downed tools and, despite being notoriously denounced by Thatcher as “the enemy within”, people up and down the country rallied to support them and their families, who faced increasing hardship the longer the strike went on.

One totally unexpected source of funding came from the lesbian and gay community, whose campaign was based at the Gay’s The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury and immortalised in the 2014 film Pride. “Two communities under attack from prejudice and persecution … formed an alliance to fight for ‘what is right, just and moral in the face of isolation’, ” writes Gildea, professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Oxford, echoing the sentiments of gay campaigner Mike Jackson.

Reading this reminded me of how, 20 weeks into the strike, Camden Council twinned with the Yorkshire pit town of Bentley, unimaginable today, a gesture of solidarity witnessed in the town hall chamber by a visiting delegation of miners and their wives.

They went on to address local unions and community groups, including a black drop in-centre in King’s Cross, raising hundreds of pounds as they did so.

On another occasion, African drum and dance group Steel ‘n’ Skin travelled from its Camden base to perform at Ashfield, a colliery town in Nottingham. The event was organised by teachers in Westminster who would get their buckets out at Paddington station every Friday after school to collect money for the miners.

“It brought together two communities who previously had no contact before,” recalls Diana Binstead, who worked as a primary school teacher at the time. “I remember miners saying to the group ‘now we understand where you’re coming from when it comes to the police’. It represented an important cultural shift.”

Gildea devotes a chapter to the role of miners’ wives as they abandoned domesticity and adopted a public role in the strike alongside their menfolk, transforming their lives. One of them was Sian James, whose days once revolved around ensuring her two children were immaculately dressed and her lace curtains the cleanest in the street.

But after hearing a striker droning on at a meeting she reckoned she could do better “with a paper bag over my head” and was soon travelling far and wide to speak. James, who would become Labour MP for Swansea East, 2005-2015, was part of a network of local women’s strike support groups whose national rally in Barnsley in May 1984 was attended by a jubilant crowd of 10,000 women.

The strike ended in defeat and the mass closure of pits. By 1993, the year the coal industry was privatised, only 16 of 219 remained, and the last deep coal mine in Kellingley, North Yorkshire, closed for good in 2015.

With nothing to replace lost mining jobs, once-flourishing communities became blighted by unemployment, poverty and ill health. Many have never recovered but some fought back with the same resilience that had held the strike together for so long and Gildea records a number of success stories.

He also believes the wave of strikes of 2022 and 2023 and continuing pushback against the cost of living crisis represent a lasting legacy.

“The story of the Miners’ Strike and its aftermath is one of triumph and tragedy, resilience and retreat, reinvention and ruin,” he says. “It was a defeat in the last great industrial battle of the 20th century, but it transformed those who were involved and left a legacy that continues to resonate today. [The strike] and the voices of men and women who sustained it for a year can offer guidance and hope.”

• Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85. By Robert Gildea, Yale University Press, £20