The real winners in the miners’ strike
Forty years after Britain’s most bitter industrial dispute, new work is casting the role women played in the dispute as a catalyst that changed traditional communities for good
By Simon Greaves
Empowerment of women in society and the workforce was the winner in the 1984–85 miners’ strike, the longest and most bitter battle in Britain’s industrial history, according to a new book about the role of women in the dispute.
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, who with Natalie Thomlinson wrote Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984–1985*, the first national examination of the role of women, using interviews with more than 100 of those involved, highlight how crucial miners’ wives were to keeping the bitter struggle going for a year.
Professor Sutcliffe-Braithwaite says: “The women’s support movement is relatively well-known — certainly helped by the film Pride, which showed one of the women’s groups in action — but there’s never actually been a historical study of the national movement before.
“Our research used published sources, archives and oral histories to map the movement, showing how groups were set up throughout every mining area in the country. There were just a handful of places we came across where groups failed to form — this really was an incredibly extensive movement, and it achieved incredible things.
“Almost all groups put the typically ‘feminine’ work of feeding — via food parcels, soup kitchens, and sometimes supermarket vouchers — at the heart of their work; most also undertook a lot of fundraising, and many staged marches and protests, too. Some women — though here the numbers were fewer — also spoke at political meetings and rallies, and stood on picket lines beside the men.”
She explains that joining pithead picket lines was the biggest change in women’s roles in mining communities, and was also the most controversial: some husbands, and some National Union of Mineworkers’ branches, opposed it, seeing picket lines as no place for women.
The authors say they want to emphasise the social side of women’s involvement, since most involved in the support movement described their activism, at the time and in later interviews, as not ‘political’. One interviewee, Kay Case, from Treharris in south Wales, told them that: “The majority of people were like me: not politically-minded. They didn’t want to bring the government down, weren’t trying to get Margaret Thatcher or the Conservatives, we were basically fighting for the right to live, and that was it.” Another, Aggie Currie from south Yorkshire, who was arrested on picket lines more than a dozen times, said in her interview, “I’m not right political, me.”
The authors argue that probably the most well-known narrative about miners’ wives in the strike is that they came out from behind the kitchen sink, became politically active, and were transformed in the process. They write that there’s a kernel of truth in this, but it’s also important to recognise how this change was given a political spin, both during the strike — when it was a way of soliciting support from feminist groups outside the coalfields — and afterwards, when it was a way of salvaging something good from the wreckage of defeat. Some even viewed the support network that emerged as an alternative welfare state.
“Our research suggests that while many women who got involved in activism during the strike did feel it had changed them, often the change was a subtle one: not a big-p Political transformation, but a shift in women’s sense of themselves and in their self-confidence.
“Alice Samuel, from Fife, for example, told us in her interview that she thought she wouldn’t have gone back to work or left her husband if it hadn’t been for her experiences in the strike: ‘A lot of the choices and decisions that I’ve made since then are probably because of the confidence I gained in that time’.”
The authors explain that some aspects of women’s contribution were more private but nonetheless important. They describe the ‘emotional labour’ of family support that women did in the home as vital. At the same time women’s own income from work was also crucial in many households.
“The stereotype of mining communities as being patriarchal ones where women didn’t work has been remarkably persistent. Our analysis of census and national birth cohort study data suggests that in the postwar period mining families were converging with other working-class families, and in both cases, working motherhood was becoming more and more normalised. The wages women brought into striking households were central to the pursuit of the strike.”
Even less well-known were the groups that sprang up among working miners’ wives in Nottinghamshire, crucible of the back-to-work movement, to offer support to each other. One interviewee, Polly (not her real name) told the researchers about assembling a group of local women to offer emotional support, and to protest against flying pickets in her village: “We actually decided to walk up together with the children and walk through all these men to go to the top club, to show them we weren’t afraid, and we weren’t going to take [it].”
Miners in most of Nottinghamshire had been encouraged to believe that their pits — highly productive and profitable (miners typically doubled their wages with bonuses), and mining coal ideally suited to the domestic energy market — were safe. Pit closures followed there in the decade after the strike as elsewhere in the country.
Though working miners and their wives were on the ‘winning’ side in 1984–85, they subsequently felt betrayed by the closures and abandonment of their areas by government. Polly said in her interview that if she had known the strike was to save pits, she would have supported it: “Well, you see with hindsight, if we’d have known that, then — that’s why I’m so angry with Scargill for not going about it the right way and giving us the chance to vote for a strike, because then we would have been all in it together, and what would have happened may never have possibly happened.”
Julie Place, who at the time of the strike was a reporter with the Nottingham Evening Post, said at the London book launch: “In working class communities at the time in Mansfield and Ashfield, men worked down the mines, women in manufacturing industries and yes, the women did earn reasonably good money but there were soup kitchens and collections run by women both inside and outside the mining industry, so many families did not have a sufficient second income to survive.
“A positive to come out of the action was that it changed family dynamics. The mining lifestyle described vividly by D.H. Lawrence constituted miners picking up their weekly wages, disappearing to the pub and giving women what was left to feed the family. This pattern still existed in many communities. Women having to be more pro-active in generating and monitoring family spending during the strike actually become more empowering.”
The researchers also stress that, among their key findings, many of those interviewed wanted to convey just how much their neighbourhoods, villages, and towns had changed since the loss of the strike and closure of the pits. They talked about the loss of secure, relatively well-paid work: some spoke with regret of the fact that their sons and daughters often faced the prospect of work in sectors like retail, care and hospitality, where pay is low and precarious contracts abound; others talked about how their sons had to leave the area, or work away during the week, in order to get skilled manual work.
“But just as much as work, our interviewees talked about the loss of social infrastructure and the fraying of the fabric of community. It was common for women to list all the pubs, clubs, miners’ welfares, shops, cinemas, and other community organisations that their villages — sometimes very small villages — sustained in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, and to contrast this with the situation today.”
Kay Case, says: “We haven’t got a community in Treharris anymore. A lot of the shops have shut, the men have drifted, a lot of them didn’t work again, they went to work in other industries, but Treharris itself, I don’t know that I’m any different but Treharris itself is certainly different. It isn’t the community it was when we … up until they closed the pits. Down there now, if you go down there now, I think we’ve got about four or five kebab, Chinese and chip shops. The Co-op is still there, but right along we had … there was a lot of shops at the time of the strike, a lot of shops … Treharris just isn’t the same, it’s not the same feeling, it’s not the same … it’s not the same place anymore.”
Professor Sutcliffe-Braithwaite acknowledges the strike as a turning point in the history of industrial relations in Britain. Thatcher broke the NUM, a trade union that had been powerful enough a decade earlier to bring down a Tory government; practically and symbolically, it was a hugely important victory.
In recent years, there has been a surge of trade union activity, and an upsurge in interest in this landmark strike. She adds: “What, I think, interests people on the left today tends to be not the industrial muscle the miners displayed, but the truly impressive struggle and sacrifice of miners, their wives and families, and the stories of solidarity between different groups — trade unionists and constituency Labour parties, but also women’s groups, black people, lesbians and gays. This upsurge of interest suggests to me a hopefulness that the strike can supply lessons — and inspiration — in collective efforts to rebalance economic power towards working people.”
*Oxford University Press £35
Simon Greaves is a Financial Times journalist and was coal industry reporter at the Nottingham Evening Post throughout the strike
