The Mining Industry and the Miners’ Strike

by Robert Gildea
|
12 books
The fortieth anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike has brought forth a number of significant publications about the strike and the growth and decline of the mining industry. It has also produced autobiographies of former miners and miners’ wives, together with fictional writing. This is also a moment to revisit ‘golden oldies’ about the mining industry in all its precariousness, danger and fighting spirit.
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Recent histories

Black Gold: the History of How Coal Made Britain

Jeremy Paxman, 2022
A lively and evocative story of coal in Britain, its importance to the economy, the dangers of extracting it, and the struggles between miners and coal owners from the eighteenth century to the present. A gripping read.

The Shadow of the Mine

Coal and the End of Industrial Britain
Huw Beynon, Ray Hudson, 2024
A masterly study by two veterans of the subject, taking the story forward to pit closures, deindustrialisation, the devastation of former mining communities and the political fallout of the fragmentation of the once proud vanguard of the working class.

Women and the Miners' Strike, 1984-1985

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Natalie Thomlinson, 2023
A wonderful, carefully researched and significant account of the role of women during the Miners’ Strike, setting up support groups, raising money for soup kitchens and food parcels, but also looking at the role of women who were less keen on the strike and even opposed to it.
Autobiographies

Ghost Dancers

The Miners' Last Generation
David Douglass, 2010
The final part of a trilogy by a Geordie of the ’68 generation who went into the mines in South Yorkshire and was a right-hand man of Arthur Scargill during the strike. Full of verve, local colour, anger and nostalgia.

Anne and Betty

United by the Struggle
Anne Scargill, Betty Cook, 2020
Based on interviews with these two high-profile miners’ wives who threw themselves into the strike and into many struggles afterwards. Offers a vivid sense of postwar life and loves in mining communities.

Just a Pit Lass

Heather Wood
Of course, Heather Wood was not ‘just a pit lass’ but the main driver of Save Easington Area Mines (SEAM) in County Durham. A beautiful and often painful account of a working-class family and community, and the courage of its women. With a preface by her friend Ken Loach.
Older histories

The Fed, a History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century

Hywel Francis, Dai Smith, 1980
A powerful history of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, its exceptional leadership and its industrial and political struggles since its inception in 1898. Published in 1980, it argues that there was ‘The Dawn of a New Era’ after 1945.

Thurcroft

A Village and the Miners' Strike
Peter Gibbon, 2014
A gem of an anthropological study, published in 1986, which tells the story of the strike and its before and after in a single South Yorkshire village, using the voices of the (sadly mostly anonymised) participants.

The Enemy Within

The Secret War Against the Miners
Seumas Milne, 2004
A coruscating account, now in its fourth edition, of the relentless war to frame and discredit Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers by politicians, the media, the legal profession and the secret services.
Reportage and fiction

The Road to Wigan Pier

George Orwell, 2021
First published in 1937, Orwell takes us into the shabby homes of Lancashire miners, and even down into a pit, confronting their struggles with reality which too many of them lost. The second half of the book is a plea for socialism to save Britain from fascist Europe.

Rape of the Fair Country

The Mortymer Trilogy Book One
Alexander Cordell, 2014
A dramatic and fast-moving story of the struggles of a first generation of Welsh miners and ironworkers in Merthyr South Wales, inspired by the Chartists and crushed by the English Redcoats. Published in 1959, it was brought to my notice by a miner’s wife, teacher and 1984-85 strike activist who said it politicised her at the age of fourteen.

Pity

Andrew McMillan, 2024
An intriguing, troubling but beautiful account of a tension between a drag artist and his father, of the last generation of miners in Barnsley, interleaved by a sociological survey of their decaying community. It may need re-reading to pin down the moving parts.