Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Miners Strike
The Miners Strike
A short History:
20 collieries to be closed 20,000 jobs at stake
o Goel was to privatize the mines
Roughly 1,000 collieries working at the beginning of the 20th century
o in 1984: just about 173.
Once an vital part of the British economy
Later discovered that the government had been stockpiling coal
o The government was prepared
The strikers: earned no money and was not eligible for benefits (the strike
deemed illegal).
About 187,000 miners went on strike
Nottinghamshire:
o Held a ballot – voted to carry on working
= not the most vulnerable, had a great production
o In contrast e.g. south Wales – 99,6 % on strike 21,500 workers
o Working miners: ‘scabs’
the individuals who kept on working
there was a lot of police violence
“National Women Against pit closures”
Public image versus active feminists
Compare the division in the NUM with NWAPC.
o not run in a transparent manner
Thatcher:
Wanted to close unproductive pits
Stockpiling coal prepared for the strike
Mobile police units
Arthur Scargill as a divisive leader
NUM
goal →
support miners and their families during the strike and protest the
Conservative government’s policy of closing mines and attempt to crush the
powerful (NUM) National Union of Mineworkers.
goal → to retain their way of life
The men should keep their jobs→ mines should stay open
The women received much publicity:
how did the media portray these women?
→ as the supportive wives and daughters of miners, loyally performing a kind
of domestic role that enabled their men to maintain the strike.
however: Not everyone involved fitted the description of “miners’ wives”
The article focusses on:
1. the group of women from Barnsley
→ already highly politically active
→ many were steadfast Socialists, Communists and/or feminists (82)
o not politically naïve example: Jean McCrindle (p. 80)
lecturer, an activist for the left since the 1950s, links to Arthur Scargill
2. the group and Arthur Scargill constructed the image of the NWAPC organization
as a group of politically naïve miners’ wives for political reasons.
women portrayed themselves as ordinary miners’ wives BUT they were not
politically innocent
hid their political identity to win public sympathy in the strike
3. some members of the NWAPC had another agenda
saw the strike as a vehicle for a broader, transformative Socialist-feminist politics
4. Arthur Scargill: heavily involved with organizing and constructing the group
counter views?
Some claim the women were politically naïve:
● Jean Stead’s 1986: (…) unprecedented, spontaneous, huge in scale and
transformative for gender roles. The classic example is Jean Stead’s 1986
account Never The Same Again: Stead argued that the women’s movement
represented an authentic working-class feminism, and wrote that ‘the miners’
wives’ response … was spontaneous..” (p. 79)
● Martin Adeney and John Lloyd’s journalistic study of the strike,
argued that the movement had made more women ‘politically aware’ (79)
This article claims that is not true:
· “Many of these women may indeed have been in some senses ‘ordinary
miners’ wives’, but they were also emphatically not the political innocents which
they would deliberately portray themselves as during the strike.” (82)
--> the women were already organized and politically active
→ Women’s support group was not without precedent. (80)
examples:
○ In Kent
■ women had been active in the 1972 and 1974 miners’ strikes, then
called Aylesham Ladies Action Group
■ reunited in 84’ to think about how to support the new strike.
(80)
○ In Nottinghamshire
■ activist Rita Abbott said that
■ ‘the work of 1984/5 was a follow-on of what we did’ in 1972
and 1974. (80)
o Chesterfield Women’s Action Group
■ they knew each other when they had been on a NUM’s weekend
course
■ campaigned together for Labor’s Tony Benn in the by-election
What was the purpose of the movement?
there were 3 purposes:
1. Miners wives wanted:
their husbands should keep their job
→ maintain the family livelihood
2. drew mining communities closer together solidarity
3. NUM: Could use NWAPC as a weapon in their campaign
“…the leadership of the NUM became increasingly convinced that the
women’s movement could be an important weapon in the strike.”
(86)
“The ‘ordinariness’ and respectability of women like Anne Scargill
meant they garnered very different coverage to that of the NUM.”
(86”
→ the women provided a positive image
→ BUT did not want the women from CP at the forefront or as
members of NUM
4.. The political women:
→ The aims were not just to secure the future of the mines and the jobs of
the miners, but also the promotion and development socialist and/or feminist
ideas
“Some of those involved in WAPC wanted to turn it into a vehicle for a
much broader progressive politics—feminist, Socialist, far left, or some
combination of those things.” (92)
They also regard the strike as a feminist/socialist struggle
They had an awareness to wider issues and its implications for the future.
How WAPC were organized?
SOURCE:
Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence, og Natalie Thomlinson. “National Women Against Pit
Closures: Gender, Trade Unionism and Community Activism in the Miners’ Strike,
1984–5”. Contemporary British History 32, nr. 1 (2. januar 2018): 78–100.
(Link: http://tinyurl.com/yds5kco7 )
Howell, David. ”Defiant dominoes: working miners and the 1984-5 strike.” in
Jackson, Ben and Robert Saunders. Making Thatcher’s Britain. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 148-164.