best FOR REAL LIFE REPORTS
Whatever your political view, it’s hard not to be moved by the people prepared to fight for their beliefs in Britain’s most explosive strike...
The miners’ strike of 1984 began as a fight to save jobs and protect the livelihoods of Britain’s pitmen. It became the most divisive conflict of a generation, tearing friendships, families and communities apart.
Now a new BBC documentary to mark the 40th anniversary speaks to the men and women whose lives were destroyed by the devastating hardships of the gruelling strike. It started on 6 March 1984 and lasted 11 months, three weeks and four days, and 170,000 miners – 80 per cent of the miners’ national workforce – took industrial action to stop pit closures, which threatened to throw them on to the dole.
It turned into a political battlefield between prime minister Margaret Thatcher (who was determined to curb the trade unions) and Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers.
Many miners crossed picket lines, claiming the un-balloted strike was unlawful. And opposing loyalties created conflict, turning friends, neighbours and even families into bitter enemies.
Miner’s daughter Lisa McKenzie, 56, remembers well the day the strike started at her dad’s Nottinghamshire pit – it was her 16th birthday. ‘That day is ingrained in my memory,’ she says. ‘It was about half seven in the morning and I could hear people in the house. I’m like, this ain’t right – has it got anything to do with my birthday? When I come downstairs, my mam told me we were on strike.’
Generations of men in Lisa’s family had worked down the pit. ‘My grandad would sit me on his knee and tell me we were important – we were the people who kept the lights on. For us, it wasn’t just a job, the pit was everything. We might not have much money, but we were honest folk. We were working-class and proud.
‘I was shaped by growing up in that mining community and having that love, safety and security. But 1984 to 1985 removed all of that.’
Lisa left school and helped her trade unionist mum as their home became a flurry of activity. ‘Mum was in her element. She was writing handwritten letters asking for support, which was really difficult for her as she hadn’t had a good education. So she used to ask me to go through them and check the spelling.
‘Dad became a picket manager. He was a simple miner, he didn’t know about logistics, he’d never been in the army. Yet he was creating codes so if the police ever caught you, they wouldn’t know where you were going.’
But by the end of the strike, Lisa – now an author, social activist and senior lecturer at Bedfordshire University – sometimes struggled to make sense of the impact it had on her family and community.
‘I noticed men were cryin
