When Anne Woolford moved into her house in Great Houghton in South Yorkshire in 2000, you could see the black mound of a slag heap from a former colliery from the back window. Today, the heap is covered with grass, and what dominates her view instead is an Asos warehouse that sits atop the former coalmine – a change she says symbolises how employment has evolved locally since the collapse of the industry.
This week, the UK marks the 40th anniversary of the start of the 1984 miners’ strike, when at least 142,000 miners withdrew their labour in attempts to block colliery closures. Despite the historic industrial dispute, the eventual closures changed the face of these areas, with ex-coalfield regions today more likely to be deprived and have less faith in politics.
But despite the passing of four decades, memories from that period remain powerful for many who lived through it. Communities were split between striking miners and those who crossed the picket lines – and after the mines were closed by the Conservative government, a way of life was lost. Woolford, whose father and two grandfathers were coalminers, feels she has “witnessed the dismantling of opportunity for young people” that she benefited from in the 1960s and 1970s. She says it was no golden age and recalls coal mining as a punishing industry; her father was injured at work when she was seven and he later worked in the control room above ground. “It wasn’t a glamorous job,” Woolford said, “but they had security, comradeship, community”. “These things feel like relics of the past now,” she says. Woolford feels that this anniversary highlights what the miners were fighting for. “They weren’t just fighting to save their jobs. They were fighting for their communities,” she said.
Later this month, former mining families in Armthorpe will parade through the village from the site of the pit to the community centre, with a band playing, speeches and banners. As it prepares to mark the strike’s 40th anniversary, Chris Brodhurst-Brown, the chair of Armthorpe’s parish council, said the village is not just looking back to a time before the pit closures. It has its sights set on the future, too. “Although our village was brought to its knees after the strike and subsequent closures, it holds itself proud, is full of community spirit and a sought after place to live,” Brodhurst-Brown, 65, said. “Thatcher tried to break us but she didn’t. The mining families form the spine of our community spirit.” Brodhurst-Brown, 65, whose grandfather, father and first husband were all miners, said mining jobs gave the village of Armthorpe and the housing estate where she grew up a sense of social cohesion.
Some of that sense of togetherness stemmed from the danger of mining work, she said. “My first husband, I’d never send him off to work on a bad word or a row because there was a genuine chance he wouldn’t come back. One of our neighbours was killed – it was a very real thing, we were desperately trying to look out for one another. The men and the families relied on each other.” The pit closure in 1992 led to “a real gloom,” she said, that “ripped the heart out of the village”. But Brodhurst-Brown said Armthorpe has done relatively OK. “We’ve regenerated economically well – there’s been lots of new housebuilding. New people sustain and grow the village. Things aren’t perfect but comparatively, the village is a prosperous place,” she said, though she added pockets of deprivation existed, with working families on low wages. The village has benefited from being on major routes, Brodhurst-Brown explained, with good access to shops, modern businesses and logistics. Brodhurst-Brown said Armthorpe had changed, but its spirit had remained. “Lots of the pubs and clubs have gone, all those good, proud, yet dangerous mining jobs have gone. Everywhere in the country has changed though, it’s not just us. We’re not just sat there looking at bits of coal and pit lamps and thinking about what used to be,” she said. “We look back with pride, however we also look forward with aspiration.”
Garry McKay, a 59-year-old from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was 18 when the miners’ strike began and has watched the town change over the last four decades. McKay became a social worker in 1994 and today manages adult social care and health services in the Mansfield and Ashfield areas. The job, he said, has given him a front-row seat on the deprivation locally: health problems, poor housing, poverty, addiction, loneliness. “People’s lives dipped when the pits closed and they probably never recovered financially, and now it’s taking a toll on their health,” he said. “It’s bleak.” His family had been coalminers since the 1850s, he said, but in 1984-85 his dad crossed the picket line. “I was ashamed of him,” McKay recalls, but looking back, “I think he probably suffered a lot of abuse, [but] never brought it home.” There was a belief that Nottinghamshire collieries would be secure from government closures, as they often continued working and helped the National Coal Board win the dispute. But Mansfield was shut in 1988, and McKay’s father died a few years later.
Over the next couple of decades, the town’s fortunes declined. After the pit closure and ensuing job losses, a number of the town’s breweries and pubs closed, houses were repossessed, and local textile jobs also declined. “I was unemployed for a couple of years in the early 1990s, there were really no jobs at all,” McKay said. He remembers a bizarre week spent on a weeklong course by the dole office – sat doing crosswords with a group of dejected out-of-work older men. The intervening decades saw some efforts at regeneration. But McKay feels any recovery was choked off by the cuts of the 2010s. “What the pit closures didn’t kill off, austerity came along with [David] Cameron 14 years ago and finished the job very well.”
Sue Lawson, 64, believes the pits were closed without sufficient long-term economic planning. Lawson, who works for Hetton Town Trust, a charity formed out of the former miners’ welfare organisation, has lived near the former mining village of Hetton-le-Hole in County Durham since 1999. “The closure of the pits was bad enough,” she said. But the real issue was “the manner in which it was done, with very little afterthought”, particularly for the younger generations who “would have naturally followed their fathers down the pit”. Lawson was 24, newly married and living in the ex-steel town of Consett, County Durham when the strike started. Lawson’s husband, Peter, worked as an engineer for a company that supplied equipment for coal mining, which provoked nervousness for their futures. “We were pretty hard up at the time but did what we could to support the miners,” she said.
In October 1992, John Major’s government announced plans to close 31 UK pits with about 31,000 job losses. In Lawson’s area, some mining-related job losses were offset, such as by the 1986 opening of a Nissan factory that today employs about 6,000 people. Sunderland, the local authority that includes Hetton-le-Hole, is now the 23rd most income-deprived, according to the ONS, out of 316 local authorities in England “Like many colliery towns, the centre is rundown, with a few empty shops. On the periphery, new housing estates are being built, but as there are not many well paid jobs locally, many people commute to Durham, Peterlee, Newcastle,” Lawson said. Lawson believes Labour’s 2019 manifesto “had some very good policies that would have benefited areas like ours”. But she now feels people have lost faith that either the Conservatives or Labour can change the picture. If Labour wins the next general election, she has concerns Keir Starmer’s “hands are going to be pretty much tied” by poor Treasury finances, Lawson said. “Let’s hope that [Labour] do get in, but we’re starting from such a low base, and that doesn’t give me much hope. Because you think, well, how much worse has it got to get before we start turning a corner?”