Ten years ago, Boff Whalley created a play for Red Ladder theatre company about the role of women in the 1984-85 miners’ strike. “We said ‘tell us your stories’,” he explains, as he recalls meeting the women who inspired the drama. “Invariably those meetings weren’t grim affairs. They were full of laughter and silliness and brilliant stories,” says Whalley, best known as lead guitarist of anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba.
The result was We’re Not Going Back, which follows three sisters in a pit village. Olive, Mary and Isabel are determined to set up a branch of Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC), the political movement encouraging women to join in strike action, set up camps in the mining pits and take public-facing roles in a campaign historically dominated by men. This month the play is revived for a tour, co-presented by Red Ladder and Unite the Union.
One of the chief inspirations was Betty Cook, who was married to a miner and became a leading protest voice against quarry closures. Few people have the natural charm and self-assuredness that 85-year-old Cook demonstrates as she tells me her stories of the pits and picket lines when I visit her at home in Barnsley. “I hate Margaret Thatcher and I hate the Tories,” she tells me with a giggle.
Cook first became involved by running soup kitchens for the pitmen and attending women’s meetings. She met Anne Scargill, wife of former National Union of Mineworkers president, Arthur Scargill, and they became friends who spearheaded the WAPC movement. Cook was arrested for picketing outside Michael Heseltine’s office in Westminster, and had her knee smashed by a truncheon. She used crutches and had limited mobility for several months. “I’ll never trust the police again,” she says. “When they hit me, the police said ‘serves you right, silly git’. It took me a long time to recover from that injury.”
Despite the backlash she faced, including from her mother who said protests were “unladylike”, Cook carried on, alongside growing numbers of women. She reflects on the joy sustained through the struggle, something that Whalley made sure to convey. “Of course it was hard, but there were lots of moments of laughter and happiness … One morning in 1985 we had a great laugh. We used to hire a minibus [to transport us to pits]. It depended on the garage and what they could spare. This particular night they gave us a white one with a blue stripe down the side. It was dark, so at the first roadblock we came to, the police just waved us through. I couldn’t understand it at first. They thought it was one of theirs. That created a laugh!”
When organising group trips to join picket lines and pit camps, she was often questioned by the police. “We had all sorts of excuses: we were strippers going to London, we’d been to a nightclub in Nottingham … The funny thing is that they often believed it.”
Cook, who stands vehemently against the over-intellectualisation of the working-class experience, was invited to deliver talks at colleges and universities but was left confused by the theorisation of her actions. For Cook, it was a means to keep her community alive. “One of the phrases that was said during the strike was ‘close a pit, kill a community’,” she explains. She always believed herself to be a part of a wider effort. “We had some women join us from London. They criticised how much men were helping us at WAPC protests,” Cook explains. “At one of our first pit camps, one said to me ‘you don’t need the men here, they’ll have to go’ – I said ‘just a minute, this is our pit camp, you’re a visitor, we run it how we want to run it’. The [male] miners and us are working together. If they are willing to bring us water and coal, we are willing to accept it.’”
Whalley’s play does not feature police officers or miners on picket lines. Instead, the plot focuses entirely on the impact the ongoing action is having on the sisters. “What I always try to do when I’m writing like this, is to make it really human,” explains the playwright. “The last thing you want to do is turn people in the play into just mouthpieces for politics. That’s not real. There is an overtly political side but there’s this other side which happens all day and every day in these communities, and that’s what we wanted to find and portray.”
Cook herself describes the strikes as a time she found her footing. “I got the confidence to stand up to injustice,” she says. “And improve my own life too.”
We’re Not Going Back is on tour until 29 March
