Miners from 1980s strikes return to picket line … at mining museum

Retired miner Russ Kear, 60, one of the tour guides on strike, said he and his father walked out of the pits in the 1980s. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

“Who’d have thought we’d be doing this again?” Arthur Scargill said earlier this week, raising a laugh from the ex-miners standing in the picket line outside the National Coal Mining Museum.

Staff at the Wakefield museum, many of them former coalminers, have walked out in a dispute over pay, and were joined on Thursday by the now 87-year-old former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers.