The 40th anniversary of Britain’s biggest industrial dispute is ostensibly why Channel 4 is revisiting it with a three-part documentary. But as the subtitle of Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain acknowledges, this is not ancient history. We are all living in the country where Margaret Thatcher won and the striking miners lost.
The series tells the story by formatting each episode as a standalone narrative zoomed in on a place or a moment and relayed by people who were directly involved, many of whom have not spoken before. How communities were irreparably divided by the dispute, and how intractable ideological differences ensured it would be bitter and long, is the theme of an opening instalment that places itself in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, where what is now the headquarters of Sports Direct was once a colliery at the heart of a buzzing mining town.
James Graham’s BBC2 drama Sherwood was set up the road in Nottinghamshire, but it could have been Shirebrook. The cinematography here is vividly familiar: interviews take place in community centres and working men’s clubs, grey daylight streaming into long, low-ceilinged rooms full of stackable chairs standing neat and empty. Resentment and sadness easily resurface; they have never really subsided.
The programme does a fine job of conveying that for the strikers, their whole lives and identities were at stake. We see Shirebrook in the days when the town was a huge family, 14,000 strong, with dominoes, darts and dancing in the pub every night. Going out on a random Tuesday evening, we hear, was “like New Year’s Eve”. Lads couldn’t wait to turn 16 and go to work in the pit despite it being dirty, filthy toil; workers who suffered injuries were looked after by the collective. Burly, middle-aged men break down on camera when they reflect on what was lost, but those who went on strike don’t want to forget: miners are what they always wanted to be and what they still are.
The battle began in March 1984, when the National Coal Board announced the impending closure of 20 collieries nationally, with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Strikes loomed, but with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) not having called a national ballot, regions held their own votes on whether to join in. Here is where Shirebrook is perhaps a contentious choice of venue: industrial action was less popular in the Midlands than it was farther north, and in Derbyshire the local NUM overruled the result of a vote in which miners who wanted to continue to work narrowly won. Why the county’s union leaders prioritised solidarity with striking workers in Shirebrook and elsewhere above the result of a ballot isn’t properly unpacked, leaving the pro-strike contributors starting out on the back foot.
The interviewee leading the other side is Roland Taylor, seen in 1984 acting as the public face of the miners who chose to keep working. He is at the pit manning the phone, reassuring those thinking of breaking the strike that they will be supported. In the present day, Taylor insists he was just fielding calls, not actively canvassing for workers to cross picket lines. The Taylor of 1984 seems to admit otherwise: “We’re doing no more than what the NUM have already done to us,” he says. “Divide and conquer.”
If a bitter personal attack on Taylor by a still-furious striker, accusing him of being an opportunist with little understanding of or love for the vocation of mining, is gratuitous – viewers inclined to think that way can judge for themselves – the gradually increasing numbers of workers who wavered and went back to the pit are retrospectively given ample say. This is especially so in a long section devoted to the intimidating criticism aimed not just at miners crossing picket lines but also at their wives and children, who were buffeted by screams of “Scab!” in the street and at school. As we see news archive of “battle buses” either burnt out at a vandalised depot or with steel grilles reinforcing their windows as they speed to the colliery, the impression given is that the strikers resorted to verbal and physical aggression that was unacceptable in a disagreement with sincerely held beliefs on both sides.
The idea that the strikers might have had unconscionable things done to them that justified their loss of decorum will, perhaps, feature more prominently next week, when the focus is on the state violence and deception of the Battle of Orgreave. But although the miners’ strike marked the moment when modern power and money stamped their boots down on community spirit, working pride and the common good, starting a battle that is still ongoing decades later, the history of Shirebrook is a reminder that not every citizen believes those things are worth fighting for in the first place.
Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain is on Channel 4
