In last week’s BBC documentary Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story, some of the history was inevitably told by those who were only coming of age in 1984. One of those was Lisa McKenzie, the daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Nottinghamshire miners, who turned 16 on the first day of the strike. Among other memories, McKenzie, now 55, recalled with a grin the time when a group calling themselves the Cambridge University Feminist Players had got in touch, back then, and wanted to come and do a play for the women of the pit village, in a show of solidarity.
When the students arrived they insisted that only women could watch their performance. “None of the women liked that, and none of the men liked it either,” McKenzie recalled. The play itself, she said, was “every bit as bad as you could imagine: all avant garde and flounce.” As a finale, the student actors turned their backs to the audience and when they turned around their faces were blackened with coal dust. They held hands and announced: “One day all sisters will unite – and work side-by-side down the pits with their men!” McKenzie was open-mouthed recalling this, as her home-permed self had been open-mouthed first time around. “What that showed us,” she said, 40 years on, “is that they just didn’t understand us at all.”
