Communities throughout Caerphilly County Borough were affected by the miners’ strike of 1984. The industrial conflict created unprecedented community spirit and division. Gareth Hill spoke to those involved in the strike, from miners to activists – to the women who found their political voice.
March 12 marked 30 years since the beginning of the miners’ strike that lasted almost a year. The industrial action was called after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher planned to close 20 pits, which the Government and National Coal Board said were uneconomical.
For many the dispute went further, pitting whole communities against the Government, the police and resulting in mass closures of mines across the country.
For Alan Sandel, then Vice Chairman of Celynen North NUM lodge in Newbridge, it went beyond the closure of these mines.
He said: “Thatcher wasn’t out to break the miners. She was out to break the trade unions and she succeeded.
“Despite this, it was the best year of my life, not because we didn’t suffer because we did.
“The fact I was so proud is because of my family, my wife and daughter and all the women that took part.
“Because of the support we had from all the way around the country, we would not have lasted 12 months without our women and communities.”
In South Wales, communities unified and after ten months just over 1% of the region’s 20,000 miners had returned to work, facing hostility from those who supported the strike.
Things turned deadly when taxi driver David Wilkie was killed after a concrete block was thrown off a bridge while he was taking a miner to work in Merthyr Vale.
Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, both 21 at the time, were striking miners from Rhymney, and were convicted of murder, becoming known as the ‘Rhymney Two’.
The convictions were reduced to manslaughter after an appeal supported by the NUM and public figures including the late Tony Benn and Bedwas councillor Ray Davies.
Supporters also included the group ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’ who raised money for the NUM in South Wales after access to their funds were blocked by the courts.
Ron Stoate, Vice Chairman of NUM Penallta lodge, witnessed a change in attitudes in The Valleys.
He said: “I saw people, who wouldn’t know a pit if it sprouted out the ground, support us. We got support from all sorts of avenues.
“We were an enclosed society. Gays and lesbians were alien to us but it turned out they could see a link between their position and our own.
“They were being persecuted in the press and in society as a whole and so were we, and all we wanted was to keep our jobs.”
The NUM voted to go back to work on March 3 1985, leaving Ron Stoate “totally gutted”.
He said: “The treatment of the miners was appalling by police, Government and the press.
“When we went back to work the thought of those Tory politicians in Chequers toasting themselves with champagne at the weekend ripped the guts out of me.”
Less than nine years after the strike, 28 collieries in South Wales had shut, many within a year or two of the dispute, with 25,000 jobs in 1981 reduced to 1,200 ten years later.
Dorothy Phillips was part of the Newbridge Women’s Support Group and remembers the day the strike ended: “We were in the kitchen when they told us the strike was ending, we couldn’t believe it, because we would have gone on.
“What we lost for our children were the ancillary jobs that came with the pits – the electricians and carpenters.
“That is the future our children could have had – they could have been skilled.
“None of us really wanted our children to go down the pit, but it was the prosperity that the pit brought.”
“We stood side by side with our men”
All Dorothy Phillips, Donna Barnes and Angela Boulton had in common before the miners’ strike of 1984 was that their husbands all worked underground.
But over the year-long strike they forged a friendship that has been reignited 30 years later as they sit in Newbridge Memo, the strike headquarters for the village that fed two collieries
They were part of the Newbridge Women’s Support Group that fed striking miners and their families, helped by donations from trade unions, local shops, residents and campaign groups.
For Dorothy, 81, it was the community support that was the most special.
She said: “Local pensioners were wonderful, they knew that their past was our future. They didn’t have much to live on but they still supported the kitchen.”
Angela, who was 20 when the strike began, agreed: “The community here has never been as strong as it was in 1984. I don’t think it ever will be.
“I had my second born three weeks before the strike and my friend had a baby on the day of the strike.
“We used to leave the babies with our husbands when they weren’t picketing and go door-to-door collecting money, leafleting and picking up food for parcels.”
The support group began by putting together the parcels for families but, following the lead of women from Yorkshire, meals were soon provided on a daily basis for miners returning from the picket lines.
Angela said: “Single men weren’t getting any food parcels and this is where the kitchen helped feed all these youngsters.”
Dorothy explained: “The Government stopped miners’ family money saying that the men were having strike pay, but they weren’t – they were living on family allowance.”
“When they stopped the money, it was a political ploy to make the men feel they were taking the food out of their children’s mouths but we thought putting a dinner up everyday meant they didn’t feel like that.”
The kitchen became so successful that the NUM sent Dorothy to speak to union meetings across the country, where she was “treated like royalty”, spreading ideas and collecting money – and the favour was returned by other groups.
Donna Barnes was 30 in 1984 and also had a baby born that year.
She said: “Hackney Women’s Support Group came to a meeting here one day and a lot of young mothers came.
“I asked them for nappies and I got everything. Clothes parcels until my daughter was three-years-old as well as clothes for myself to go into hospital. It was wonderful support.”
For Dorothy the interest in the support group was due to its originality.
She said: “We always supported our men but this time we stood side-by-side with them and the kitchen was good because we knew everything that was going on. In previous strikes you knew what your husband said when he came home but during that strike, we were really involved.
“We got to know about the buses going to the picket line and we’d ask the union to go but sometimes they wouldn’t let us because they knew it was going to be violent.”
Dorothy remembers a picket line in Port Talbot where women from Greenham Common Peace Camp went to support the striking miners and she confronted an officer after a woman was picked up and thrown over a fence.
She said: “That was the first experience I had of the police and their tactics. It was hard for me to realise that and see it first-hand because I’d always been brought up to respect the police. I never thought they would do things like that.
“We were being accused of trying to bring the Government down but we were saying ‘no, we want jobs for our kids and we want a future for us’.
“Thatcher said we were the enemy within. She was a mother, and when her son got lost in the desert she had an army out looking for him, so why did she think I thought less of my son?”
The women said the aftermath of the strike is still being felt today through deprivation and unemployment in Valleys towns.
None of them pass a foodbank without donating and they despise their youngsters being called scroungers who don’t want to work.
Angela Boulton wrote a poem in the aftermath of the strike about the void left.
She said: “I called the poem The Forgotten Future because that’s how it is. The pits are finished and that has done us wrong.
“It’s disgusting how we’ve come to this with foodbanks in this day and age – it shouldn’t be like this.
“Kids on jobseekers and families should be getting food parcels because they can’t afford to keep going at home.”
The Forgotten Future by Angela Boulton
The village is short of breath, no more the land of song
The pits have finished, how that has done us wrong
Gone is the community of which people were loving and willing to share
It’s not there no more, it all seems so unfair
You have to be lucky these days, to even find a job
To put food upon the table, and pocket a few bob
Look after oneself now, that’s all anyone can do
Standing in the dole queue and praying there’s a job for you
Life seems to cheat us in more ways than one
The children’s uncertain future, misses out on our past fun
Parents on their guard more, in fear of what could be
But happy at them staying in and watching the TV
“Gone are the good old days”, that’s what old folks say,
Let’s don’t give up and throw them all away
We need a better future with jobs, and forget about the wrong
Let’s get back our community, and once again make it the land of song
Bedwas councillor’s personal dispute
For Bedwas councillor Ray Davies, the 1984 miners’ strike wasn’t just political – it was personal.
Ray, 84, started work as a boy miner when he was 13, shortly after his mother died a day after giving birth to his sister.
He said: “My mother died for the want of a pint of blood, the want of a hospital bed and the want of an abortion.
“When I started working underground and I started hearing the miners talk of the need for a better world it electrified me.
“The finest political education I had was underground.”
When the 1984 strike started, Cllr Davies left his day-to-day council duties and put his efforts into the Rhymney Valley Miners’ Support Group, collecting money and joining picket lines, despite criticism from the Labour Party hierarchy.
He explained: “They said ‘You’re a Labour councillor and instead of being down there with a donkey jacket on, you should be doing the job of a councillor’.
“I’d reply ‘It’s not the Labour Party and the council that comes first. What comes first is winning justice for the miners and their communities’.”
Cllr Davies’ role was considered so important that he twice had fines paid for him that kept him out of prison. Once by the Welsh Conservative leader, to stop bad publicity for his party, and once by the NUM to allow him to carry on campaigning.
The Rhymney support group started with daily collections outside Tesco in Caerphilly town, much to the anger of the management, according to Cllr Davies, who would spend evenings collecting from houses for food parcels.
He said: “We realised straight away that we wanted to be on the picket line to support the miners but the real support they wanted was to make sure that their families had food and didn’t suffer.”
Cllr Davies and the Rhymney support group also campaigned against the murder convictions for Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland after they killed taxi driver David Wilkie as he was driving two miners to work.
He recalled: “They didn’t mean to kill anyone. They wanted to frighten the taxi driver so he would turn back.
“I got put in the cells for saying they were not murderers outside the court in Cardiff. They were guilty of manslaughter but they were not guilty of murder.”
He organised a march of 2,000 people to Cardiff Prison in support of the ‘Rhymney Two’, whose convictions were later reduced to manslaughter.
The death of David Wilkie revealed the tension in South Wales mining communities at the time, as some men defied the strike and hardship and returned to work.
The end of the strike on March 3 1985 led to all the miners returning to work, many for just a few weeks and months, before their collieries were shut, adding to their defeat.
But Cllr Davies said he didn’t view the strike as a defeat of the miners. He explained: “How can it be a defeat when people from all over the world came to Caerphilly and money poured in to help those on strike?
“People saw that the miners were an inspiration for people everywhere struggling for justice and freedom.”
He said: “I wanted to get behind the scenes and the miners used to protect me.
“I went to Orgreave (in South Yorkshire) and have never been so scared in my life.”
Photographs taken when Roger returned to the mining villages 30 years on will be exhibited at the National Library of Wales next year. For more information visit www.rogertiley.com. Copyright Roger Tiley