When we look back on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, we often see pictures of masculinity: men with banners, confrontations at pit gates and proud marches back to work. Four decades on, Natalie Thomlinson, Associate Professor in History, highlights an overlooked dimension of this historic dispute – the women who themselves went on strike and stood up to Thatcher’s government.
3rd March 1985 was a sad day for many in coalfield communities up and down the country, as striking miners returned to work with no settlement, having downed tools to prevent pit closures for an entire year. Many communities organised “back-to-work” marches – often accompanied by the local colliery band – so they could return ‘with their heads’ held high’; not bowed by the National Coal Board or the Thatcher government, but proud working men.
And men the miners were. Yet, on many such marches, these men were accompanied by women; the wives, mothers, daughters of striking miners who had done so much to support them during the strike – but also, on some occasions, women who had been on strike themselves.
Women on strike
The story of the women’s support movement during the strike, when women from local coalfield communities organised to fundraise for, and feed, striking miners and their families, is relatively well known. It is a story that Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and I explored in depth in our book, “Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984-5”.
Less well-known, however, is the fact that there were a small but significant number of women employed by collieries who joined the dispute. These women were not miners, of course, but they were canteen workers, cleaners and office workers, who joined the strike out of solidarity with their miner colleagues, many of whom were their friends, husbands and relations.
Why did some of these women join the strike when most female workers in collieries did not? It’s important to note that it was unclear whether or not these female workers were even expected to join the strike. Confusingly, the union they belonged to – Colliery Officials and Staffs Area (COSA) – was technically an auxiliary section of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), but in reality it had functioned as a separate entity for a long time.
One woman we interviewed for our book, Roni Chapman, was the librarian at Coal House in Doncaster. Roni initially did not join the strike because she believed that her COSA branch was not participating:
“Initially I went in, because nobody was striking at Coal House. You know—there was nobody else striking. But then there was a more militant member of the union in Coal House so he struck. And then it got to the point—you know, you’ve got your colleagues, who you’ve got a loyalty to …”
Roni felt that by not going to work in Coal House, she was letting down her colleagues, and not honouring the result of the vote at her local branch. Roni, however, was well aware of the wider position of the NUM and of the cause of striking miners. As she told us, “it was a case of, who do I owe my loyalties to? That was the problem, always the problem.” Roni was also a Labour representative on Doncaster Council, and faced significant pressure from her fellow councillors (many of whom were in the NUM), who ostracised her: she was put “in a polling station out in the sticks” on election day, and one even wrote “blackleg” on her desk in the council chamber. The tension became so much that Roni had a minor breakdown:
“It was like a depression. I—I just couldn’t get out of bed. I can’t describe the feeling, you know, it was pretty horrible … Because I knew whatever I did, I wasn’t going to do right by everybody. But in the end, that’s when I decided, after I’d been in bed a couple of days.”
After the agonising decision making process, Roni eventually decided to come out on strike, and became involved in efforts to support other striking COSA members.
Other women on strike were canteen workers, who, with their skills in mass catering, often became vital to the running of the support movement in coalfield areas. One such woman we interviewed was Kay Case of Treharris in South Wales, who became deeply involved in her local support group. Several weeks into the strike, she and several other striking women “got together and we said, ‘why don’t we try and do something to help’”. They decided to make sandwiches and hot drinks for men acting as flying pickets; they ‘put notices up or spread the word around’, and soon more women got involved, with the group’s activities expanding beyond simply feeding picketing men, expanding into more general feeding, fundraising and political activity. It was not unusual for women who were on strike to have husbands who were striking miners as well, and in such cases hardship in families could be particularly acute.
Hidden from history
The stories of the many women who went on strike are diverse but always fascinating. Yet in popular retellings of the strike, they are almost never mentioned, hidden from history in the way that women still so often are.
One of the regrets we felt when we came to the end of our research was that we had not thought to try and interview more such women at the outset of the project: perhaps a depressing sign that even feminist historians are not immune to overlooking the presence of women in certain times, places and disputes.
Forty years since its end, the strike is well and truly passing into history, with the people who took part growing elderly; some, of course, have died. How much I would love to see someone take up the baton, and interview more of these women strikers whilst we still have time. Their stories, too, deserve to be part of this history.
Natalie Thomlinson is the coauthor of “Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984-1985”, which was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.