Catalogue Number
NMLH.2025.5.3
Object Name
letter
Place
Wigan, England, UK
People
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Bernard McGurrin Kirkless NUM Branch Secretary
Events
1984-85 Miners' Strike
Description
This is a typed letter from Bernard McGurrin, Acting Kirkless NUM Branch Secretary, to NUM branch members, dated 26 August 1984 describing contact with the Kirkless Workshops Manager encouraging local miners to strike break and return to work. While the public's main view of a strike is that of picket lines and news reporting, internal organisation letters like this give important insight into the ways mines and unions worked behind the scenes to strengthen strikers resolve, or in the case of the employers, attempt to undermine it entirely.
The letter documents strong negative feelings towards six strikebreakers who have returned to work, suggesting they have been paid "£1.50 in 5p pieces" ie 30 pieces of silver, likening strikers to the Biblical betrayer, Judas Iscariot.
The letter also shows opposition to the so called 'Dirty Thirty' 'Working Miners' Committee' of 30 miners in Nottinghamshire who refused to strike and attempted to oppose the strike through the courts as the NUM had called the national strike without an official ballot. The letter asks, "What right have the miners in Nottinghamshire or any other area, to put a cross on a ballot paper to close a colliery or workshop in Lancashire, none whatsoever." Crossing picket lines or 'scabbing' on a strike is viewed as a serious betrayal by striking workers, and miners oral histories discuss mining families where people who crossed picket lines were shunned for life.
The 1984-85 Miners' Strike was called after the government announced plans to close 20 pits, at a cost of twenty thousand miners jobs, which the miners accurately saw as the beginning of the closure of all the pits in the UK. The strike lasted for over a year before ending unsuccessfully in March 1985. The speculation was correct, and a second round of closures in 1992 was announced, closing almost all the mines in the UK, leaving former pit towns with extremely high rates of unemployment and deprivation that last to this day.
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