Catalogue Number
NMLH.2025.5.4
Object Name
letter
Place
Lancashire, England, UK
People
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Lancashire Working Miners' Committee
Events
1984-85 Miners' Strike
Description
This is a typed letter from Lancashire Working Miners' Committee to NUM branch members, dated 29 August 1984. The Working Miners were those who refused to go on strike, and the letter urges those on strike to return to work. They claim 'We are not scabs, we are brave men fighting to make sure this great Union is not taken over by dictators', arguing that the strike was not the democratic will of the NUM members.
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 and strikebreakers, attempt to undermine it entirely. Crossing picket lines or 'scabbing' on a strike is viewed as a serious betrayal by striking workers, with serious social consequences - oral histories from the Strike 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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