Catalogue Number
NMLH.2025.5.7
Object Name
letter
Place
Wigan, Lancashire, England, UK
People
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), National Coal Board, Kirkless Workshops
Events
1984-85 Miners' Strike
Description
This is a typed letter from the Kirkless Workshops Manager J.A. Stacey on behalf of the National Coal Board (NCB) to striker Lenny Jones, dated 22 May 1984. The letter encourages Mr Jones to return to work and strikebreak, claiming that 161 people including 112 NUM members had reported for work that day.
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. In this case, they play on the workers pride in the quality of their work and the reputation of the Kirkless Workshop to emotionally provoke them into returning to work. 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 strength of feeling about strikebreaking is hinted at by the NCB's reassurance that strike breakers will "receive the full protection of management both during and at the termination of the present dispute" as it would be unlikely strikers would willingly work with a scab following the return to work, and many strikers physically prevented buses of strikebreakers from crossing picket lines and entering pits.
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 NUM's 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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