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How the great strike began
Britain’s coalfields were already seething with anger and lightning walkouts when the national strike against pit closures was triggered at Cortonwood colliery in Yorkshire on March 6 1984. PETER LAZENBY reports
A mass rally of striking miners in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.

HILARY CAVE was at the heart of the National Union of Mineworkers administrative apparatus at its headquarters in Sheffield from 1983 to 1988.

As national education officer she ran training courses preparing union activists for what the union knew was coming — an all-out attack by the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher on the miners and their union.

 

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