Coal and Community in Wales 
Images of the Miners Strike: Before, During and After 
by Richard Williams and Amanda Powell, YLolfa, £14.99

FORTY years after British miners began a relentless fight in defence of pits, jobs and communities, it is fair to say that the literature examining their struggle is now huge and continues to grow. 

The quality of it, however, remains varied. Although there has been a shift away from  portraying miners as “the enemy within,” now that is effectively safe to do so, many accounts remain either narrowly sectarian or overly romantic and sentimental in their approach.

Fortunately, Coal and Community in Wales is neither of these and, to my mind, is a real people’s history that uses image and text skilfully to capture the strike as a lived experience.

Written and photographed by two journalists who documented the dispute from day one, the book also brings together other involved individuals who have been given the opportunity to put forward their own accounts and reflections about the period, often for the very first time. 

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Every angle gets covered, some peculiar to the areas examined, some replicated across all the coalfields.

There’s a well-defined pride in a dirty, dangerous and socially valued occupation and the working-class cultures that had evolved out of that.

There’s a sense of being under siege from the state and from its police and its media. Alongside that there is a real feeling of joy in collective struggle and in celebrating even the smallest of victories.

Finally, there is the anger: the sense of betrayal and enduring animosity understandably expressed towards those who scabbed and also towards those who, for whatever reason, were expected to be firmer allies and really ought to have known better.

The book notes as well the importance of the National Union of Mineworkers which was not as monolithically socialist and militant before and during the strike as now seems to be assumed. 

In terms of the degree to which participants were further politicised, some may feel that this has been exaggerated, but it’s beyond doubt that to have seen the full force of the Establishment directed towards a community radicalised many, and not least women who had generally stood aside from the predominantly male trade union.

Ways of resisting and struggling changed too. Pictures of communal meals and Christmas parties remind us that they were often as important in sustaining the lengthy strike as the militarily organised flying pickets.

Sections of society  that had previously suffered discrimination, such as the LGBT community, made contributions that are now well-known. And international material aid, as well as offers of first-time holidays abroad, from, for example, the CGT in France and the Soviet Union, poured in throughout. 

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On a less overtly political note, these photographss capture the nature of mining towns and villages where, even at the height of the strike, kids continued going to school in their ubiquitous parkas, allotments were tended, dogs were walked and there was often a semblance of normality. Mining areas were by no means drab industrialised hell holes, and pit communities often occupied geographic spaces that defied simple town or country definitions.

In some ways it is a world that has largely disappeared. Spectacle-wise, wonderful events like the Durham Miners’ Gala and demonstrations called by the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign continue to grow and develop.

As regards the visible remnants of this industry, however, the only signs today are scattered miners’ welfare institutes, patches of terraced housing which you would generally only recognise as coal board if you were from the area, and the huge slag heaps now fortunately colonised by an amazing array of plants and animals.

This is undoubtedly a moving and insightful collection that will surely become a key work for understanding the response of Wales, both as a class and a nation, to what was one of the most momentous disputes in British labour history.