The Miner's Strike and support groups: South Wales

The South Wales Miners’ Federation had a proud history of trade union loyalty, solidarity, and discipline extending back to the heydays of Victorian and Edwardian industrial expansion when the Rhondda valley, a strip of land some 16 miles long, had boasted over 50 coal mines, and its brass bands and choirs had made the valleys famous throughout the world.

By the summer of 1984, in the midst of the Miners' Strike, Welsh miners had made their presence felt by picketing power stations and steel works as far apart as Port Talbot, Tilbury and Didcot.

The Cambridge Miners' Support Group forged relationships with miners and their families in Maerdy and Abertillery.

Mardy

Mardy, the last working pit in the Rhondda, was known as Little Moscow because of its long Communist traditions.

In April 1984, miners from Maerdy [the village is Maerdy but the colliery was spelt Mardy] were welcomed in Cambridge, making the city their base from Monday to Friday each week while they picketed the coal-fired Barrington Cement Works.

The miners were given food, pillows and blankets donated by supporters, £30 a week to cover basic expenses, and slept on the floor of the Alex Wood Hall. Peter Aldridge arranged for them to take showers in municipal facilities.

Welsh miners became a familiar presence in Cambridge. They lobbied trade union branches and workplaces including Marshalls, Pye, and Addenbrooke's Hospital, where the cleaners were also on strike. They also held meetings with trade unionists and their supporters in some of the Cambridge colleges. The Mayor of Cambridge, Eddie Cowell, Head Porter at New Hall, invited the miners into his parlour.

In July the legality of miners from the South Wales Miners’ Federation picketing outside their own geographical area was contested and a £50,000 fine was imposed, which they refused to pay in accordance with a policy agreed by the TUC Conference. In August their funds, amounting to £770,000, were sequestrated by the courts.

When Maerdy miners stopped coming, they were replaced by others from Merthyr and then finally by miners from the Six Bells Pit in Abertillery who remained in Cambridge until the very end of the strike.

Public support for the strike in Nottinghamshire and in Wales could not have been more different. Picketing in the valleys was notional for much of the strike. Since loyalty to the pit, lodge, community and the National Union of Miners (NUM) had been deeply embedded in mining areas for so long this was hardly necessary.

So broadly based was the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities (set up in Cardiff in October), and so representative of all shades of opinion and civic society – from Plaid Cymru and hill farmers in the Welsh-speaking north to entire council estates in Labour’s industrial heartlands – that the Congress was able to adopt the slogan, The NUM fights for Wales. 

When on 26 February, 600 miners from Mardy came out of their lodge meeting having voted with heavy hearts that the ‘best way to stop the NUM being smashed was an orderly return to work’, they did so having demonstrated a record of solidarity second to none. Not one of its 753-strong labour force had broken the strike.

The procession of the Maerdy miners, walking back to their pit behind their banner and brass band with all the pride and dignity they had intended the world to see, provided the labour movement with one of the great historic moments in its iconography. But the NUM’s demands for reinstatement of sacked and victimised miners were not conceded and the men who had been sacked during the dispute, often for trivial offences, did not go back.

The National Coal Board was able to continue with its closure programme virtually unimpeded. Coal production at Mardy finally ceased in 1990, bringing an era in Welsh history to the end.

Abertillery

Martin Rogers, Emrys Deacon, Jim Line and Tony Williams were childhood friends from families where generations had worked down the pit. They travelled to Cambridge weekly in Jim Line’s car, returning at the weekend. In Cambridge, speaking generally fell to Jim who became adept at impassioned appeals laced with his infectious sense of humour – typically finishing with a poem to enthusiastic applause.The four are pictured below, on one of their visits. Also pictured are Jim with his wife Mary.

There were many meals at supporters’ homes and a makeshift kitchen ‘for a brew or a stew’ in the Alex Wood Hall. The Abertillery miners were very popular with students. A farewell card, now in the ARU archive, is signed by students including Scott McCracken, David Lea, Gary Kelly and Morag Shiach and reads ‘The cobbles will never be the same’.

In South Wales, a framed picture of King’s College still takes pride of place in Jim's home.

Because coal provided most full-time jobs, many families in Abertillery were in severe financial difficulties. Diane and Tony Williams, a face worker at the Six Bells Pit which employed 480 men, were luckier than most. Their fortnightly NUM food parcel consisted of tea, jam, a tin of rice pudding, soup, tinned tomatoes, corned beef and two pounds of sugar, but their two children, Mark and Carolanne, did not have fresh fruit for weeks. ‘Things like biscuits, which are a pretty normal buy in most households were virtually unheard of during the strike’, recollected Diane, one of eight brothers and sisters who grew up in a two-bedroomed Coal Board house. Her father worked in the old Cwmtillery pit in Abertillery and later the Rose Heyworth.

In contrast to Nottinghamshire, the Labour-controlled local authority, the utility boards, and many shop keepers were sympathetic with the council issuing food vouchers to striking miners and not demanding rent arrears. The exceptions were television hire shops. TV sets had to be returned as did cars on hire purchase.

Abertillery Council made over office space to the Gwent Food Fund where volunteers, largely women, were responsible for the bulk purchases of food with money from the public (over £10,000 a week) and packing and distributing of food parcels in over 14 NUM areas. Appeals for the Gwent Food Fund met with an excellent response because individuals who would not support the strike directly did not wish women and children to go hungry, particularly before Christmas. In total, £660,000 was raised.

Welsh women had a long history of political activity dating to the General Strike of 1926. Dora Cox from near Pontypool marched with the women from Tonypandy in the Hunger March of 1934. The personal testimonies of women in the Abertillery Women’s Action Group were collected by Jill Miller in You Can’t Kill the Spirit.

Women in a Welsh Mining Valley (1986). Pearl Williams (pictured below) described women venturing into the Men’s Institute for the first time during the strike (‘the Institute was and is, men only, but it wasn’t going to take us ladies long to alter that one’). Soon after, Pearl and her friends established a kitchen in the ‘Stute’ providing cooked meals for 120 and 150 people every day and also a welfare centre.

Diane Williams (no relation) volunteered in the food centre and the welfare centre which gave advice on rent arrears, hire purchase and debt. The women became accomplished letter-writers. Meanwhile, Beryl Fury from the food centre travelled on her own in Italy, Holland and France selling merchandise and raising money.

The Abertillery women organised a concert and a rally addressed by Barking MP, Jo Richardson, and Brenda Dean of SOGAT 82, the first woman leading a major trade union. The Abertillery women attended the TUC Conference in Brighton and a stormy meeting addressed by TUC General Secretary, Norman Willis in Aberavon. They joined the All Wales Women’s Picket at Port Talbot turn away lorries at the Llanwen power station. Forty-eight children went to Holland for Christmas.

Pit closures and heritage

The Rose Heyworth closed in 1985 and the Marine at Cwm in 1989.

The Six Bells mine shut in 1988 when the Rhondda Heritage Park was built on the old Lewis Merthyr Colliery site. A 20-metre statue called The Guardian, towers over the site of the former Six Bells Colliery. It is constructed from over 20,000 strips of steel that filter the light, and is by the artist Sabastien Boyesen. It commemorates a tragic mining accident in 1960 in which 48 men lost their lives. Tony Williams had just started working in the pit and remembers being down the mine that day.

On December 2014 Jim Line, who took the photograph below, wrote: 'I am sending a photo of the monument of a miner to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the explosion at the Six Bells Colliery on 28/6/1960. It was erected in 2011. The youngest boy was Dennis Lane aged 18. It happened a day after my 21st birthday. It is a beautiful monument even bigger than the Angel of the North. You can keep the photo.'

In 2015, former miners Tony Williams and Jim Line, along with Miners' Strike researcher Prof Mary Joannou, visited the site of the Six Bells Pit in Abertillery, and were photographed with The Guardian in the background.