As part of our series of special reports in the week of the 40th anniversary of the start of the 1984-85 Miners' Strike, Gavin Havery looks at the role women played in the dispute.
With no money to put food on the table or pay bills, the women of the East Durham coalfields knew they would have to get involved to give striking pitmen the stomach to continue picketing.
The Blitz-style spirit started simply with the community pulling together to feed hungry mouths but developed into a large-scale operation and became the very heart and soul of the strike’s sustainability.
The body of men stood firm in their defiance as the state ramped up the pressure throughout 1984 and into the following year to break their will.
But the backbone women provided not only helped them hold their position but also paved the way for lasting social change between the sexes.
The strike came in response to the announcement of plans by the National Coal Board to close 20 pits, and fearing many more would follow, union members were keen to preserve proud hard-working communities and their way of life.
Coal had fuelled the industrial revolution and the North East, along with Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, was an energy powerhouse.
Working underground was hard, dangerous and dirty toil but, although the wages might seem inadequate given the risks involved, miners were relatively well-paid.
Entire villages were dependent on the coal industry and families were keen to preserve their nice, clean, carpeted homes, cars, foreign holidays and mod cons such as colour televisions and video cassette recorders.
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Heather Wood, whose dad, Gordon MacPherson was a miner, said: “At the time people were able to provide good food for their children. They had a good life and they were fighting to keep it.
“I know of families who had to sell every bit of electrical equipment in their house to keep going and in other cases, the family split up because they just could not cope anymore.
“By the time we got to June and July, things got worse. Mortgage companies were wanting their money and electricity and gas bills had not been paid so people were being threatened with being cut off.
“Televisions that were rented were going to be taken away. They took everything.
“Sometimes I would get telephone calls in the middle of the night from people saying they were ready to commit suicide because they could not pay their bills.
“It was so easy for people to lose their self-esteem and their pride and, in some cases, I am sure that happened, but most of the time pride didn’t matter because we were all the same.”
Heather, who was 32 at the time, was chairwoman of the Easington Constituency Labour Party and part of the National Women Against Pit Closures.
Even before the strike was called, she was instrumental in organising a series of discussions, debates, rallies, and a leafletting campaign across the district that led to the creation of the Save Easington Area Mines group.
Heather said: “When we got the January of ‘84 we could see the strike was getting closer. It was imminent and we needed to involve the women.
“If we did not it would fail because they could end up pushing the men to go back to work because there would be no food for the kids.
“We organised a meeting and women from throughout the district packed the council chamber.
“They were all from different villages. They all went back to their villages and got more women together.”
Support groups were set up with free cafes - sometimes called soup kitchens - launched to feed people with local businesses pitching in to help where they could.
Bakers would leave their ovens on to cook pies made in enormous tins on an industrial scale as families, used to living in each other’s pockets, sat cheek by jowl, in crammed community centres to eat.
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Heather, a mother-of-two who now has five grandchildren, said: “At Christmas, we got all of the bairns one new present each.
“We went to one shop and said: ‘We have got no money but we want presents for the kids’ and the manager just said: ‘Take what you want off the shelves, and pay us back later’.
“That was how we kept our pride, we were all in it together.”
As well as surviving the poverty the strike brought, Heather said many women became politicised at seeing the sight of men being beaten by police officers with truncheons on the picket lines and hearing the harsh uncaring rhetoric from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the television news.
Some of the women would stand side-by-side with their men, get arrested and join them in flicking the Vs and throwing eggs at strike-breaking ‘scabs’.
Heather recalls one woman had her leg broken during a particularly severe and violent clash with police officers in the village.
Although coalmining was traditionally ‘a man’s world’, it seems the loyalty and steadfast support women offered during the strike helped, to some extent, change outdated sexist attitudes, ushering in a new sense of respect and equality.
In some cases, there was a shift in the balance of financial power in households as women took jobs in factories to make ends meet and the men collected their children from school.
Heather said, as part of this 'role reversal', it also made it more socially acceptable for men to take on a more prominent caregiving role as working-class women saw they were no longer limited to the very important but sometimes underrated job of 'homemaking'.
This would prove increasingly important over the next decade as pits across the County Durham coalfield were systemically closed and families could no longer rely on the industry to make a living.
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Heather said: “It was an incredible learning curve for these women and it changed them forever.
“Women organised meetings and spoke at rallies and spoke on television and radio, things they had never done before.
“For the first time ever the women would say ‘right I am off to London for a rally with the lasses.
"It was totally different to what most women had ever done.
“One woman, she only died recently, said to me: ‘Heather, it was the best year of my life’.”
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