Humax TV Tonight: Miner’s Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain

January 25, 2024

Miner’s Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.

The miners’ strike of 1984 to 1985 opened a great wound in the soul of the nation.

It divided communities, transformed the way we are policed and re-shaped the country with consequences that are still being processed today. Packed with raw, emotional testimony and explosive archive, this landmark series of three powerful, stand-alone stories looks at the events of the strike through the eyes of those directly involved on the front line, on all sides. The series has tracked down a wide range of people who were filmed during that tumultuous year – both striking miners and those who continued to work, as well as their families; many telling their stories for the first time.

The series argues that the strike was a seminal event in modern British history that has defined the lives of workers in Britain ever since. In the first film, Community,the strike proved bitterly divisive, nowhere more so than in one Derbyshire pit village, Shirebrook, that came to be split down the middle in an increasingly violent struggle between striking and working miners. This episode tells the story of how Shirebrook descended into violence and division – a microcosm of what was happening in communities across the country. Alan Gascoyne, NUM Secretary of Shirebrook Colliery, led the walk-out of miners who believed a strike was the only way to save their jobs, their community and their way of life. But from the very beginning, others maintained that the strike was undemocratic.

They crossed the picket lines and started returning to work. The series hears from some of those working miners who feel ostracised to this day for the position they took. Roland Taylor was one of them, and he soon became a lightning rod for the anger directed at working miners, pejoratively known as ‘scabs’. As tensions escalated – vividly captured by news crews – Shirebrook became known as the ‘Belfast of England’, with miners on both sides facing verbal abuse, harassment and violence. With the Metropolitan Police drafted in to help, more and more miners were arrested, and the town’s women, including miner’s wife Denise Oscroft, stepped into the front line of the dispute as one of a group of women and children who joined the picket line at the colliery. When the strike was eventually defeated the miners returned to the pit, but within 10 years the mine had closed for good.