The Miners’ Strike 1984: Northumberland, Durham and What Happened Here

The miners’ strike of 1984 to 1985 lasted from March 1984 to March 1985 – fifty-one weeks in which the National Union of Mineworkers attempted to prevent the closure of twenty collieries announced by the National Coal Board under Ian MacGregor. The strike failed. The pits closed. The industry that had employed hundreds of thousands of people in Northumberland and Durham and given communities their entire social and economic identity was dismantled in the decade that followed. The consequences are still present in the landscape and in the people who lived through it.

The Northumberland and Durham Coalfield

The northeast coalfield stretched from the Northumberland coast at Lynemouth south through County Durham to the Yorkshire border. By 1984 it comprised dozens of functioning collieries and employed more than 30,000 miners in the region. The communities that surrounded the pits – Easington on the Durham coast, Ellington in Northumberland, Chopwell, Horden, Murton, Seaham – had been built around coal. The colliery was the largest employer, the miners’ welfare hall was the social centre, the union branch was the political institution. The pit defined everything.

The northeast collieries joined the strike almost unanimously from the start – a contrast with some Nottinghamshire pits that continued working and created the division in the union that contributed to the strike’s eventual failure. In Durham and Northumberland, solidarity was not a rhetorical aspiration but a practical reality. Picket lines were maintained for a year. Women’s support groups organised food distribution, welfare and community communication with a professionalism that surprised observers who expected passivity. The communities demonstrated a collective capacity for mutual support that was the product of generations of the same kind of solidarity built in the pit villages.

Easington

Easington Colliery on the Durham coast was one of the most isolated and solidly strike-bound communities in the country. The colliery had been sunk in 1899 and the village that grew around it was entirely dependent on coal – there was no other economy to fall back on. During the strike, the community fed itself through collective organisation. After the strike, and after the colliery closed in 1993, Easington faced the full consequence of that dependency. The pit that had been the reason for the community’s existence was gone and nothing replaced it at the same scale. The unemployment that followed was not temporary structural adjustment. It was the removal of the economic foundation of the community.

The land where the colliery stood was cleared and the coastline – which had been black with coal waste for decades – was restored to sand and grass. The restoration is genuine and the coast is now clean. The loss of the industrial heritage is also genuine. Easington today is a community that carries the memory of what it was and deals with the consequences of what that history produced.

Ellington

Ellington Colliery in Northumberland was the last deep coal mine in the northeast, staying open until 2005 when it finally closed after a series of financial crises and production problems. The extended survival of Ellington gave the Northumberland coalfield a different timeline from Durham – a longer, slower end rather than the comprehensive closure of the late 1980s. When Ellington finally closed, the last connection to the region’s deep mining heritage was severed.

What It Still Means

The miners’ strike is one of those events in British history that remains contested forty years on in a way that suggests it is not yet resolved. The communities that lived through it have not forgotten and have not been reconciled to the account of events given by those who defeated them. The political argument about whether the strike could have been won, whether the union leadership made strategic errors, whether the outcome was inevitable, continues in the northeast in a way that it does not continue in Westminster or the metropolitan commentariat.

What is not contested is the human cost. The year of the strike imposed hardship at a level that most British people in the 1980s did not experience. The closure of the pits imposed long-term economic damage on communities that had no alternatives. The social problems that followed – unemployment, ill health, community fragmentation – were predictable consequences of that removal and they were not adequately addressed. That is the reality of the northeast coalfield forty years on. The strike did not create those problems. But the defeat of the strike and the policy decisions that followed created the conditions for them.