The Brooklyn Rail

Dimly remembered in the United States, the strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1984–85 was a pivotal ordeal in Britain. The British coal industry, like the healthcare sector, had been nationalized after World War II. As the designer Craig Oldham explains in the introduction to In Loving Memory of Work: A Visual Record of the UK Miners’ Strike 1984-85, by the 1980s the consensus that the industrial working class had to be protected—that they were the ones who made Britain go—was frayed. The zealous administration of Margaret Thatcher set out to hamstring the unions with an eye toward restoring as many public industries as possible to the sublime vagaries of the free market.

So when the government’s National Coal Board announced in early March 1984 that twenty mines across the country were to shutter at the expense of twenty thousand jobs, the miners knew a thrown gauntlet when they saw one. (In fact, Oldham notes, documents leaked decades later would reveal the actual number of planned closures was over seventy.) They struck first in Yorkshire and then at pits across the country. The livelihoods of whole communities were at stake, but so too, it seemed, was the postwar experiment in enshrining the dignity of working people within the national interest.

The rich visual culture that emerged from the strike itself, though, has gone mostly unrecognized. Oldham, who comes from a family of Yorkshire miners, has assembled an incredible range of materials against forgetting in a 2023 edition of In Loving Memory of Work, originally published in 2015. Its artifacts include flyers, badges (“Coal Not Dole”), posters, graffiti, political cartoons, LP sleeves, and textiles, plus the photography of people like Phil Winnard, a miner who took his camera to the picket line on a whim and went on to produce a vivid, ground-level record of that dramatic year. “All the black-and-white photos I developed myself, down the cellar,” Winnard explains.

It’s a credit to Oldham’s eye and his grasp of the politics of the strike that such a range of artists (or cultural workers, if you like) are included in these pages. The visual language of the strike—alternately rousing, startling, sobering, funny, and pithy—was a vital part of what bonded the mining communities to the wider solidarity movement. The pro-miner constituencies used these forms of expression to talk to each other at the same time as they argued the miners’ case to the nation at large. Their crafts took inspiration from various styles, from punk and Constructivism to the long-standing aesthetics of the British labor movement, whose allegorical, sometimes mythological iconography adorned silk marching banners. (Angels, druids, St. Peter, and Christ were all enlisted to the miners’ side.) Galvanizing posters, like one reproduced here from the Hammersmith & Fulham miners’ support group that features a mining couple with collection bucket outstretched, evoked the struggle of the war years with a sharp oppositional edge.

Oldham and others whose voices he includes, like the director Ken Loach, emphasize the complicity of television and print media in the government’s campaign against the miners. One of the most compelling sections of the book focuses on a single photograph captured by John Harris: baton raised, a policeman mounted on horseback prepares to assault a bewildered, unarmed young woman named Lesley Boulton, a supporter of Women Against Pit Closures, amid the chaos of the confrontation at Orgreave in South Yorkshire. The image became a symbol of all that was obscured by official narratives. The book includes reflections from both Boulton and Harris. “I understand why people want to talk to me about it,” Boulton states. “But that sort of thing didn’t just happen there, it happened all over the country.” Testimonies like hers bring some welcome dimension to the book’s unyielding tone. In a project as interested as this one in the joining of art and propaganda, Oldham avoids taking the record entirely at face value, avoiding a kind of overcorrection for its neglect.

A new postface probes the legacy of the strike in an era when “coal-based capitalism” is on the way out (the coal part, at least) and the political map of Britain has been reshaped by Brexit and the Labour Party’s retreat from socialism. American readers, too, will recognize how distant these events seem from our own time, despite the recent flowering of strike activity in industries such as cars and coffee. But Oldham insists that even in defeat, the miners still have plenty to teach us about what solidarity looks like. The capacity of the miners’ creativity and elan to inspire gets its due in these pages, which seethe and smolder just as they should.