Labor History. Video: Welsh Women of The Miner's Strike

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

This strike was ended in victory for the British capitalist class as Thatcher and her US counterpart Reagan brought their policies of death to workers everywhere. I was on the picket lines up in Yorkshire thanks to my dear friend and comrade Sean O'Torain (John Throne) making the effort to get me up there.

This was a profound experience for me. I stayed in Barnsley with a miner's family and I will never forget walking up the small road to the pit entrance of the coal mine the next morning. It was early and as I looked to the right and the left of me there we rows of mounted police, the breath steaming from their mount's nostrils in the morning mist. There were thousands of us it seemed and thousands of cops.

The workers threw down marbles when the horses charged at them as they can't walk on marbles. Workers told me it was a horrific thing to be charged on by a horse. They also had vehicles with shields attached to the sides that cops armed with truncheons would shelter behind, exposing themselves when necessary to beat strikers. At the front of the line at the pit head, the young miners were in physical battles with the cops and I could see fists flying and helmets being knocked off. I took pictures as we were driven back by the police and unfortunately lent them to a miner that came over here to the US and never got them back, he died later.

South Wales, the area featured in this video, was a always famous for militancy, radical politics and song, particularly choirs. John L Lewis, the famous leader of the US United Mine Workers Union was obviously of Welsh ancestry. If you go to Black Diamond Mine, now a preserve, here in Northern California you will see  graveyard filled with many people of Welsh ancestry.  One of the strangest things in the US for a European immigrant like myself is that we all become "white" and are supposed to adopt this "racial" identity rather than our national one.  When I talk to some folks named Griffith, Jones, Morgan, Lewis I instinctively know they are of Welsh background unless they are African Americans of course.  There are names that are exclusively Welsh. The last Celtic King of Britain, Caractacus, was captured by the Romans in Wales if I recall my history right.

Just as they have in many strikes in the US, women have played the most crucial role like these Welsh women featured in the video. In Yorkshire and throughout the UK they were integral to this strike. In US working class history we find the same pattern whether it was in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, the great Lawrence strike in Massachusetts or in that great movie, Salt of the Earth that captured the strike of Mexican workers and more recently the year long UFCW P9 strike at Hormel. This had profound effects on women too as they became more centrally involved, being part of the class struggle rather on the sidelines looking in and feeling like it wasn't their struggle when it most definitely is.

This video is a little bit or working class history, and an aspect of it that has historically been ignored. But it was very moving for me to watch one of the participants 35 years later say proudly that "...at the beginning of the strike, what would you say I was? I'm a Christian, I'm a socialist, I'm Welsh, at the end of it; exactly the same really."