From a Rock to a Hard Place

By the end of the notorious 1984/85 miners' strike many wanted to forget their painful experiences. Forty years on people are ready to look back and talk about what happened in the UK during this defining moment of industrial action. Beverley Trounce, who worked in a pit village and whose father was a miner, has interviewed a number of the people directly affected by the strike. Her research covers the pickets, the collieries, the matter of simple survival through the extreme and grinding poverty of the time, the effects on the women and children involved and the wider community, as well as the aftermath and what its legacy means to people today.