Mining history

Dr Katy Shaw, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton has collected the poetry from 1984-5 written by Jean and many other people.

"The poem Kim, for instance, was written by Jean and published locally by a miners' support group in a pamphlet called Striking Stuff. I think there are probably only three or four copies of the pamphlet in existence now.

"I did my PhD thesis on miners' poetry. It involved collecting together poems on scraps of paper from across the UK. To get the collection together I talked to as many people as possible to tip me off to the existence of some poems.

"I've got random poems on cornflakes packets and the flyleaves of books, because paper was in short supply. I've also got diaries of the strike.

"I was motivated to work on the poetry because my generation grew up with images of the strike through films like Billy Elliot or Brassed off. It was a romanticised version and I was keen to put the alternative side.

"Of the poems I have collected 80% come from Yorkshire. Mine is the only independent collection of Miners' Strike poetry as far as I am aware. I have around 500 individual poems. Some are just on scraps of paper, some in personal collections and some in published books.

"As well as striking miners' poetry, I have also got some work by Notts miners writing in defence of not striking.

"I was born in 1982 so I don't have direct memories of the strike but I lived in County Durham and my family were directly affected by the strike. My father was made redundant twice during the 1980s. So I grew up very aware and in a landscape scarred by the death of an industry.

"I think its important to understand the significance of the strike to the generation which followed it - many seem to think that young people are not interested in this conflict. In reality, I have found them far from apathetic and actually eager to learn more.

"Why the strike is not part of the UK history taught in schools is a major source of discussion at present. These poems engage us with the past and the people who lived it. In the same way as Jean and I got in touch through this poetry, I hope that other people might be encouraged to do the same.

"I would like to put the archive online by digitising it and I am approaching people who might want to house the physical archive. The miners' voice is not always a 'sexy' topic, though this may change with the 25th anniversary during 2009/10, so it is proving difficult to get the money to digitise all the material."