Work Reform

When Britain’s miners went on strike in March 1984, there were three pits in Kent, with Tilmanstone, Betteshanger, and Snowdon collieries all huddled together near England’s southeast coast. This was a small, remote corner of the coalfield, far from both the old mining heartlands of South Wales, Durham, and Scotland, and the new center of the industry in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. According to market logic, Kent was “peripheral,” and its collieries were easy targets for closure. Conditions were tough. Betteshanger miner Gary Cox described how the coal seams were “about 3 foot thick. In Nottingham they were 14 foot thick. You could sneeze in Nottingham and get their coal off because it was crap. They actually had to mix our coal with Nottinghamshire coal just to make it any good to sell.”

Kent, known as the “Garden of England,” lies far from what’s popularly considered the core of Britain’s working class. Malcolm Pitt — a ripper at Tilmanstone, a Communist, and Kent area National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) president in 1984 — described the pits as “an industrial intrusion into the agricultural and holiday resort economy of East Kent.” That miners were cut off, a “breed apart,” was always part of their mythology.

But Kent offered its own version of isolation. The workers, often migrants from more established mining areas, figured as outsiders imposed on a hostile population. Some within the local coalfield communities recalled that in the early days of settlement, in the 1920s and ‘30s, housing notices would read “no miners, no dogs, no children.” Social ostracism was experienced most acutely by miners’ wives; the men at least had the camaraderie of the workplace.