Strike Stories: Richard Williams (photographer) and Amanda Powell (journalist)
, 8 January 2025
In this series of Strike Stories we hear the highs and lows of that life changing year through the eyes of miners, families, police officers and politicians as they recall what life was like in 84–85.
The Strike Stories form part of the Streic 84–85 Strike exhibition which is on display at National Musem Cardiff until April 27 2025.
© Richard Williams
Richard, photographer
I was a press photographer at the time of the strike, covering the south Wales mining valleys around me. I’d get calls when picket lines were broken, that kind of thing.
One of my most memorable days was in the Garw Valley, where Monty Morgan was the first miner in south Wales to break the strike. There were hundreds of police and pickets out. Monty had felt the strike was becoming futile, driving his return to work. There was a lot of anger – people’s livelihoods were at stake. He was shocked by the levels of anger towards him, but he wasn’t from the area: he was an Englishman, ex-military, and perhaps didn’t understand the sense of community there.
One of my shots shows the bus he’s travelling out of the colliery on, with hundreds of police surrounding it. One courageous striker is standing in its path and he was then arrested. When we were researching our book, we managed to track that miner down. He had kids and he’d known at the time that arrests were frequent. Despite all of that, he kept a sense of humour, even whilst he was locked up.
Earlier that year, I’d photographed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher coming to Porthcawl for the Tory conference as hundreds of angry and frustrated protestors lined the seafront, behind steel barriers. After addressing the conference, as she left the building, she was pelted with eggs from the crowd. One egg hit her, then the police managed to shield her with an umbrella before she was rushed away.
It was an extreme time, with emotions and passions running high, which was very understandable as defeat meant communities would change forever. As winter set in and things were getting harder, miners were beginning to go back in some areas, although the strike remained remarkably solid in south Wales. Having covered the strike from the start, I was also there for the end and afterwards as miners returned and most traces of the industry began to disappear.
Amanda, journalist
I’m from a Rhymney Valley mining family originally, and these stories and the struggles people went through felt very important to remind people of, as none of us are getting any younger.
I was particularly struck by the role played by women during the strike: the way they organised and then began to speak out. In 2023, I interviewed a woman who had been in one of the miners’ support groups. She’d been quite a shy person, who was persuaded to stand up and speak at a big fundraising event in Maesteg, to a large crowd that included MPs and miners’ leaders. It changed her. She, and others I talked to, feel as strongly about it all today as they did then. Every single person said they’d put up the same fight again.
My brother, a former miner, describes great humour in and around the pits – it kept people going in a dangerous profession, where attitudes to health and safety could be somewhat relaxed at times. The stories are abundant. Injuries were commonplace and the washeries (coal processing plants) sometimes employed miners who could no longer work underground after injury. In our book we tell the story of a washery worker who’d been permanently disabled when the cage (lift) taking him underground malfunctioned and smashed into the pit bottom.
Many of the people in our book have now passed away. Fewer still will be around to tell these stories in the future. It’s critical we do so now, so that younger generations understand what their families fought for.