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Festival remembers the great miners' strike
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The theme of this year's South Yorkshire Festival, to be held at Wortley Hall, Wortley, Sheffield S35 7DB on Saturday 16 August 12 noon - 5.00pm is the 30th anniversary of the miners' strike.
The former BBC Industrial and Political Correspondent Nick Jones will be speaking at a public meeting in Wortley Hall during the Festival. Nick covered the 1984-85 miners' strike as an Industrial Correspondent for BBC Radio. He has also written two chapters in Settling Scores: The Media, the Police and the Miners' Strike about the revelations contained in the Cabinet Papers released in January this year.
Nick's presentation is about how the government manipulated the return to work that finally ended the strike in March 1985 – and it became clear towards the end of the strike that Mrs Thatcher was determined to claim victory and that she would do so once half the miners had given up the strike and had been forced back to work. The attached front page from the Daily Mirror is from January 1985 when the government was making it abundantly clearly there would be no way out for the NUM – and to quote (Sir) Tim Bell, who was Mrs T's favourite adman and a propagandist for the government during the strike, she “wanted the strikers to drag themselves back to work...that was what it was all about at the end."
Nick has unrivalled knowledge of the 1984-85 miners' strike and his talk will be illustrated with examples of newspaper coverage from the time.
Also speaking will be Lesley Boulton from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. The John Harris photo of Lesley, as a mounted policeman is about to attack her at Orgrave in June 1984, remains one of the most powerful images from the dispute.
The event, which is free, is in the Henry Collins Room, Wortley Hall, 3.30pm.
There will also be an exhibition of Sheffield-based photographer, Martin Jenkinson's work in the Wortley Hall library. Martin died in 2012 but a collection of his photographs from the 1984-85 miners' strike are in the recently published 'Images of the Past: The Miners' Strike' published by Pen & Sword Books.
DATELINE: 10 August, 2014
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