“Just Coal Seams and Heartbroken Miners”: Poetic Representations of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike in (Post-)Industrial South Yorkshire

Why are people in the post-industrial North of England still writing poems about something that happened decades ago? This chapter explores the lingering presence of the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike in South Yorkshire, a region which once depended heavily on the jobs and social security that the coal-mining industry brought about. The legacy of the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike continues to have a presence across media and film, but one mode of artistic representation which has often been overlooked by scholars is poetry—particularly poems written by non-professional writers. Drawing on my own experiences of working with two creative writing groups in Barnsley (my hometown) in the mid-2010s, this chapter discusses the paradoxical entanglement of class and culture—something Raymond Williams once described as a “confused field” (1957, 29). To be working class is often seen as being in direct conflict with culture, and yet, people from working-class backgrounds wrote and shared poetry during the Miners’ Strike and continue to do so. The chapter concludes with a brief exploration of how this strike-influenced writing has thematically changed over time; from the hopeful mid-strike representations in the NUM-published Against All the Odds anthology (1984) to the hopelessness of the socially haunted, post-industrial era that followed.