Additional:
Being from Kent, I was surprised to learn that our county's mining union was so committed to the strike action between 1984-5 (considering the relatively small numbers of previously mining-dependent towns in the South East). It's not a piece of local history I've heard much of before.
Considering the small size of the 1984 union (roughly 2,000 according to wikipedia), what were the motivations of this commitment?
I understand from browsing that the Kent union may have had an openly communist bent in leadership & officials, and that they were successful in soliciting donations from sympathetic socialists in London. Is this the source of the willingness to keep striking (ie: they had the ideological commitment and the capability from the donations to keep paying their members and prolong the strike)?
The Kent Miner’s militancy in may have been informed by the politics of the leaders, but it was also influenced strongly by the poor prospects of the Kent mining industry.
As you note, there were only 2,000 miners in Kent by the time of the strike, out of 140,000 across the country. Coal in Kent was expensive to produce, chiefly due to the need to offer higher wages due to attract and retain miners in the relatively prosperous local economy. The ‘thin’ nature of the coal streams also made it a less attractive place for mechanisation and investment, by the National Coal Board (NCB).
In 1969 the first mine, out of three in the county, closed, and by the mid-1970s productivity in the Kent coalfields was half the national average. In 1971 Richborough Power Station in Kent, a large consumer of Kent coal, was converted to burn oil rather than coal. While the 1973 Yom Kippur War and Oil embargo temporarily boosted demand for coal, the long term prospects of the industry in Kent remained unfavourable.
Most importantly, the 1981 recession, and decline of the British Steel industry – the largest consumer of Kent coal – left the county’s coal industry in an extremely precarious position, by the time of the 1984 strike. The two mines operating at the time had been slated for closure in 1981, only to be given a stay of execution, and in 1983 the general secretary of the Kent Miners stated that he believed the NCB intended to close the Kent coalfield. When an internal NCB document was leaked in June 1984 (during the strike) stating that seventy pits were slated for closure, Kent’s mining future in event of the strike’s failure was not difficult to ascertain.
Rates of strikebreaking in Kent were very low (under 50 miners returned to work during the strike) aided by Kent’s proximity to London and ability to draw upon sympathy and support in the capital – in one example, striking miners were fed by the canteen of Woolwich Polytechnic, whose student union President was the son of a Welsh miner. The fact that their coal fields had been under the Sword of Damocles for many years, by the time of the strike, and the support they could render from London therefore contributed towards the militancy. One of the Kent coal mines was the last in the country to return to work after the strike ended – the two mines closed in 1987 and 1989 respectively.
Yates, N. (2001) Kent in the 20th Century. Boydell and Brewer Harvey, M. (2014) The Miners Strike Pen and Sword Park, A. (1999). A comparative study of community and militancy in two coalmining settlements in Britain (Doctoral dissertation, University of Kent).
Unrelated – if you are interested in Kent’s industrial heritage, you may also be interested in researching the Chatham dockyard, which employed thousands before it shut in 1984 – about three weeks after the miners strike began.