Tag: 30th anniversary

With Banners Held High: 30 Years On

Support this important film project.

To mark the 30th Anniversary of the Miners’ Strike, One to One Development Trust, a Wakefield based media charity, will be making a short documentary film celebrating the unique humour of the strike. The film will include ex-miners, Women Against Pit Closures and Trade Union representatives who all played their part during the strike.

These humorous stories from the strike form an important part of the heritage of the coalfields.

For Banners Held High, we wanted to capture these precious funnytales that celebrate cameraderie for audences now and in the future.

We need your support. We need to raise £8000 to support this project.

The film will be launched at the With Banners Held High day long festival of talks , debate,film and music to mark 30 years since the end of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike to be held at Unity Works, Wakefield on Saturday 7th March 2015. To find out more email wbhh@talktalk.net or contact Granville Williams, 24 Tower Avenue, Upton, Pontefract, West Yorkshire WF9 1EE.

poster-revised

We’re Not Going Back

Red Ladder Theatre Company Presents

We’re Not Going Back

Thursday 18 September – Saturday 20 September

We’re Not Going Back is about the 1984/85 miners’ strike… more or less.

But, in this hard-hitting musical comedy there are no miners. Instead, we follow the fortunes of three sisters in a pit village, hit hard by the Government’s war against the miners and determined to set up a branch of ‘Women Against Pit Closures’.

Olive, Mary and Isabel are like any other sisters whose everyday squabbles became a background hum to the strike that forced them to question their lives, their relationships and their family ties. This strike wasn’t just a battle fought out between pickets, police, politicians and public opinion. It was as much a battle in the homes and families of those fighting for their communities.

We’re Not Going Back tackles the resilience of working communities, the make-and-mend fabric of family and the power of sticking two fingers up to a government hell-bent on destruction… and all with humour, song and a six pack of Babycham.

Coal fields: A legacy to the Miners’ Strike

Photographer Andrew Foley examines the changed landscape of mining communities since the 1984-85 strike through contemporary images from the sites of all 44 collieries in the Barnsley, Doncaster and South Yorkshire Coalfields that were open immediately prior to the dispute.

Each image is accompanied by information on workforce numbers and coal tonnage preceding the dispute, together with details of the colliery’s fate and future usage of the site.

Visitors will also be able to view Mike Figgis’ 2001 documentary about Jeremy Deller’s ‘The Battle of Orgreave’; a re-enactment of the confrontation between striking miners and the police that occurred at the Orgreave Coking Plant in Yorkshire on 18 June 1984. Orchestrated by historical re-enactment expert Howard Giles, more than 800 people participated; many of them former miners and a few former policemen, and relived the events from 1984.

For Deller the miners’ strike, and specifically the clash between the pickets and police at Orgreave, resembled the events of a civil war, medieval in their physical and social brutality. For him, the specific historical event that unfolded at Orgreave stands as a symbol of the destruction of mining communities as well as the wider social fabric of the working class during the Thatcher government.

Women Against Pit Closures

March 2014 – March 2015

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike, we invite you to take part in a year-long programme of event from 3 March 2014 to 8 March 2015.

All events take place in Experience Barnsley, Town Hall, unless otherwise stated.

Click here to view the programme of events: A5_Events_Programme_2014