My grandfather was a miner in Mountain Ash and he was caught up in the General Strike of May 1926 and the subsequent Miners' Strike that continued until the autumn of that year. My Dad was a 13 year old teenager at that time and the events of those days were deeply embedded in his memory. He was the youngest of four brothers, the two eldest worked down the mines but they and his parents were determined that he and his next oldest brother were not going to follow them. There was “real” poverty in the Valleys in 1926 compared to the 1984 strike with little or no financial help. He told me stories of how the local Methodist minister raised support from friends in London and in this way obtained shoes for kids who had none and clothes to replace the rags they were dressed in. Indeed it affected his political outlook for the rest of his life, no doubt enhanced by the death of his father in a mine accident just 7 years later in 1933.

He was a staunch Socialist and supported the nationalisation of the mines but he was always wary of Scargill from the start. He and I could see that the latter was simply looking for an opportunity to bring down the government, quite a different scenario to 1926 where miners were striking for fair wages and working conditions. Unfortunately Scargill's timing was disastrous for various reasons and Thatcher won the day; so not only did he not succeed in preventing mine closures but he also, unwittingly maybe, caused the demise of the trade union movement as a whole so that it became a shadow of what it was originally was/intended to be.