Women of the British coalfields on strike in 1926 and 1984: Documenting lives using oral history and photography

Frontiers, 1998 by Gier-Viskovatoff, Jaclyn J, Porter, Abigail

Although this form of protest received no official sanction from the union or the Labour Party, it did not go unrecognized by other women of the coalfields. During the Eighth National Conference of Labour Women, held in May of 1927, Mrs. Rose Davies of Aberdare, South Wales, asked the conference to remember how women in the mining areas had struggled nobly and well, helping in all relief work, such as communal kitchens. She reminded her audience that the miners' wives had also taken up the fight against "the dirty blacklegs," and as a result many of the women had been sentenced to prison. Davies maintained that it was now the work of Labour women to get those victims of class "justice" out of jail.19

Who were these victims of class "justice"? In the standard Labour history accounts of union politics and the 1926 Lockout in South Wales, their identities are virtually unknown and their protests mentioned only in passing.20 Most of the women who were adults at the time of the 1926 Lockout have already passed away, making the task of collecting oral testimony impossible. Apart from some legal records and community documents, such as records from the Maerdy Distress Committee, there is little information available on the miners' wives who engaged in protest and collective action. The legal records and accounts of court proceedings refer only to those who were arrested and prosecuted, and in many cases women successfully avoided both.21

A limited number of interviews were conducted with miners' wives during the 1970s, and some of the women interviewed refer to women's involvement in protest. However, the majority of these refer specifically to the Communist Party of Great Britain (C.PG.A.) or to women's relationship with the union vis-a-vis their husbands.22 Although the Communist Party was behind some women's protests, particularly in parts of the Rhondda Valley, there is no conclusive evidence linking the majority of women's protests during mining disputes to the C.PG.B., the S.WM.F., or the Labour Party. While each of these organizations was important to interwar coalfield society, the coalfield society's aversion to scab labor was essentially a moral stance, not expressly political-which is to say that a blackleg was a blackleg to communists as well as to Labour Party members.

Women were particularly well suited to the traditional role of confronting strikebreakers. Questioning the offender's manhood underscored his failure to live up to the masculine ideal of the miner, an especially potent form of censure. Gender difference, or in some instances sexual difference, as illustrated by the account below from the 1926 Lockout, could be used to shame the blacklegs into retreat:

We used to go up in the night and watch them coming out, and the women, and what do we now, because we got hold of them, and we used to give them a rough time, and I said, "Take their bloody trousers off, they won't go to work without any trousers." So that's what we did, we used to take their trousers off, take their food off of them and throw it away, and they were cunning, they used to overtime, and different shift work, but the place was like a beehive up there, with the police. We used to be up there every night, and all day long we'd be out there.23