Late on in 1984, when thousands of miners had already been striking for nine months, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) branch at Kellingley in Yorkshire approached Birmingham-based Banner Theatre to come up north and support the strike with a Christmas show. Dave Rogers, founder of Banner Theatre, assembled a group of volunteers to help, including members of Banner, and friends from nearby arts collectives Jubilee Arts and Smethwick Music Workshop. They piled into the Jubilee playbus, an old double decker repurposed as a mobile arts space, to travel up West Yorkshire to support a community fighting for its survival.
I was told of this story by my aunt, Sylvia King, when I moved to Wakefield in 2015, having been offered a permanent job at the University of Leeds. “I lived in Wakefield for a while during the strike”, she told me. I asked more. Sylvia worked with Jubilee Arts for years, becoming its director in 1990 when the collective took on a more formalised structure of management. Jubilee Arts was a community multi-media and interdisciplinary arts organisation based in West Bromwich, Sandwell, committed to making art that was accessible, for, about, and crucially with communities themselves. ‘The Jubilee’, as it was often called, became known for street theatre, murals, workshops, innovative photography projects, and play activities, including the well-known playbus. By the 1980s, it was an organisation becoming more overtly political. They supported not only striking miners, but a wide range of groups, from tenants campaigning against poor housing to those on the dole marching for jobs, from getting involved in Rock Against Racism to demonstrations against the National Front.
Kellingley colliery, a ‘super pit’ which opened in 1965 and closed in 2015, was part of the coalfield spanning the Wakefield area. It was one of the most important coalfields in the country, with over forty coalmines at its peak. Thousands of strikers across the Wakefield area headed out on strike in March 1984, matched by many more across Britain, sparked by a localised walk out in nearby Cortonwood Colliery, near Barnsley. Months into what became the biggest industrial dispute in post-war Britain, in December 1984, a group of artists including my aunt Sylvia and her partner Brendan Jackson arrived at the ‘Big K’, a social club in Knottingley that served the miners and their families.
At first, the artists and volunteers weren’t quite sure how to help. They pitched in, making tea and putting on activities to entertain different sections of the community. When they hit on creating a self-portrait photography studio in the Big K, the collaboration really took off. As well as taking photos of the community, from shots of picketers to capturing an impromptu rugby match, the artists created the opportunity for anyone to take a photograph of themselves – the 1980s forerunner of a selfie. With a long cable release, anyone could create their own self-portrait and choose how they were portrayed. It was an idea that other community arts organisations were using at the time, and a method Jubilee had used before in working with communities.
In the Big K, and in outside spaces too, members of the community captured joyful and funny shots, a ‘powerful counter narrative’, as Brendan Jackson puts it, to the mainstream media portrayals of striking miners. Photos were taken each day and developed overnight in a store cupboard or even the centre’s toilets, then hung from a washing line in Big K’s community spaces for everyone to see and respond to. It was an iterative and interactive process. A funny motif emerged across this series of photos, in which participants used two fingers to create rabbit ears behind another subject’s head. As fellow artist Owen Kelly wrote for the Jubilee website in 1999, it was the collaborative and exploratory nature of this process which worked, allowing the artists and community members to tell a very different kind of story of the strike.
In time, the photos took on a new life, beyond a sharing and documenting of what was happening on the ground. They were used in a new NUM branch banner for Kellingley, in which a series of ten indicative photos were used to depict the experience of the strike. A group of activists in Knottingley chose to use them again as the strike ended in March 1985, forming the basis of an exhibition which toured the area and beyond.
This is a story I’ve pieced together from the wonderful Jubilee Arts Archive website, but also in conversations with my cousins. The other half of this story is a personal one, one of family and friendship. The members of Jubilee who travelled up to Knottingley – my aunt Sylvia, her partner Brendan, and fellow artist Peter Singh – were put up by a couple called Frank and Frances. This couple, I’m told, had six children, and squeezed in the Jubilee artists on mattresses on the floor. My cousin, Sylvia’s four-year-old daughter, remembers going up to Knottingley, too.
The photos captured have had an afterlife, in exhibitions, banners, and now online, but so too have the personal connections forged in this moment of solidarity. In return for Frank and Frances’s hospitality in Knottingley, Sylvia and Brendan invited them to come and stay in their house in West Bromwich after the strike ended. The family came, and my wider family pitched in to help make them feel welcome. Another of my aunts, Colette, and her daughter, Maria, came to help, cooking a turkey dinner (it wasn’t Christmas) to feed the crowd. Maria remembers a houseful of children, with the youngest, aged three, singing ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, with the alternative ending adapted for the circumstances and political leanings of the group of family and friends: ‘and Maggie Thatcher’s on the top’.
These friendships lasted. They were the first thing Sylvia told me about when I moved to Wakefield. I wished I remembered more of our conversations about her time here in and around Wakefield (I’m travelling on a battered old Northern train as I write this, rattling through those pit villages in and around Wakefield, between Leeds and Sheffield). I interviewed Sylvia twice, and recorded a whole range of memories, such as her childhood holidays back ‘home’ to Ireland, the place both her parents were born and lived until coming to England in the 1930s, forced to do so because of their mixed marriage – my grandmother was Catholic, my grandfather Protestant. She told me about her work life, a mix of art and political activism, and I can see her strong values and principles living on in (I hope) the work I do as well as the arts-based careers of her daughters, Anna and Katy, and other nieces and nephews. But I didn’t record her memories of the strike. She died in 2022. I can’t ask her any more.
What I do have are some Whatsapp messages. In between messages to arrange visits to see her, photos of my baby daughter (whose middle name is Sylvia), and general chat about our family in early 2020, she told me that she was still friends on Facebook with Frank and Frances. She told me she ‘met some amazing women’ while she was here in West Yorkshire in 1984. These are a few digital traces of this part of my family’s history, my aunt’s story. The story persists within these traces, within an online archives, and in its retelling, a story of activism, of friendship, of family. They live on in my cousins’ discussion of them, in Sylvia’s eldest daughter Anna remembering being thrown out of an Aha gig with Frank and Frances’s youngest daughter.
It’s forty years since the strike ended. There are fantastic histories written about it, podcasts charting these experiences, and television programmes showing footage of the violent clashes fought between picketers and police. But these stories last in families too, and not just those families of miners, picketers and activists. These are stories that shape political sensibilities, narratives about communities, and feelings about family identities today. They matter, and I hope continue to be retold.
Many thanks to Brendan Jackson and the Jubilee Arts Archive for permission to reproduce these images.