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The Miners' Strike began on 5 March 1984 at Cortonwood in South Yorkshire following the Coal Board's announcement that around 20 pits would be closed. A national strike followed on 12 March and it ended in defeat for Arthur Scargill's National Union of Mineworkers a year later when they returned to work.

Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government had introduced a range of union laws including a ban on secondary picketing (aka flying pickets) - those who demonstrate at workplaces other than their own. This was the major reason why police from across the UK were drafted into the coalfields - to allow non-striking miners to get through the picket lines to work.

For serving officers in Suffolk, this meant weeks and months away from home, but also big earnings from overtime.

Cricket on the battlefield

Bob Lawrence was a Patrol Inspector and in charge of Police Support Units (riot-trained squads) sent from Suffolk. Each PSU included one inspector, two sergeants and 20 men and Bob estimates that at least one was sent away each week and sometimes three.

They'd work 12 hour shifts, get put up in hotels, and even holiday camps, and overtime would be paid at time-and-a-half.

"My first trip was up to Lincolnshire to be ready for the coal run of lorries from the docks to the power stations, but Orgreave near Sheffield was where we first saw action [29 May 1984]," said Bob. This was the day Arthur Scargill got arrested.

Striking miners at Orgreave coke depot.

"We were a convoy of nine vans from Suffolk and we arrived and were looking down at a mass of people - several thousand faced with five or six rows of police with linked arms.

"We were probably about seven or eight rows back when we joined. There were all sorts of pieces of wood and bottles being thrown over the front towards us at the back.

"It was a definite battle. There was a definite wish of the pickets to break through the police barrier and prevent work at the mine.

"If the flying pickets turned up to try and close a motorway, which they did occasionally, we would have been needed, but we did absolutely nothing for a week.

"And we got paid quite well for that.

"We were all volunteers, nobody went up there against their will and it was all on overtime. I bought a set of 'Arthur Scargill' golf clubs and there were several 'Arthur Scargill' Cortinas driving around in Ipswich."

Contrary to the view of some on the left, former Inspector Lawrence said there was no feeling the police were being used in the government's political battle:

"It was just a matter of preventing what was a criminal act of trying to takeover the mine. After Orgreave, I went eight more times and only on one occasion did we ever see any action or have any conflict with strikers.

Police clash with miners in 1984

"Once I spent a day playing cricket with striking miners at Shirebrook in Derbyshire! I think there was a lot of movement within the flying pickets to whirr up the local miners to do things that they didn't really want to do."

Former Suffolk police officer Nigel Lungley was a 24 year old PC in 1984 and he visited Normanton, Allerton and Chesterfield: "It never really occurred to me that we were being used by the government.

"I was there to do my job. Clearly the men that wanted to work had to be allowed to work.

"There were violent moments. At the time Suffolk was one of the only provincial forces to wear white shirts. The miners all thought we were from the Met and once they realised we weren't, we all got on really well.

"We used to get packed meals and we used to share our sandwiches sometimes with the miners. And the overtime paid for a holiday in Morocco in February 1985!"

East Anglia's ports

Before the dispute, the government stock-piled coal so that power stations wouldn't run as low as they had in the early 1970s resulting in the three-day week.

Pro-NUM activist John Tipple said they were picketing coal deliveries at Wivenhoe, Brightlingsea and Colchester. He said Ipswich and Felixstowe weren't used to get coal into the country:

Margaret Thatcher, 1985

"They had to bring it in through little unorganised ports. Anywhere there was organised working class people - they couldn't get away with that.

"Collecting money was always the easiest thing. The hardest thing was to get other workers to take strike action because it had been outlawed by then - which today has not been repealed by the Labour government.

"Those things were brought about to criminalise solidarity. The rich and powerful can stick together, but if you're working class and you do that, you're breaking the law.

"The other unions were threatened with sequestration [having union funds frozen] and they were pretty cowardly to start with. So that disciplined them.

"The union leaders refused to call solidarity action because it was illegal and left the miners, with some honourable exceptions, by themselves."

The politics

The Miners' Strike was, if nothing else, certainly about how much relative power the unions and government had. The miners' victories in 1972 and 1974 mean many see the 1984 dispute as an act of revenge by the Conservatives for the defeat of the Heath government.

John Tipple is also a member of the Socialist Workers Party and he took time off from the merchant navy to support the miners: "Thatcher needed to take-on the most powerful union in the country if she was going to discipline the working class to accept privatisation, less wages and worse conditions.

"Anyone who understood it in those terms was on the side of the miners."

For Margaret Thatcher it was a different perspective according to John Gummer MP:

"What it actually was was the reality of a government that came in after the Winter of Discontent [1978-9] when we had bodies unburied and refuse in the streets and a feeling that no-one was in charge."

"Mrs Thatcher won [the 1979 general election] primarily because Labour was defeated by the trades unions. We came into power in circumstances in which the public said we must have a situation in which the government and democracy wins and the trade unions don't hold us to ransom.

"We saw ourselves as defending workers' rights. We had many workers unable to earn a living because of the power of particular trades unions who were refusing to accept that their actions were reducing the ability of Britain to compete and therefore the opportunities of jobs for other people.

"There are circumstances when the union movement can be extremely important for workers, but in this particular case the trades union movement had betrayed the interests of workers.

The miners' leader, Arthur Scargill

"The thing you can't do in a global economy is blackmail government or employers into terms and conditions which made you uncompetitive.

"Even when it was privatised the companies couldn't sell coal to any great extent. The fact was people weren't buying coal at a price we could produce it at.

"It's quite possible that in the future we could produce coal competitively if the price of energy makes it possible. But we should only use it if we have carbon-capture and storage."

However, ex-Inspector Bob Lawrence said there was one occasion when he had a feeling the police were being used by the government. It was at a management training course when they were addressed by a Conservative MP:

"He started off by congratulating us and he went over the top a little bit about there being 'enough coal in the power stations, we can go on forever'. I stopped him and said we'd just spent a week at Shirebrook where they're striking to keep their village and mine alive and if they lose that mine, they lose everything.

"We resented him a little bit coming down and telling us they had enough coal to crush the miners and that wasn't what it was about at all."

What if?

John Gummer said Britain would be a different place now if the NUM had won: "None of the things we've been able to spend money on since would have been possible. If you have an uncompetitive nation you have a nation with can't afford a decent health service or education system."

John Tipple agrees Britain would have been different, but for the better, if the miners had won: "In Harwich we saw one of the first privatisations with Sealink in 1982 and our town went down on one knee and has never recovered.

"What have we lost since the Miners' Strike? All of our utilities have been privatised so our gas, water and electricity bills are astronomical.

"We've lost all the friendly societies, the building societies which were set-up to make sure we didn't fall into the hands of rackateer landlords.

"As far as I'm concerned, a national strike of the magnitude of the miners' needs to happen right now."

Inspector Bob Lawrence said he had sympathy with miners fighting for a way of life:

"Shirebrook was a mine with a huge council estate next to it. The village exists for that mine and you have to say what else will happen for a community like that? Once the mine's gone there's nothing else.

"It was a shame that so many communities were devastated, but if Arthur Scargill had worked more with the government to try and scale down rather than prevent any closures at all, then they'd probably still have a reasonably-sized mining community.

"But he was determined to break the government, and the government certainly wasn't going to be broken by Arthur Scargill."

John Tipple has no sympathy with the police:

"As far as I'm concerned the police were paid to scab on the miners. I've got no time for their sob-stories about how they got hurt.

"Thatcher gave the police 28% wage increases just prior to unleashing them on the working class with their truncheons and violence against the mining communities.

"She knew exactly who she needed onside before she took on the miners. I can remember the police at Orgreave, I can remember violence at Wivenhoe and armed police on the roundabouts at Colchester and then, of course, they called us violent when we showed up in our plimsoles.

"The police's job in our society is to make sure the working classes do as they're told. When they unleash violence it's 'just the police doing their job', when we respond it's 'mindless violence'.

"And it was backed up by a compliant media which wasn't prepared to say there was a military dressed-up in police uniforms and which constantly repeated the mantra that the strike wasn't democratic and Arthur Scargill was a communist.

"And that includes the Bosses' Broadcasting Corporation."