The secret life of us: 1984, the miners' strike and the place of biography in writing history ‘from below’

This article adds to the growing literature on 1980s Britain and the 1984–5 miners’ strike. Its purpose is to demonstrate the role of oral history and biography in the writing of more personalised narratives about national events. Throughout the oral testimony that underpins the article, speakers made conscious connections with the past whether through folk memories of earlier industrial action or by building links between their own lives and those of their parents and grandparents during the 1926 miners’ lockout. Respondents saw themselves as part of the collective story of both their own family and the community in which they lived. Their sense of biography provided a means of understanding and relating the events that had engulfed their lives for over a year and which, for that generation of people, still defines their life story today.