What makes this National Coal Board (NCB) film so wonderful is the way in which it portrays Britain's proud and industrious industry some two years after their initial national strike, by the National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) against the NCB, for better pay conditions. These actions brought Britain to its knees with a three-day week, power shortages and ultimately bringing down the Tory (Conservative) government.
Miners, directed by Peter Pickering (23rd January 1924 - 20th November 2020) goes deep into the mines and the homes of those living in Bagworth, Leicestershire and is an account of life within this mining community and more particularly, the way-of-life deep within the collieries themselves. We are, too, invited into the living rooms of the women who also live this life and who bear testimonies, apprehensions and concern of their men who day-in-day-out work in these extremely poor conditions.
Told in voiceovers by the miners' themselves as the film journeys with them into the dark abyss of cages, pit-helmets, machines and coalface. We are given first hand accounts of the vast experience, for example, of how and why the mining environment would, and does, transcends life rather than it being oppressed in factories with the comradeship of the mining community. This is more than an insight; this is an education on pure British, blue-collar working class life, as dirty as the job may be this documentary is a refreshing look into a bygone age of 1970s Britain.
By the time, this nostalgic timepiece had been shot and the years had gone by, it was then the decade of Privatisation and the 1980s. The Conservative government, spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher, had sold, and closed, most, if not all, of the mines, another major strike had come and gone (1984-85) and this time it was to be the miners' who would lose, and with pits closing and miners losing their jobs, the epicentre of communities crumbled from within the homes themselves.
There are no more working mines left in the British Isle's and what there is are now only disused mines, working museums, empty lots, parking spaces, homes or shopping centres etc. The once "from generation to generation" mentality, as depicted within this film, had now wholly evaporated and that is the real, sadly, the only, purpose of this tiny snippet of English culture, to highlight a once thriving industry that held strong believes and with its working colliery was also the backbone of this thriving, living community.
Inside the realms of the English kitchen sink genre two films that revolve around the lives of the British mining community, that are worth a mention here, are Brassed Off (1996) and Billy Elliot (2000), two very different films but one central axis and, also, the tongue-in-cheek parody of the then Alternative comedy set that was The Comic Strip Presentswith their own special brand of humour and irony and their personal interpretation, of the 1984-5 strike, that is called The Strike (1988). This is why Miners is such a valuable archive, of an era of pride, prosperity and optimism, there is no tone of malice or bitterness here; these are men who want to work and are proud to work on these coalfaces. This is more than an invitation to an inside look at an English workers' environment, this is, too, a wonderful and reflective monument of a golden age that does this culture proud whose, now, epitaph has been written in the sands of time.