Links
The Story
An English feature published on UCLan's Adelphi Live on 29 April 2024 — written by me, with every photograph my own. It covers the 40th anniversary memorial of the 1984 miners' strike, held on 27 April 2024 by the Chorley & District Trades Union Council. In May 1984, around 100 miners from Coppull and Chorley joined the strike; most worked at Parkside Colliery, with others from Sutton Manor, Golborne, Bold and the Ellerbeck opencast site established during the strike itself.
The People
The piece restores the memories of those present: John Harris, the photographer behind the defining Orgreave image (a mounted officer swinging his baton towards Lesley Boulton); Betty Cook and Heather Wood, organisers of the National Women Against Pit Closures movement — «without the women providing food, the strike could never have held»; and Samantha Gent, who lived through the strike as a small child and spoke of what the memorial means to her.
Family Wounds
One anonymous miner told me how he and his father — also a miner — fell on opposite sides of the strike (he walked out; his father kept working), and did not speak for ten years after 1985. They rebuilt the relationship, yet it remains, in his words, a memory that will «stay with me for the moment».
What Remains
Organiser Dave Beale (Lancashire Association of Trade Union Councils) on why the strike still teaches: «the duration and the way it was organised remain an inspiration — it was about food, bills and solving problems; it applies not just to unions but to every form of struggle.» The feature closes with the aftermath of the March 1985 return to work — pit closures, deindustrialisation and the hollowing of working-class communities — and lands on the echo those memories send into a new generation of workers' rights struggles.
My Contribution
Independent reporting and writing (byline: Yaocheng Ye) + all on-site photography — the portraits of John Harris, Samantha Gent, Dave Beale and others are credited «Photo taken: Yaocheng Ye». A published proof of news writing, interviewing and documentary photography.
Photography
