11 June 2024, 5pm-6.30pm.
NTU, NEWLT4 City Campus
Also available online via Microsoft Teams
Professor Robert Gildea (University of Oxford): The Miners’ Strike: their story in their voices’
The Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 was the last great industrial conflict of the twentieth century in Britain. Miners stayed out for a year in defence of their jobs, with the help of support groups run mainly by women and outside activists. The defeat of the strike led to pit closures and deindustrialisation in formerly flourishing areas, from South Wales to Scotland. For this project Robert Gildea interviewed 148 former miners, their wives and children, in six former mining communities, and a number of activists. He will discuss the origin of the project, the sampling of interviewees, examples of the life history interview, the challenges of weaving an overall narrative and the art of ‘staying with it’.
Robert Gildea is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He specialised in French and European history until his comparative study, Empires of the Mind (2019) and his current work on the Miners’ Strike, Backbone of the Nation (2023). He did his first (fairly disastrous) oral history interview in 1996 but went on to lead a team of fifteen historians, including Chris Reynolds, who interviewed former 1968 activists for Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt (2013). Backbone of the Nation is his most recent oral history project.
