Miners’ strike: Voices from the Welsh coalfields

Ron Stoate was a 34-year-old miner in the Rhymney valley colliery of Penallta, Caerphilly county, when the strike broke out.

He called it the biggest learning curve of his life, and it forever changed how he saw institutions such as the judiciary and the police, leaving him “bitter and twisted”, he said.

“I had a wife and two children to look after. I used to go to Nantgarw cutting to get a car full of waste coke for fuel, which we shared with everyone back home,” he said.

As part of the picket action, “me and my brothers were arrested 10 times, me four times, them three each”.

Ron described road blocks being set up by the police to try to prevent pickets from reaching mines, as well as what he saw as biased actions by officers.

“You had the police who were actively going, and I can say this from experience because it happened to a man in our pit, actively going to people’s houses to ask them ‘do they want to go to work?’.

“So they weren’t just policing the strike, they were actively trying to break the strike.”

Ron was at Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, in June 1984, where almost 100 miners were detained.

Thousands of police and striking miners clashed violently in one of the darkest days of the strike, with the police accused of using excessive force.