Dr Natalie Thomlinson delivered the Society’s third annual John Halstead Memorial Lecture, Remembering the Strike: the miners’ strike of 1984-5 in popular memory at the University of Huddersfield on Saturday 9 November 2024.

The lecture can be viewed on YouTube here.

Dr Thomlinson is Associate Professor of Modern British Cultural History at the University of Reading, and co-author of Women and the Miners’ Strike (2023). She has written widely on women, gender, and feminism in late twentieth century Britain.

The lecture draws on Dr Thomlinson’s research on women’s stories of the strike. It offers a study of how the strike has been remembered, both popularly and privately. Both during and after the strike, a large number of books, films, plays and newspaper articles about the dispute were created; this lecture examines how the stories these cultural productions tell have come to tell about the strike as variously a heroic failure, a moment of emancipation for working-class women, or as the last gasp of the trade union movement, have come to frame how individual experiences of the strike were remembered and narrated. In particular, the lecture explores how the many women interviewed for Women and the Miners’ Strike 1984-5 recounted their stories using these larger cultural frameworks. Finally, the lecture turns to examine how these women thought about coalfield communities today, and how their nostalgia for the past could be used as a form of political critique of the present.

About the John L. Halstead Memorial Lecture
This series of annual lectures is named in memory of the late John L. Halstead, who served the Society through six decades in numerous capacities and has been much missed since his death in 2021. John L. Halstead (1936-2021): Obituary.

Previous John L. Halstead Memorial Lectures
The Rising Sun of Socialism and the Labour Movement in West Yorkshire 1884-1914, delivered by Professor Keith Laybourn, 2023

Big Jim Larkin: reflections on the identity, politics and legacy of a socialist and trade union leader, delivered by Dr Emmet O’Connor, 2022