Food parcels and pan haggerty kept miners' bellies full during the 1984-85 strike. But wives did more than make meals from nothing. They found political voices never before heard. Beverley Addy spoke to the woman who was told by her husband 'don't go getting involved' and ended up the national president of the Women's Support Groups. ************ Ann Lilburn's husband Gordon was a 'traditional' kind of miner. And Ann was a traditional kind of miner's wife.
Ann Lilburn today.
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She thought being a housewife was a "good role" and she was happy to do just that until the year-long miners' strike of 1984-85 began to hit home. A women's meeting was being held nearby to see what the wives could do to support their men. Gordon, now 70, who worked at Whittle Pit, in Northumberland, told her `just be a helper, don't go getting involved'. But this was to be the first in many life- changing steps for Ann. Very quickly the women's movement got off the ground and soon a nationwide network had been established. Ann, now 63, was elected chairwoman of her local branch and then national president. While the core work was raising cash and turning that into food and clothes, for Ann the movement meant leading a 23,000-throng through the streets of London, speaking at international conferences and flying abroad for the first time in her life. But it wasn't the life of the 'jet-setter'. "We slept on garage floors and all kinds of things to be in the places where we could collect money. Sometimes we got spat on when we were collecting. "We didn't think in our wildest dreams that it was going to last for 12 months. We were very naive; we didn't realise how stage-managed it was. The Government was ready for it. Coal was stockpiled and everything. Scargill knew this but no-one believed it. And the women in particular were very unaware of these things. "I wasn't typical of the sort of woman who went off and campaigned. I'm not a women's libber. I was the woman who stayed at home and looked after my kids. "To me that was a good role in life; 90pc of the women who joined us were housewives. "As the strike went on a few weeks we started to realise the money was running out. Women were entitled to £21.45 a week but the Government kept £15 of that on the assumption that the men were getting strike pay. "Single miners didn't get anything at all. In my house, there was me and my husband, and my two grown-up sons living on £6.45 a week. Billy was 22 and Alan was 20 and they were both still living at home. Our daughter Gina, 24, was married and she helped all she could. "We needed to feed the families. The men weren't going to watch their kids starve and stay out on strike. This is why women were motivated to do something and they had to do it quickly. Our area was very rural. While some areas did kitchens, we had to do food parcels. "I discovered I could speak. I had never done it before. I remember trying at the school debating society and I froze. I was terrified, but needs must. I found myself speaking to labour parties, trade unions and people at work. "I could do it because I was speaking from the heart. We had these young wives with little children. If I'd had young children looking at me for things I couldn't give I don't know what it would have done to me. "The women were the army. They worked like Trojans. Whatever we asked them to do, they did. "We were all inexperienced but I had a little bit of gumption to speak. We teamed up with wives from the other pits in Northumberland. It gave us a good feeling that we weren't alone. We learned from each other. We weren't just little helpers any more, we became a lot stronger than that. We realised this was going to go on and on. "We went in picket vans and slept in them. We slept on people's floors, in village halls. When there was a lot of us going to a rally we'd ask if they could provide a warm room and we would all take sleeping bags. "I remember sitting on this platform once, a housewife from Northumberland with all these union general secretaries, and I thought `what am I doing here?' But it was brilliant. I spoke and I got a standing ovation." As the national network gathered numbers, the women organised a huge rally in Burgess Park, London, with a march through the capital. Ann led it. "It was a gigantic operation - thousands of other women who were not involved in the pits joined in. It was a women's march, not a miners' march. Some men marched behind in support. "At the time it was the biggest women's march ever. I remember when we came by the DSS headquarters and outside were the workers and they had this `ginormous' cheque. It said `you are owed this much' and `we are proud of you'. I can't remember the figure but it was huge, and it was what the Government was taking off miners who were on strike. "It was a baking hot day. The police were trying to force us this way and that and scrunch us up. But from being so tired on this long march we got such a surge of energy from seeing that demonstration by the DSS workers that we went on the rest of the march with our arms swinging and singing again."
Ann Lilburn in action.
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Tears come to Ann's eyes when she remembers some of the 'best' moments during her campaigning. She even ended up on national TV. "I remember reading a poem for the South Bank Show that was filmed at Monkwearmouth Club in Sunderland and I had tights on with the holes stitched up. We couldn't even afford to get a pair of tights to go on telly." As time went on, the women's passions grew: "It was an adventure at first. Never in our wildest dreams did we think it would go on for so long. We grew with it. We got more confident and stronger, more defiant and resolute. "It wasn't the women that drove the husbands back to work like some said. We got frustrated but we would have done anything but give in. We had our public face and our private face. At home sometimes we cried ourselves to sleep because we didn't know where we could turn next. It still hurts. We talk about things that happened and laugh, but underneath the sacrifice will not be forgotten." And, like all the wives, Ann had to keep things going in her own home too. "I was eligible for one food parcel, even though I'd got three striking miners to feed. In the end they relented and gave us two when they saw how much weight we'd lost. "We used to joke that if we got red meat we would turn savage, it was that rare. I had to tell our milkman that we couldn't afford any more deliveries. Even so, every other day there'd be a of pint of milk on the doorstep and every so often a dozen eggs. Afterwards I paid him back. He used to give bags of potatoes and boxes of eggs every week to the support group. "One friend said during the strike, `what do you miss the most?' I said, bacon sandwiches. The next day she came round and slapped a pound of bacon on the shelf. Little things meant a lot. "These are the people who kept us going. They believed in what we were doing. We wanted our husbands to have jobs. "My husband never worked again when they started closing the pits. He was 53. I've one son living in London. The other son went to Leicester and he had to come home every other weekend to visit his wife and kids. He's back now working at Ellington Pit." Page 2: How the housewife - 'Thatcher's nightmare' - stirred sympathy in Europe | 
