The noise and the thick black dust, shimmering and sparkling when hit by the light, were almost overwhelming. Just in front, a mighty mining machine continuously rotated along the thick face, its teeth ripping into the wall of coal, whereupon it then loaded great chunks of the black stuff onto a conveyor to take it to the surface.

I was at one of the main faces at the bottom of Easington Colliery in County Durham. Its workings went up to four miles under the North Sea and had to be constantly pumped of ingested seawater. We had come hurtling down in a cage, hearts in our mouths, from one of the twin winding towers overhead, before joining an electric paddy train that took us past various huge, hissing machines and jumbled cables, and past distant galleries that were also being worked. On one level, I met a miner working up to his calves in water, using a shovel to clear debris. Miners could also get to the face by jumping on the ever-moving conveyor belts and clanking their way to the bottom.

As with other mines in the North East, like Bolden and Shotton Collieries, Easington Colliery was also the name of the large industrial village which surrounded and supported the pit. For much of its near- century of life, over 2,500 men worked here. The community was proud, self-policing, and, more often than not in the hard times, self-supporting. In the 1970s, as a result of a wave of industrial action in support of better wages and combined with the Wilson government’s new ‘Plan for Coal’, miners at the big remaining coastal collieries were taking home good wages. The North East was also a major industrial centre for shipbuilding, engineering, steelmaking, and chemicals.

Up until the bitter year-long mining strike, Easington was sometimes better known for one of Britain’s worst mining accidents which occurred on 29 May 1951 when an explosion deep inside the mine resulted in the deaths of eighty-three men, including two rescue workers. A small, gated, well-maintained memorial garden now sits at one of the former entrances to the colliery. Alan Cummings, the former lodge secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), often posts pictures of the garden and of the glorious golden beaches that once used to be black from the slag tipped by the huge overhead aerial conveyors into the North Sea. The now long-gone conveyors just down the coast at Blackhall formed the backdrop to the final scenes of the gritty film Get Carter, featuring Michael Caine. The rows of miners’ terraces in Easington Colliery featured more recently in Billy Elliot.

In 1984, Easington Colliery wasn’t on the hit list of the twenty pits destined for closure, which Arthur Scargill claimed the then-nationalised National Coal Board (NCB) under its new hatchet man, Ian MacGregor, was planning. Scargill was right. This is exactly what was being planned. MacGregor had been brought in by Margaret Thatcher to prepare the industry for privatisation and break the union that had so famously broken her predecessor, Edward Heath. Nonetheless, the tight-knit mining communities of Easington, in common with others at nearby Murton, Vane Tempest, Blackhall, Dawdon, and elsewhere throughout the North East, came out solidly on strike to save jobs and communities.

John Cummings (no relation to Alan), then a union official at Murton Colliery and later the MP for the area, said of MacGregor and, by extension, Thatcher: ‘He wants to take away our independence and our cultural heritage, our village life and our club life. All this is our heritage, and I’m not prepared to let him take my heritage away from me.’ This sentiment was shared almost universally. It was also supported by John’s much-loved Jack Russell dog, Grit, known locally as the ‘picket pup’. John had trained Grit to bite policemen’s ankles and immediately scarper in the ensuing melee. When, some years later, Grit went to doggy heaven, Tribune famously published both a picture and an obituary of the hound.

As the months of that strike year ground on, the government, the Coal Board, and the police worked more closely and intently to try and break both the spirit of the communities and the strike itself. Easington had been fairly quiet, but when pickets found that a single strikebreaker, Paul Wilkinson, had been smuggled into work through a back entrance, it all kicked off. As the picketing stepped up, so did police action. Heather Wood, who lived in Easington in 1984, said:

Our village green — you couldn’t see it. It was black because it was full of police in uniform. I went to go down from the village to the colliery, the place where you’ve lived all your life, and the police are there with a cordon. ‘Where are you going? How long are you going to be? Who are you seeing?’

One of the most famous and shocking images of that time was that of Josie Smith, a retired and disabled ex-miner, who was arrested outside his home in Easington in August. His distraught wife, Dot, was pictured trying to prevent the police taking him away. That summer, at the Durham Miners’ Gala, area executive member and former Easington miner Billy Stobbs famously thanked ‘Mr Bruce Springdene [sic] from America for so generously donating to our strike fund.’ Later, Labour leader Neil Kinnock rose to speak, and members of the North East area brass band picked up their instruments and played themselves off the racecourse. Kinnock never attended another gala.

The scenario back in the pit villages was played out elsewhere as villages became miniature police states. The reaction of the police often depended on where they were from. One bitterly cold pitch-black morning, I went with striking miners from the strike centre at a local welfare club to the gates of Dawdon Colliery, where a handful of strikebreakers were being ferried in by green NCB coaches. On this occasion Lincolnshire police were holding the lines of pickets back; there was pushing and shoving, but as one miner said at the time: ‘If this were the Met they would be kicking our shins and beating us.’

On one of those black, freezing mornings as police vans went crashing through one of the villages, sirens blaring, some locals started lobbing snowballs from the general direction of a hastily assembled snowman. One van careered towards the snowman in order to knock it over, its police driver realising only too late that it had been built around an iron bollard.

Easington Colliery was closed in 1993. Bishop David Jenkins of Durham was there for the protest march we all went on before the wheels stopped winding. He had been a thorn in the side of the Thatcher government, speaking up for the coal communities. The story of what happened next is a familiar one. The welcome arrival of Nissan some years later could never replace the sheer volume of skilled, working-class jobs lost.

Today, Easington Colliery is a quieter, emptier, more subdued village. The spirit is still there, but the past decades of alternating Tory and Labour governments have not left much to show. In other countries, the mining industry was closed in tandem with the new jobs and industries coming in. But not in Britain, not in Easington. The village, with a combined population of 7,000, has the highest obesity levels in Britain and is the UK’s fourth most deprived area. A recent YouTube video by a local lad who has since moved away from the village identified a number of terraced houses being auctioned for around £5,000 each at a sale to private landlords in Birmingham.

This part of east Durham was not lost to the blue tide that swept through other parts of the former coalfields in 2019. Today, it is still represented in Parliament by Grahame Morris, a local whose dad worked underground at Seaham Colliery. He is a popular, committed, and hardworking Labour MP of the old school. But even here, as assorted punditry in London excites itself about the likelihood of a Starmer-led Labour government, the omens point to something darker, possibly still a way off, but there nonetheless.

The new, hard-right Reform UK Party, an unknown entity just a few years ago, is already garnering the support of close to 20 percent of those who still say they may vote in the Easington constituency. Having been let down and forgotten for decades, having had to endure years of drivel being spouted about ‘levelling up’, it is hardly surprising that the Financial Times recently reported on a great national switch-off from politicians. If barely 12 percent of voters now say that they trust political parties nationally, what might that percentage be today in Easington Colliery?