The pit dispute of 1984 was a bitter clash between two political heavyweights – Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. Caught in the middle were ordinary people who lived in mining communities. DAVID LOWE and DELIA MONK report from Cotgrave to assess the impact on one such Notts village

MEMORIES of the 1984 miners' strike are indelibly etched on Bryan Barrodale's mind as though they had happened yesterday.

For he was often seen on the front line, quietly mediating during the heated stand-offs between police and protesters at the gates of Cotgrave Colliery.

Canon Barrodale recalled: "I always wore my cassock and sometimes I took my military helmet as well – just in case they started chucking heavy stuff about.

"My role was gentle reconciliation. Here were two groups of young men from not hugely different backgrounds who stared at each other with hostility.

"The rumour among pitmen was that police were making a fortune in overtime pay for keeping the miners in their place.

"But I remember talking to one young officer from the Met who had not been able to get home to see his baby daughter born four weeks earlier.

"No amount of money compensated for missing that precious time with his family.

"I took him over to a couple of Yorkshire miners who were looking especially ratty and said: 'Tell them your story.'

"They realised there was a different side to things. For a tiny moment it broke down feelings of us and them."

When Mr Barrodale, then an experienced Anglican vicar, arrived in Cotgrave in 1976 it was a dynamic community based around the pit.

It wasn't a great hotbed of union politics. When the strike call came, around 130 out of a workforce of 1,700 followed firebrand miners' leader Arthur Scargill.

"I have always felt he was a brilliant prophet but a rotten general," said Canon Barrodale.

"He was absolutely right on his facts but his ego drove him to go it independently. I am certain that had he had a vote among the Notts miners the UDM would never have come into being."

But as the strike dragged on, the pressures on miners and their families intensified.

Canon Barrodale explained: "On the days when we were visited by large numbers of pickets you could have up to 3,000 there.

"The days of picketing were quite terrifying.

"I always thought there needed to be someone saying: 'Yes, there are problems, but the police are men and the miners are men, so let's think of the humanity.

"My instinct was always to be where there was public concern. I was trying to inject some sort of quiet humanity into what seemed a dehumanising situation.

"Sometimes that was done with a little bit of guileful confrontation and sometimes it was done with humour.

"The Government had set miner against miner and with the police, one set of workers against another."

He reflects: "I hope the Church will be remembered for standing by the community in time of strife.

"When the strike was coming to an end I remember one of the mining officials saying to me: 'Thanks for coming down, Father'.

"When you were there, the lads kept the bricks in their pockets and the police kept their truncheons in their pockets."

Once the strike was over, he saw his role as helping to heal the rifts – "from the pulpit and more importantly in the streets.

"But I felt the whole place had the hand of the death of the pit over it. They knew, ultimately, they would lose the pit and when the redundancies began, suddenly we had a lot of window cleaning businesses and very young grandfathers taking their grandchildren for walks."

In the days following the closure of Cotgrave Colliery, he recalled going to a local garage to collect his car and spotted an ex-miner he knew.

"He deliberately turned away from me," said Canon Barrodale. "I thought: 'I'm not having that', and I went across and asked him what I had done to offend him.

"He said: 'I didn't want you to see me doing this'. He was washing cars. It was the only job he could get and he was ashamed that he felt so reduced. I told him the shame belonged to Maggie Thatcher, not him."

This minor incident sums up the devastating effect the Conservative Government's pit closure programme had on communities like Cotgrave.

But when All Saints' Parish Church burned down in 1996, it provided Cotgrave with a rallying point. Within seven or eight months, £200,000 was raised.

"It was a declaration that we could make a difference, that together we could rebuild," said Canon Barrodale.

"I was so glad we put a mining window in the rebuilt church. It's a lovely thing and a reminder that all the miners' labour, sweat, toil and tears should not be forgotten."

But have families divided by the bitter dispute found reconciliation?

Canon Barrodale thinks they have though he believes: "it's probably more a case of people being tired of falling out...

"Many of the social problems stemming from the miners' strike are still with us.

"I started a community action centre in Cotgrave and that's still doing tremendous business."

In 2000, he was appointed a Canon. He was Vicar of Beeston until he retired towards the end of 2005. But he continues to keep an interested eye on Cotgrave's progress.

He believes the community has a future but also believes it has to rediscover its identity.

"The mining generation were never really employed properly again.

"I do not think they have yet found a purpose in life and I think that applies to the whole community.

"Some mining communities have been swept away altogether. I come from Wales and worked in Merthyr Tydfil, which was a valley stuffed with pits.

"Now you would be hard pressed to find one.

"I find the rundown of mining incredibly sad. Hundreds of millions of tonnes were left underground in the Notts coalfield for which now the nation is becoming increasingly desperate.

"If, instead of using all those police officers and all that political power to crush the miners, they had put the effort into new clean air technology then there would have been some value to the nation.

"Equally important was the loss of a massively skilled workforce.

"All the culture and dignity of those communities were crushed at that same time for what I suspect was a political end."