Family stories and secrets in memories of the UK 1984/85 miners’ strike

This article draws on interviews with people from striking families who remember the 1984-85 UK miners’ strike as children. It considers how proximity to the strike is often understood as participation in picket lines and in other forms of activism most commonly used to represent the strike in the media, film and television. However, the accounts reveal that, in contrast to the solidity of these images, memories of the strike’s children are characterised by a sense of knowing and not knowing. Family stories and family secrets, located in the home, are vital to the management and negotiation of the strike and these omissions and absences continue to characterise the memories of the strike in adult retellings. This article considers the context of family stories and the importance of family secrets in adult memories of childhood experiences of the strike, suggesting that looking at absences, silences, secrets and the known and unknown can reveal the many ways in which the strike was experienced and is narrated and remembered.