Martin Jenkinson was a freelance photographer who lived in Sheffield in south Yorkshire. Tens of thousands of people will have seen his work in national and regional newspapers, perhaps without knowing his name.

Jenkinson died in February 2012 but the images he produced will live on for decades, carrying messages of working-class struggle and determination.

Now some of his work has been reproduced in the illustrated book Images Of The The Past: The Miners' Strike which coincides with the 30th anniversary of its beginning in March 1984.

Jenkinson was a committed socialist, trade unionist and former steelworker and he covered every major industrial and political struggle in Britain from 1980 to just weeks before his death from cancer. He left a huge and unique archive of work and many of the images are iconic.

He was there when a striking miner wearing a joke policeman's helmet walked along the lines of massed ranks of police officers inspecting them at the notorious Orgreave coke depot in South Yorkshire in June 1984.

Later police staged their vicious attack on thousands of pickets which Jenkinson witnessed and photographed.

He was on the spot when Arthur Scargill was arrested at Orgreave and in Barnsley civic hall when thousands of women from striking mining communities launched the heroic Women Against Pit Closures movement.

Jenkinson visited their food kitchens. He photographed the demonstrations and rallies which attracted tens of thousands of supporters from the labour and trade union movement.

He captured the spirit of international support as tonnes of food were unloaded from cargo ships, sent by trades unionists in other countries.

And he recorded the solidarity from other unions and organisations, the street stalls collecting food and money for mining communities suffering as the Thatcher government wielded the weapon of starvation to break the strike.

Jenkinson was there when police escalated their violence by invading mining communities, attacking at will.

After the strike, when the Tories launched their final assault on Britain's coalmining industry in 1993, he recorded the renewed struggle - the occupations by Women Against Pit Closures and the protest camps established at pit-heads.

Later he photographed the final destruction of Britain's mining industry and the communities which were at its heart - the boarded-up houses as miners and their families were driven out by the desperate need for work and the wrecking balls smashing down pit-head gear and buildings

Two of Martin's friends, Mark Metcalf and Mark Harvey, have delved into his archive to produce this book.

Metcalf, a freelance journalist and author, and Harvey, a freelance photographer, are both based in Yorkshire and worked with Jenkinson's wife Edwina and daughter Justine, who selected some of the images for the book.

Even so, it covers only a fraction of three decades of his work.

It is to be hoped that more of his magnificent legacy will be produced for the enlightenment and education of future generations.

Images Of The The Past: The Miners Strike is published by Pen And Sword, price £14.99