THE 30TH anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike has produced a wide variety of retrospectives, from the sober reflections of the 2014 documentary Still the Enemy Within to Stephen Beresford’s upbeat intersectional film Pride.

In addition to these onscreen recollections, there have been several recent books on the events, some written to analyse and others to commemorate.

The majority of these retrospectives acknowledge that a major aspect of the strike was the role played in it by women, both simply as the partners, wives, daughters, mothers and sisters of miners and on a more organised basis as part of the Women Against Pit Closures movement.

Wisdom of Our Own: Living and Learning Since the Miners’ Strike tells the story of the creation of Castleford Community Learning Centre, described by those who know it as “the best thing to come out of the miners’ strike.”

It grew out of what was Castleford Women’s Centre, which in turn developed out of the soup kitchens run during the strike by miners’ support groups.

The book brings together almost 100 contributions from individuals involved in the process, interspersed with political tributes, poetry and memoir. As such, it is both a valuable local history and a useful part of the national and class history generated by the strike, as well as testament to the resilience of the community that it chronicles.

A further example of the ways in which involvement in the strike empowered and strengthened working-class women, Wisdom of Our Own also provides a vital reminder of the significant place held by education in working-class history and identity.

Rhian E Jones