For two hundred years, Britain needed coal. The men who braved dreadful danger to hew it out of rocks miles underground were considered heroes; their trade union was feared by governments and revered by the rest of the labour movement.

In 1984, with brutal suddenness, all this stopped. We found we could do without miners, and so we got rid of them, just like that. Today, forty years on, what miners did, what it cost them to do it and why they thought their way of life was worth fighting for are remembered only by a fast-dwindling group of mining families. Emily P Webber has come among us just in time to salvage the colour and texture of mining communities.

She does it above all through interviews with former miners. Ted, who worked in Steetley Colliery on the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border, told her about working beside a friend whose hand was caught in a machine. ‘It pulled his fingers off,’ he told Webber, ‘and I pulled him out, and I pulled his glove off, and two fingers came out with his glove.’ The injured man had just paid £2,500 for a new home. All he could say as they stretchered him away, over and over again, was ‘what’s going to happen to me bungalow?’

Stewart told her about his grandfather, killed in a mining accident in Lancashire soon after the First World War, leaving five small children not just fatherless but homeless too. ‘Back then, when somebody was killed underground, and you were living in a colliery house, you were only in for seven days and then you were out,’ said Stewart.

John remembered the dreadful day his Yorkshire miner father was hit by a collapsing pit roof. He survived, but all his life thereafter he had a deep blue scar across his forehead, which he used to store his pencil in when he was betting on horses. Years later, in 1973, when John was fifteen, he watched events unfold at Lofthouse Colliery, where three million gallons of filthy water broke into new underground workings from an abandoned Victorian mine. The following year, John became a miner himself. His father, like many miner fathers, hoped for something better and safer for his son, and so did John himself. But teachers at his school saw few other options for him. As John puts it, ‘Why would they not look at me and think, he’s pit fodder?’ Besides, the National Coal Board was promising new recruits ‘a job for life’ because ‘people will always need coal’. They were lying. The industry John joined in 1974 had just ten more years to live.

Webber’s interviews give us a clear picture of a terrifying way to earn a living and of the atmosphere in the mines. She is a historian with the good novelist’s eye for the telling detail, and we get to know her interviewees as human beings. But a book about British mining will always be judged by the way it handles the dreadful manner of its death.

Here Webber makes a slightly stuttering start. Good on the taste and texture of the pit, she struggles with the politics. But when she reaches the famous Battle of Orgreave, the defining moment of the Miners’ Strike, she gets much better, carried away by anger and heartbreak. On 18 June 1984, thousands of miners came to picket the coking works at Orgreave in South Yorkshire to try to turn back the lorries arriving to collect coke. There they faced an entirely new sort of paramilitary policing. Webber describes how ‘the glassy sea of riot shields parted, and cavalry flooded out … Short-shield snatch squads followed behind, grabbing any pickets who were not already desperately fleeing the scene.’

Paul remembers the horses charging through and the men fleeing. They had a choice of heading to a wall on one side and trees on the other. Some men chose the trees, and Paul, one of the miners on strike, could hear their screams as the police set Alsatians on them. ‘Younger miners’, writes Webber, ‘who had grown up admiring older men underground, witnessed their heroes being beaten and humiliated.’

As they went past pickets in their coaches, police officers routinely held £10 notes against the windows to remind the men outside that they were getting good money on overtime, while the striking miners were near starvation. The Guardian’s Malcolm Pithers reported ‘policemen clapping and cheering as a picket, bleeding heavily from a head wound, was helped into an ambulance’. A miner called Kevin described to Webber the police station in Sheffield, where he walked past cells ‘covered in blood, urine and the remnants of broken bodies’. The men had arrived at Orgreave in jeans and trainers with no idea of what lay ahead. Unlike on other days, the police made no attempt to stop the coaches carrying them – in fact, they helped get the men into a position to picket. It was, says one of Webber’s interviewees, as though the police and the government wanted them there ‘to give us a kicking, to teach us a lesson’.

He was right. The government did want them there, and not just to teach them a lesson. That story is outside Webber’s brief (David Hencke and I told it in our book Marching to the Fault Line). The government wanted the pickets a long way away from Nottinghamshire, where the real action was taking place. So the police put a cordon round Nottinghamshire to prevent pickets’ coaches getting into the county. It was a trap, and the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, a vain and foolish man with the tactical sense of a lump of coal, threw his men straight into it – unarmed, unprepared and vulnerable. 

For two hundred years, Britain needed coal. As a nation, we enticed men to the hard, grinding, dreadfully dangerous coalface to cut it for us and bring it to us. What sort of nation sends generations of men to work and die miles underground, and then, as soon as we think we can do without them, throws them out without a thought for how they might feed their families, demonises and humiliates them when they try to resist, and hunts them with horses and dogs as though they were animals?