Thousands of people across Scotland were affected by the 1984 miners' strike.
Twenty-five years have passed since the beginning of the year-long dispute, which became one of the greatest trade union struggles since the 1926 General Strike.
The strike pitted the powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), led by Arthur Scargill, against Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, who described the miners as "the enemy within".
RESOURCES
Extended interview with former union man John McCormack and ex pit boss Donald Cameron.
On March 5, 1984, miners at Cortonwood colliery near Barnsley walked out with other Yorkshire miners in protest of the colliery's planned closure. The next day, the unions were told that Cortonwood was only the first of a wide-ranging programme of closures that would see 20 pits shut and 20,000 miners lose their jobs.
In Scotland, violence flared at Bilston Glen as the strike took hold, affecting all of Scotland's 12 pits and 15,000 miners. Protesters at Ravenscraig Steel Works in Motherwell and Hunterston Port in Ayrshire were amongst those who supported their fellow heavy industry workers.
Bob Young, who during the strike led 1,200 men onto the picket line, said: "If Arthur Scargill had said there were guns at the door and we are going out to fight, then the guns would have been picked up and we would have been out there fighting. He had us convinced that this was the right thing to do and I have to be truthful and say he was right.
"There was no money to buy Christmas presents. There was no money for next year's holidays. The strike had a tremendous psychological impact on everybody."
According to a new book, the strike of 1984/85 should and could have been prevented. Marching to the Fault Line claims the National Coal Board (NCB) never intended to include Cortonwood in the list of pits to be closed at that time.
The book also details the statistics behind the dispute - including 9,808 arrests, 1,392 police officers injured, two dead on the picket lines, three murder charges and 682 miners sacked for "violence and sabotage". The cost of the police operation against the strikers has also been estimated at £200million.
The dispute ultimately ended in failure and the coal industry was decimated by the Conservative government as a result.
Labour MP Michael Clapham described the strike as the "most important industrial struggle fought by the British Labour Movement since the Second World War".
His House of Commons motion, which states that the NUM deserves "respect for its nobility in fighting against the odds", has been so far signed by 24 Labour MPs. Mr Clapham argues that it took the election of a Labour government in 1997 to "rebuild broken mining communities".
by Graham Fraser
