Red Hill: A Mining Community

by Tony Parker

The miners' strike of 1984-85 was one of the longest and most acrimonious in Britain's history. Six months after it ended, Tony Parker travelled to the North East of England to speak to people on both sides of the dispute and discover the views and feelings of a colliery community contemplating the bitter end of a whole way of life.

'[Red Hill gives a] powerful idea of the tribulations suffered by everyone affected by the miners' strike.' Today

'Here are men and women with all their quirks and oddities, their emotions and prejudices.' TLS

'The reader is allowed to enter a secret, remote world which is at times heroic, but more often poignant and lonely.' Listener

Genres: History, Nonfiction

196 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1987

About the author

Tony Parker (25 June 1923 – 3 October 1996) was an oral historian whose work was dedicated to giving a voice to British and American society's most marginalised figures, from single mothers to lighthouse keepers to criminals, including murderers.

Born in Stockport, Cheshire, Parker was a conscientious objector during World War II, and directed to work in a coal mine. He moved to London and worked as a publisher's representative at Odhams Press. He campaigned against capital punishment and became very interested in prisons and their occupants, eventually focussing on the experiences of prisoners after release.

Tony Parker died in Westleton, Suffolk, having just completed his study of his American counterpart Studs Terkel.

Reviews

[Jordan Phizacklea-Cullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tony Parker was one of the 20th century's great oral historians, a British equivalent to Studs Terkel, and his talent lay in identifying the marginalised in society and helping them feel at ease to tell their stories, unfiltered, unembellished and to reveal a sector of society few were able to see, because few were willing to give them time to set their thoughts down. This stirring collection of interviews from a mining village reeling from the after-effects of the devastating miners' strike of 1984-85 is an important document of a pivotal moment in modern British history, and as much as Parker tries to give space to all viewpoints by not just speaking to miners and their families (not all of whom shared the same feelings on the strike) but also to a policeman, a local journalist and a director on the National Coal Board, it's clear those most deeply affected were the working families of the pit communities, and is a sober attempt to reflect on what went so badly wrong.

[Robert Spencer]

The British coal miners strike of 1984 divided the country at the time and still divides opinion today. In a sense it played on the collective mind as only Brexit has done since, with many people very torn between their loyalty to opposing groups.
Looking back we might realise that in the long run the coal mines were doomed to closure but that wasn't how people felt at the time. For generations fathers had told their sons to get educated, so they would not have to work in the mines, but in 1984 they went on strike until they starved, desperate to keep those mines open so that thei sons would have a job.
To those who lived through it there were no good guys. The Thatcher government were fiends in their ruthless cruelty, and the miners leaders were fools with no political sense.
The victims were the miners and thei families.

Red Hill is a good book, but if anything it underestimates the misery and the trauma of the time.

[albie_of_nonfic · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

The author did an excellent job in obtaining interviews from such widely disparate people as priests, miners, women supporters, Coal Board executives and shopkeepers.

The curating of the interviews is questionable, and shows the author's heavy pro-union bias. Strikers come out as martyrs suffering for their principles. Anti-strikers' interviews seem to have been selected to show them as deluded (mainly self-deluded), selfish, greedy and moronic, and having been played for fools by Thatcher.

Read in 2025, it shows a lost world that is barely comprehensible to anyone who grew up after the end of the Cold War and the passing of Thatcher.

[kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

oral history milujem a britske banicke strajky su z nejakeho dovodu moja srdcova tema a milujem aj vsetky zeny, s ktorymi bol v tejto knizke rozhovor (absolutne prevalcovali muzov svojou uprimnostou a zapalom a vsetkym im strasne fandim a dufam, ze sa nikdy uz neprestali zaujimat o to, co sa okolo nich deje a boli na seba do nekonecna pysne!!!).