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The booming coal industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the main reason behind the creation of modern south Wales and its miners were central to shaping the economics, politics and society of south Wales during the twentieth century. This book explores the history of these miners between 1964 and 1985, covering the concerted run-down of the coal industry under the Wilson government, the growth of miners' resistance, and the eventual defeat of the epic strike of 1984-5. Their interactions with the wider trade union movement and society during these years meant the miners were amongst the most important strategically-located sections of the British workforce during this time. The South Wales Miners is the first full-length academic study of the miners and their union in the later twentieth century, in a tumultuous period of crisis and struggle.

Abstract
In 1975, the National Coal Board (NCB) produced a short film, "People Will Always Need Coal", to encourage recruitment into mining. It was extraordinarily attention-grabbing, presenting miners as cosmopolitan playboys. It defined the industry in hyper-masculine terms, encouraging would-be recruits to "be a miner". This article uses the film as a starting point for a discussion of the complex interactions between the material realities of masculinity, class, and culture within Britain's coalfields in the period 1975–1983. A critical reading of the film is complemented by archival research and oral testimony drawn from interviews with 96 former miners and their families. At a time when the industry was positioning itself as an employer with a long-term future, mining was presented on screen as a modern masculine occupation that was far removed from the dominant imagery of coal for much of the twentieth century. The National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) victories in the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the drafting of a Government Plan for Coal, and rising living standards, created a short period of optimism before the cataclysmic closures of the 1980s and 1990s. This was a time when masculinity in the coalfields was being reproduced, modified, contested, and subverted. The years 1975–1983 offer valuable insight into such masculinity and the ways it was mediated and challenged through work, the domestic sphere, leisure, and popular culture.

In this article, we explore the impact of colliery closure programs across the nationalized British coal industry. We chart the regional disparities in these and the mobilization of community opposition to national protests, leading to the national miners' strikes of 1972, 1974, and 1984–5. This article demonstrates how closures have changed the industrial politics of mining unions for miners, junior officials, and managers and have increasingly alienated NCB officials and mining communities. We demonstrate how this undermined the ideals of nationalization. This is examined through moral economic frameworks and within the context of changes to the UK's energy mix, with implications for contemporary deliberations on public ownership, energy transitions, and regional development.