Let us rescue from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ a young teenager called Paul, travelling to work in London on a commuter train in late 1979.Footnote ¹ He has just left school and started a full time job. He doesn’t like it very much; nor is he happy about his favourite punk bands ‘selling out’ to become pop stars. To vent his spleen, he has started a fanzine, a self-produced magazine called Suburban Revolt that rails against gig prices and the apathy of his peers. Cut from a newspaper and glued to page two is a strapline asking: ‘Are You a Tired Commuter?’. On the back page, the ‘Top 20 TV Programmes’ for the week ending 9 September 1979 are listed, above which Paul has written: ‘No wonder the country’s in a mess’. ‘My attitudes have changed gradually from the 1st copy’, he writes in the editorial to issue two. Now Paul is asking questions and looking for answers. In a passage with erratic grammar, punctuation and spelling, he surveyed the political landscape.

Needless to say, Paul’s analysis reads crudely. The backdrop was provided by the May 1979 general election, from which Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party emerged victorious and began to transform the British polity. Discourses of ‘crisis’ and ‘decline’ underpinned media and political perspectives, wrangling with socio-cultural changes that prompted concern as to the ‘permissiveness’ associated with the 1960s. Orwell is evoked, perhaps another remnant from a recently taken O-Level exam resonating with portents of an authoritarian response to Britain’s apparent malaise? Anarchy, introduced to pop’s lexicon by the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’ in 1976, begins to mean more than just a punk signifier, informing the ideas and praxis that defined the ‘post-punk’ period for many young people into the 1980s. As such, mention of the overtly anarchist band Crass reveals a pertinent soundtrack to Paul’s political fumblings. He is young and working things out; he is trying to make sense of the world. Like many others whose authors were enthused by punk and fired by disaffections both deep and shallow, his fanzine offered a medium to test ideas and seek a dialogue. A ‘safe space’ (in modern parlance) to designate a genre of political writing where formative ideas – generally progressive, but also often reactionary and dismissively ‘anti-politics’ – could be tested and articulated.

Ripped & Torn: Punk Fanzines

Fanzines have a pre-, post- and extra-punk history. The roots of fanzine culture are typically traced back to the coining of the term by the US science fiction (sci-fi) aficionado Russ Chauvenet.Footnote ³ Writing in the October 1940 issue of his own Detours publication, Chauvenet sought to distinguish between self-produced magazines disseminated in relatively small numbers by hand or by post to communities of ‘fans’ (‘fanzines’), and professional magazines published regularly and distributed widely in greater print runs to shops and suppliers for general sale (‘prozines’). As a result, fanzines first became associated with cheaply produced sci-fi publications circulating around small-but-dispersed communities in the US and Britain from the 1940s, before later earning a wider remit in relation to similarly amateur efforts focused on an assortment of fan-based cultural forms ranging from TV programmes and pop groups to film stars and football. Today, fanzines continue to proliferate, both in relation to ongoing cultural obsessions and, as ‘zines’, to an array of activist and lifestyle concerns.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, more recent studies of (fan)zines have embedded the medium within a feminist lineage and/or recognised the form as part of a wider history of self-publishing that encompasses everything from artistic bulletins and ‘little magazines’ to samizdat missives and the countercultural press.Footnote ⁵

Punk – meaning here the youth culture emergent in the UK from the mid-1970s imbued with an ethos of do-it-yourself – was integral to the reimagination of a fanzine’s initial form and function.Footnote ⁶ The songs and imagery of the Sex Pistols and The Clash lent punk a seditious and oppositional quality, offering angry bursts of invective that reflected and railed against the banalities and brutalities of everyday life. Culturally, punk was located in opposition to the vapidity and perceived irrelevance of 1970s pop and rock. In the music paper Sounds, the journalist Jonh Ingham wrote of ‘boundaries being drawn by the [Sex] Pistols’, boundaries he later recognised as a youthful irreverence for rock’s pantheon and a rejection of 1970s countercultural motifs: straight trousers replaced flares; short hair replaced long; musical immediacy replaced considered virtuosity; songs of hate and war replaced songs of love and peace; an emphasis on doing challenged commodity culture’s reliance on the spectator and consumer; engaging with replaced dropping out. ‘The great ignorant public don’t know why we’re in a band’, Johnny Rotten was quoted as saying: ‘It’s because we’re bored with all the old crap. Like every decent human being should be’.Footnote ⁷

Punk fanzines thereby sought to further challenge and provoke, transferring punk-related attitudes and aesthetics towards writing and design. Pre-punk fanzines were rudimentarily produced but conformed generally to practical layouts, with text organised in columns and images either drawn neatly or stuck into grids to be duplicated on machines maintained by community workshops, local printers or colleges. By contrast, and through a combination of accident and intent, punk’s fanzines revealed and revelled in the cut ‘n’ paste method of their creation, incorporating collage and exaggerating the improvised nature of production.Footnote ⁸ Most famously, they were often pasted-up and then printed on the Xerox photocopying machines becoming gradually more accessible over the mid-to-late 1970s. To this end, punk fanzines looked immediate and chaotic, complementing the angsty urgency of the wider culture and the bricolage nature of punk aesthetics.

More important for our purposes, punk also changed the tone and temper of fanzine discourse, critically engaging with – rather than eulogising or simply documenting – the culture on which it commentated. Pre-punk fanzines might be described as comprising ‘philatelic … attention to the finest details’, compiling potted histories and fanatical lists of favoured artists. By contrast, the self-avowed punk fanzines that emerged in the wake of Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue in the summer of 1976 typically eschewed facts and precision for excitable bursts of opinionated prose.Footnote ⁹ ‘Who wants history’?, Perry asked in late 1976: ‘I only care about the future.’Footnote ¹⁰ Rather than record and recollect the past, punk fanzines documented the now, filtering punk’s cultural challenge through critical diatribes against rich rock ‘stars’ (Ripped & Torn) and the hypocrisy of ‘ITV and the rest of the media’ (Bondage).Footnote ¹¹ Instead of positively obsessing about a band or even punk more generally, punk’s media was typically demanding and aggressive. Very soon, the term ‘fanzine’ was itself rejected by some who deemed it an unsuitable moniker for a medium designed specifically to challenge – or at least provide an alternative to – the perceived mainstream media. ‘The “fan” bit implies slave like following of the “in” bands’, Mike Diboll commented in his Toxic Grafity from late 1979. ‘I prefer the title “punkzine”, the anarchic, uncompromising spirit of punk expressed through a cheaply produced magazine, not the latest on [commercial artists such as] the Boomtown Rats.’Footnote ¹²

As this suggests, fanzines were repurposed through their association with punk. No longer a staid medium dominated by men in their twenties and thirties, punk’s fanzines were claimed by teenagers inspired by a cultural provocation that extolled the virtues of agency and autonomy.Footnote ¹³ In particular, once the Sex Pistols – and, by extension, punks – found themselves subject to a media-generated moral panic afforded by tales of violence and swearing live on teatime television, so cultural disaffection fuelled delinquent expectation.Footnote ¹⁴ A treacherous response to Elizabeth II’s 1977 Silver Jubilee sealed the deal, as the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ rose to the top of the charts and offered an alternative reading of ‘England’s dreaming’.Footnote ¹⁵ Punk was thereby perceived as avowedly anti-establishment; its modus operandi subversive. For those who wished to use it, punk afforded a political space to comment, critique and condemn.

Fanzines provided one means of doing so. They were typically made in bedrooms, in the parental front room, or perhaps at the kitchen table of a shared house. Some were sole-authored, but friends and acquaintances often contributed, with many fanzines being collective efforts comprising text, poems, artworks and photography submitted as-and-when. Visually and textually, images were sourced from existing music papers and culled from magazines or books. These were then cut out and reused alongside typed or handwritten record and gig reviews. Early on, tabloid straplines were spliced into collages that located punk in the here and now, a cultural response to a mediascape of shock-horror headlines and bland tabloid/advertising copy. Band interviews were common, the product of scattergun questions offered before or after gigs. Brief editorials might, in the first issue, provide a rationale for making a fanzine. More often than not, these took aim at the music press’ disconnection from what was happening ‘on the ground’ and cited boredom as an impulse to act/participate.Footnote ¹⁶

Once completed, titles could be one-offs or continue for a handful of issues, with print runs ranging from the tens to the hundreds. There were exceptions, of course, with some fanzines – such as Sniffin’ Glue and Jamming! – becoming popular enough to warrant runs of thousands.Footnote ¹⁷ But in terms of distribution, copies were usually sold at gigs or left with local record and book shops on a sale-or-return basis. In London, Compendium Books in Camden and Rough Trade in Ladbroke Grove were mainstays, with the latter soon offering a distribution service that allowed for mail order and sales to shops beyond the capital. From 1979, the nearby Better Badges provided printing presses to become a productive hub for countless titles into the early 1980s. With prices ranging from 5p to 50p, dropping relatively over time as access to printing became easier and cheaper, fanzines were often a costly alternative to national music press titles such as NME, Melody Maker and Sounds selling for between 18p and 20p in mid-1979. Yet they claimed a cultural cachet in their being untainted by commerciality and retaining a closer connection to the scenes and musics covered. By the end of the 1970s, most – if not all – towns and cities in the UK had at least one punk-related fanzine in circulation at any particular time.

Amidst all this, networks formed and correspondence ensued. Fanzines were swapped, shared, collected and discarded. What, for the most part, appeared ephemeral products of youthful enthusiasm served simultaneously as a means of communication within and across divergent punk and punk-related cultures. Music predominated, but politics too found expression, as punk critically engaged with the world of which it was part. If punk really was subversive and seditious, then fanzines help give a sense of the impulses underpinning the cultural revolt.

Acts of Defiance: Punk Writing

Punk fanzines allowed for a distinct genre of political writing to occur; that is, a recognisable style and approach to writing on or about politics particular to a preferred medium. Given that fanzines pertained to spontaneity and urgency, the prose was typically free-flowing and unstructured. If not quite stream-of-consciousness, then the text generally lacked shape or organisation. Spelling mistakes were ignored; words and sentences were often scribbled out to present a kind of idiot savant modernism. Shifts in font, or text transferring from typed text to handwritten scrawl, were also common. As a result, punk’s fanzine writing read more like an impulsive outpouring of formative ideas than a completed treatise. To view essays or statements that were often short and impromptu is to see ideas percolating from records heard, books read or films seen. At times, opinions are being visibly worked out as the text transcribes. There are contradictions and dead ends. The focus shifts erratically from one subject to another, leaving arguments half-made or unresolved. Evidence is eschewed for emotional subjectivity and punkish affectation (‘fuck the system’); text and imagery intertwine to present a collage of signifiers and reflections that proffer a structure of feeling rather than a rounded thesis. To be sure, the advent of overtly anarchist punkzines from 1979 led to more authoritative statements, often cloyingly and didactically so. But even then, a sense of exploration, a pushing to the edge or extreme, was palpable in their deconstructions of power and society. The process of writing a punk fanzine was a way of doing politics, formulating ideas to engender discussion and reset opinion towards subsequent action. At root, the message was always ‘think for yourself’ and ‘do it yourself’. As with the music, a fanzine’s political writing was a form of praxis: you learnt as you did it.

Political writing provided part of punk’s fanzine content from the outset. This, initially, meant the small-‘p’ politics of enabling or providing a platform for those previously without one. Mark Perry’s rationale for Sniffin’ Glue was to give coverage to what the national music press missed, dismissed or failed to understand.Footnote ¹⁸ He encouraged others to do the same and soon concluded that it was not just the music press that needed to be challenged, but ‘also the record companies .… This “new-wave” has got to take in everything, including-posters, record-covers, stage presentation, the lot! [sic]’.Footnote ¹⁹ For Pete Shelley, co-founder of Buzzcocks and author of the single-sheet Plaything fanzine, punk’s new wave was ‘a challenge to Consider everything you do, think and feel [sic]’, meaning ‘PERSONAL politics. The way that you react to the people around you. The ways that you love them, fuck them, hate them, slate them [sic]’. Typical of the genre’s nascent style, he then promised to ‘write more when I think of what to say’.Footnote ²⁰ In both cases, Perry and Shelley embodied a democratisation of political writing. Paper + pen/typewriter + a thought to communicate = anyone could do it.

One of the most significant early examples of punk fanzine writing was Jon Savage’s essay for the first London’s Outrage (1976), effectively a rehearsal for what would later become his seminal history of punk’s beginning, England’s Dreaming (1991). Here Savage made use of the freedom afforded by a fanzine’s form to deny all regard for censorship or stylistic etiquette. Writing in his diary on the day of the fanzine’s creation in late November 1976, the then Jon Sage chronicled a lunch hour’s respite from his job as a trainee solicitor. ‘I sit on the bog attacking bits of paper with Pritt glue in a very real fervour – got to do it now … I need to give voice to those explosions in my head’.Footnote ²¹

In practice, this meant a ‘long improvised piece about violence, fascism, Thatcher and the impending apocalypse’ interspersed with pictures of the Sex Pistols cropped from the music press alongside images of the Third Reich.Footnote ²² All around, choice quotes from Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) gave a theoretical underpinning to the juxtaposition of pornography, pop culture and Nazism, with the tenor of the times captured in newspaper headlines declaring ‘punk rock violence is sinister’ and an advert for the gruesome horror film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Thus, a Reich quote such as ‘[the] sexual morality that inhibits the will to freedom, as well as those forces that comply with authoritarian interests, derive their energy from repressed sexuality’, paved the way for a flyer-image from the ICA’s ‘Prostitution’ exhibition concurrently causing consternation among MPs and the press for utilising public money on the repositioning of pornography to a publicly-funded gallery.Footnote ²³ The essay then joined-the-dots, with Savage musing on punk’s aggression and the Nazi chic employed as a provocation by those in and around the milieu close to the Sex Pistols via Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s clothes shop SEX (where British punk gestated). For Savage, punk was an exhilarating ‘dance with death’, the ‘final vomit of a rotted society’ signalling the advent of a ‘peculiarly English kind of fascism’. With Margaret Thatcher appearing as the ‘mother sadist’ in waiting, and a salacious media revelling in portents of crisis, Savage posited punk as a cultural response to a country wracked by depression and populated by a ‘sexually & socially frustrated people living off past (WW2) glories [sic]’. ‘Anarchy indeed’, he concluded at the end of several pages of prose that slipped between socio-political comment and crypto-slang terms (‘eezi-wrapped package’; ‘eNMEy’; ‘punkismo’). ‘Terminal decadence is here & will become action’.Footnote ²⁴

Savage’s intelligence and eloquence ensured London’s Outrage stood out from most punk fanzines of the time. He was also in his early twenties, so a little older than the typical punk fanzine producer. Nevertheless, Savage’s approach exemplified the emergent genre, leading him immediately to push at its limits. The second issue of London’s Outrage comprised Xeroxed photographs of London’s urban landscape taken around Notting Hill on a Pentax camera, a topographical backdrop to punk’s studied alienation. This time the images were the text, depicting a derelict dystopia – a veritable catalogue of corrugated iron, concrete, graffiti, tower blocks, empty houses and brick rubble left over from bomb damage/slum clearance – caught between the past and the future.Footnote ²⁵ Next came The Secret Public (1978), a collaboration with the artist Linder (Linda Mulvey) that explored constructions of gender through photomontages compiled from glossy magazines. So, for example, female bodies from pornography were decorated with signifiers of domesticity, the heads and genitals replaced by cakes and household appliances. Alternately, clichéd totems of masculinity – office blocks, weapons, technology, commuting, bodybuilding – were scrambled to reconfigure their intended meaning. Again, the images worked to provide a text that decoded media representations of sex, gender and relationships to reveal their commodified ideal.Footnote ²⁶

Not all fanzines were so inventive. The vast majority retained a musical focus concentrated primarily on bands, gigs and records. Even so, punk’s inherent critique, be it of pop culture or society more generally, ensured that political commentary often broke through. At least on occasion, the subject matter of punk’s wider visual, verbal and textual discourse encouraged political enquiry and fostered opinion.

Among the early themes repeating across punk fanzine writing, as the London’s Outrage/Secret Public examples suggest, were fascism/anti-fascism, gender, media distortion and commodification. These, in part, were a product of discourses and concerns resonant of the time, be it Britain’s political and economic ‘crisis’, the rise of the National Front (NF), the influence of feminist and broadly leftist politics, or attendant concerns revolving around socio-cultural liberalisation and ‘permissiveness’.Footnote ²⁷ More to the point, such subjects were engaged with in ways that helped codify punk fanzine writing towards a genre. Two examples: JOLT and No Future/Tacky.

JOLT was first issued in early 1977 by Lucy Whitman, writing under the name of Lucy Toothpaste. As a feminist and socialist, Whitman was attracted to punk’s rebellious spirit and the possibilities for women in a culture that recognised ‘it doesn’t matter if we don’t know how to play guitar yet, we can soon learn’. To this end, she resolved to do ‘lots of things on girl punks’ and interviewed The Slits and X-Ray Spex over a subsequent two issues. Simultaneously, Whitman took up the question of ‘punk and fascism’, lamenting those who wore swastikas for effect and musing on the irrationality of a politics she felt was ‘getting a stronger + stronger grip in Britain at the moment (in the state, the army & police as well as the NF) [sic]’.Footnote ²⁸ Not surprisingly, Whitman soon aligned her concerns with broader movements such as Rock Against Racism (RAR) and contributed to the feminist magazine Spare Rib.

The writing in JOLT was initially by hand, a mode that reinforced the first-take immediacy of punk fanzine creation. Indeed, the inaugural issue made clear that it was ‘a period piece written in January 1977’, locating the fanzine in a particular time and place.Footnote ²⁹ Whitman personalised and demystified the process of production. She said that the idea for the fanzine came to her in bed following the removal of her wisdom teeth. Her thoughts on punk and fascism were formed, in part, by meeting a ‘“punk” at a party’ who wore a swastika and believed in repatriation and national service. She also reported on a meeting organised by the International Marxist Group about fascism and the mass media, during which her shyness stopped her challenging the folk singer Leon Rosselson over his ignorance of punk.Footnote ³⁰ The impression, taken from a reading of all three issues, is of a politics coming into focus as the reader follows Whitman’s thought processes across various interactions, experiences and events. With each issue, her resolve hardens and her political position clarifies.

As befits an archetypal punk fanzine, the text of JOLT was surround by images and excerpts stripped from newspapers, books and the music press: quotes from female punks, reports on the NF, passages from Andy Warhol’s would-be executioner Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) manifesto, even pictures of bodies from the Nazi death camps. Whitman also enrolled her friends and family to contribute, with the striking illustration of morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse entwined in a naked lesbian embrace on the cover of issue three being provided by Toothpaste’s sister, Ros. Though some early (and later) punk fanzines would prioritise the written word, the genre was largely defined by visuals that contributed to the tone of the discourse or served as evidence for the chosen subject matter.

This was important, as punk’s cultural intervention was regularly understood as a dialogue with the media and the wider culture industry. A young punk did not have to be familiar with the arguments of Guy Debord and his fellow situationists to recognise that the media distorted and the promises emblazoned on the advertising hoardings were false. Even so, a fanzine such as No Future/Tacky did reveal a familiarity with anarchist and situationist ideas, offering both a comment on and critique of punk’s commodification across two fanzines produced as one. Conceived in 1977 by Stephen Lavers, later to write for David Bailey and David Litchfield’s Ritz newspaper, Tacky served as a parody of punk’s co-option by the music industry and wider media. Presented like a teen magazine, it highlighted wallposter ‘pin-ups’ on the front cover and featured a deliberately trite Q&A with band The Damned. The language and layout were mocking, leading to a punk ‘fashion’ spread and an interview with Vivienne Westwood telling ‘her thrilling story’.Footnote ³¹

In fact, the Westwood interview served as a segue between Tacky and No Future, which changed in tone dramatically and took a far more critical and confrontational approach to punk’s co-option. On the cover, a list of words – ‘democracy’, ‘truth’, ‘leader’, ‘politics’, ‘hero’, ‘education’, ‘law’, ‘nation’, ‘career’ – was presented in bold white-against-black text, beneath which it was revealed that ‘all these words are used to brainwash you but don’t believe us because we use them too’. Content-wise, following the slogan ‘All Media Distort – Think For Yourself’, a long typed-up essay on anarchism bemoaned those who followed politics for fashion. Tolstoy was quoted, and the legitimacy (or not) of violence was debated with reference to the Red Army Faction, then at war with the German state. George Orwell’s 1984 was again evoked in relation to the media and technology, paving the way for an anarchist solution based on ‘FREE CO-OPERATION between individuals’. Read from this direction, the interview with Westwood became a call to arms that propagated punk’s intent to ‘Trust yourself, don’t let anyone tell you what to do and take one little step so you’re living instead of following’.Footnote ³² Indeed, the form and content of No Future/Tacky were crudely but effectively aligned to disseminate its message. Part parody and part communiqué, the working through of its critique was the point and the purpose.

These and similar ideas flowed across punk’s fledgling DIY media. One-off fanzines might be dedicated to urging punks to revolt, as with the mainly handwritten Speak Out!! that insisted: ‘Don’t follow fashion, don’t follow leaders, create fashion, be you’re own leader [sic]’.Footnote ³³ Brass Lip was printed through a female co-operative in Birmingham with the purpose of interviewing punk-related female artists about their relationship to the women’s movement.Footnote ³⁴ Others, such as Common Knowledge, committed to explaining and exploring the ‘politics of record production’, providing detailed instructions on how to make and distribute a record.Footnote ³⁵

In effect, punk’s political writing absorbed ideas and issues circulating in the 1970s and 1980s, refracting them through personal experience and relating them to records heard and bands seen. This might entail a brief statement on anti-fascism or support for RAR. It could comprise a collage or a poem. Musings on the dilution of punk’s protest through processes of commodification and co-option repeated, with invectives against the media and music industry being commonplace long into the 1980s. But a fanzine’s production, both in terms of preparing the paste-up and writing the text, also served as a means of discovery that prompted regular journeys of autodidactic revelation. In Vague, Steve Thomas transformed into Tom Vague to travel through a post-punk landscape from where he reported back via lengthy reports on ‘boy scout guide[s] to situationism’ and book-length editions on left-wing terrorist groups (Angry Brigade; Red Army Faction) and psychogeography.Footnote ³⁶ As Thomas became Vague/Vague, his writing charted both his own personal evolution and a suitably subterranean history of the late twentieth century.

Re-action: Anarchist Punk Fanzines

Though the politics of punk fanzine writing were contained as much in the doing as the content of communication, the advent of a recognisable ‘anarcho-punk’ culture inspired by the bands Crass and Poison Girls ensured overtly political discourse became common into the 1980s.Footnote ³⁷ As we have seen, the Sex Pistols’ infusion of ‘anarchy’ into pop encouraged early punk fanzines to engage with anarchist notions and beliefs, while socio-political movements such as RAR connected to – and even adopted – punk’s text and textures towards broadly leftist or socialist ends.Footnote ³⁸ Politics projected onto punk, be it as an expression of ‘dole queue rock’ or a sociological reading of youthful anger, likewise fuelled debate within and around the culture.Footnote ³⁹ As a result, early punk fanzines might locate ‘The Politics of Punk’ in the provision of a way out from the ‘school … job … marriage … work … retire’ pattern of life (Ripped & Torn) or consider whether it was possible to be punk ‘posh or poor’ (City Chains).Footnote ⁴⁰ That punk meant something was often stated and felt, though it was rarely explained or defined beyond the crudest terms.

From 1978 to 1979, however, Crass and Poison Girls connected countercultural, feminist and anarchist ideas more fixedly to punk’s disaffections. Their 7”-singles and 12”-EPs and albums critiqued social and political power structures, railing against a ‘system’ maintained primarily by the varied forces of state control and/or socio-cultural norms informed by the residual influence of Christianity. As well as records, both bands issued self-published communiqués and newssheets (International Anthem; The Impossible Dream). They also provided fanzines with interview time that more often than not led to extensive discussions on politics – personal, global and ideological. In response, a deluge of punk media began to engage with, debate and disseminate Crass’ and Poison Girls’ ideas, following their example in releasing independent records and working through the possibilities and tensions of anarchist-inspired lifestyles.

In time, many such fanzines began to prioritise politics over music. A classic example, and one of the most startling and renowned of the genre, was Toxic Grafity. Produced over 1980 by Mike Diboll, issue ‘five’ was entitled the ‘Mental Liberation Issue’ and promised ‘A REality OF HORROR [sic]’. This, in practice, meant the dismantling – in text and thought – of all the ‘“pillars of society” [that] support the building of oppression. Remove the pillars and the building will collapse’.Footnote ⁴¹ The results were extraordinary.

Comprising more than 40 pages, Toxic Grafity delved deep into Diboll’s psyche. Collages and essays formed the bulk of the content, but there were also cartoons and slogans dotted throughout: ‘Beat VAT!!! Steal!!!’. It was the typed text, however, that proved the most distinctive aspect of what Diboll labelled his ‘SHITZINE’. Fuelled by speed and alcohol, inspired by Crass and punk’s urge to ‘question everything’, Toxic Grafity delivered a series of relentless diatribes spewed out in seemingly random order. These could be abusive, such as: ‘BACK BRITAIN? … FUCK BRITAIN! what ever the excuse these fuckers wanna see us fucking bleed, the kind of moronic “middle class” cretin that reads the lieing Daily “hurrar for the blackshirts” Mail wants his/her silly fucking little head examined, do they think that their “masters” Will spare their boring, trivial existance just because they “backed Britain” [sic]’.Footnote ⁴² But they were also often existential and self-reflective: ‘stripped of lies and myths, “civilized life” seems unbearably hollow, a façade, a film going on before my eyes, so futile, so absurde, so pointless, i seek … MY EXIT-STANCE [sic]’.Footnote ⁴³

The tone was by turns angry, despairing and parodic. Then, in a long two-part essay entitled ‘What Price Definitions’, Diboll turned against language itself, disavowing ‘labels’ and social categories to conclude that ‘in the initiation of speech the seeds of oppression lie dorment [sic]’.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the end, Toxic Grafity had descended into abjection and what Diboll called ‘dialectical diarrhoea’, closing with a list of expletives – ‘fucking, garbage, shit, refuse, re-fuse obcene shithole …’ – and a cursory ‘FUCK OFF’. Having liberated the mind and considered ‘syndicalism, anarchism, pacifism and existentialism’ as ‘different applications of the same, true, beautiful ideal’, a ‘dark abyss’ still awaited: a ‘black expance [sic]’ in which any ‘common identity’ was shared only ‘thru a sweaty, sweaty, smelly arsehole [sic]’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Given that the ‘Mental Liberation Issue’ of Toxic Grafity came with a Crass flexi-disc 7”-single attached, its influence was soon felt. After selling an impressive 20,000 copies, a second edition was produced that fed into the upsurge of anarchist-inspired ‘punkzines’ appearing into the early 1980s. Though few ventured quite as far as Toxic Grafity, many tried and some came close. Lee Gibson’s various fanzines – A Movement With No Name, Protesting Children Minus the Bondage, Anathema et al. – initially emerged contemporaneously with Diboll’s efforts and similarly explored the depths of inner-space. Again, dense prose across multiple pages depicted desolation and frustration, before an interest in the occult and collaborations with the poet Andy T (Andy Thorley) and the illustrator/artist Kim Baxter suggested some respite. Andy Martin’s Scum, too, employed a deliberately provocative approach to cajole apathetic punks towards ‘free thort and aktion [sic]’.Footnote ⁴⁶ By so doing, Martin meshed class invective with notions of autonomy that read simultaneously inspiring and unhinged.

Patterns emerged. Artworks – primarily collages and illustrations – engaged with recurring themes: war, religion, gender constructs, misogyny and animal rights. These sometimes recalled the art produced by Gee Vaucher and Lance d’Boyle (Gary Robins) for Crass and Poison Girls, respectively, but they also revealed genuinely original talents such as Baxter and Re-action’s Cam Smith, who later worked for Marvel Comics and 2000 AD. A haranguing tone, didactic and scolding, likewise became common, as if anarchist questioning proffered definite answers; catechisms almost: ‘marriage is a deed of possession in submission which is perpetuated by socialisation in order to maintain social control and social order’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Equally, the bands featured in anarcho-zines began to repeat, connecting across the emergent culture but also contributing to a sense of uniformity. More interesting for our purposes, then, was how anarcho-punk writing extended the exploratory politics of punk’s initial intervention, particularly with regard to understanding the parameters of anarchism.

If, as Crass suggested, anarchy was an alternative to the political binaries of ‘left’ and ‘right’, then what did this entail and how could it be applied? To flick through punk’s anarcho-zines in the early 1980s is to find an ongoing debate in which ideas were offered, contemplated, adopted and sometimes rejected. A critique of ‘the system’ was relatively easy to articulate and apply, leading to countless tirades against the government, parliamentary democracy, the military, monarchy, police, religion, the meat industry, vivisection, capitalism, state-directed communism, fascism, media, marriage, law courts, schools and the arms industry. But how to respond? What could or should anarchists do? What did anarchy look like?

The answers varied between the open-ended and the definitive. Usually presented alongside band features and political collage, with addresses for radical bookshops and campaign groups scattered nearby, they typically took the form of short essays that raised questions, considered problems, then proffered a solution. Hundreds were penned across the gamut of punk’s fanzine culture, but a few examples should suffice to give a sense of the form.

Matt Macleod’s 1981 essay for Enigma began by recognising how human actions were always controlled ‘to some degree’ by morality. Even oppression was typically justified in moral terms, he argued. These, in turn, were informed principally by religion and, ‘in the western capitalist world’, Christianity. ‘The values and lifestyles of this system also have their roots in the doctrines of this fiendish cult’, he continued, locating sexual repression and gender stereotypes as a product of the church. By the same token, a faith in political ‘dogma’ served also as a block on freedom, meaning anarchism must never be reduced to ‘a distinct code of ethics’. Rather, any revolution needed to be a revolution ‘in the way we think and feel’. Only then would the ‘natural order of anarchy’ be realised.Footnote ⁴⁸

For Karin, writing in the more general punkzine Trees and Flowers, the question was a practical one: ‘could the anarchy theory ever work’? She began with a definition: ‘Free co-operation amongst individuals.’ And yet most people saw anarchy as chaotic and violent; the antithesis of a peaceful and free society. A contradiction? No, she mused, because violence stemmed from power, the processes of which we are conditioned to accept from birth. In fact, she continued, disaffection was born of capitalist relations: people working for other people and the family serving as a ‘unit only of consumption not production’. Stuck in ‘boring jobs’ or working ‘for a pittance’, people lived for money. But how to change? The political structures in Britain were too entrenched to ‘just dissolve’, Karin reasoned: ‘As the system becomes more complex the individual becomes less free’. Violent revolution was not the answer, tending only to replace one repressive system with another. People had to escape the system through ‘choice’, she concluded, alluding to punk, anarchy and peace as the means to escape the ‘rules [that] control their lives’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Anarchy and peace conformed to Crass’ pacifism and support for CND. Not all young punks adhered, however, ensuring fanzines offered space to initiate discussions that no doubt repeated around various pubs, clubs, squats and bedsits across the country. Indeed, the first two issues of Kill Your Pet Puppy, one of the most well-known and widely read punk fanzines of the 1980s, were in large part dedicated to the question of anarchy’s relationship to violence. Occasioned by the disruption of a recent Crass and Poison Girls gig, whereat assorted anti-fascists and Socialist Worker Party-aligned ‘squadists’ did battle with British Movement neo-Nazis, the ensuing debate saw both bands condemn the violence on either side. In reply, members of – and those close to – the ‘Puppy Collective’ offered varied responses, loosely concluding that ‘violent anarchy must fail’ but that ‘Violent Actions in the name and cause of Anarchy are essential [sic]’.Footnote ⁵⁰

As this suggests, at least some young punks began to transform their ideas into a politics that pushed beyond the parameters outlined in Crass’ and the Poison Girls’ early records and interviews. Taken to an extreme, this led to fanzines such as Ian Rawes’ Pigs for Slaughter committing to direct action and the instigation of a short-lived Anarchist Youth Federation (AYF) that claimed small pockets of support across the UK.Footnote ⁵¹

Pigs for Slaughter declared itself a ‘practical paper for the militant anarchist punk’. Started in 1981, it offered guides to graffiti and more combative forms of ‘anarchy and rage’. There ‘comes a point’, the pilot issue insisted, when ‘all our fine ideas have to be backed up with direct, militant action’.Footnote ⁵² This, in practice, meant reporting on statist or ruling-class modes of control – tear gas, the Special Patrol Group (SPG), the Economic LeagueFootnote ⁵³ – and encouraging acts of resistance such as establishing anarchy centres, making petrol bombs and initiating sticker campaigns to blitz London‘s tube trains.Footnote ⁵⁴ The AYF even extolled carrying out acts of vandalism on banks and ‘expensive cars’, while at least one shop accused of exploiting punk fashion, BOY on the King’s Road, survived a failed firebombing.Footnote ⁵⁵

Interestingly, the pilot issue included a rather awkward interview with Crass, during which competing conceptions of anarchy were discussed.Footnote ⁵⁶ More typically, Rawes expressed his frustration with punk and punk-related anarchism through typed essays that concluded Britain and Europe were entering a ‘new feudal age’. Soon, he reasoned, ‘society will be made up of the very rich + very poor [sic]’. The state would serve to enforce this, meaning ‘subversives + activists [sic]’ needed to resort to force ‘when absolutely necessary’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Clearly, making music and issuing statements were no longer enough. ‘Music will never succeed in changing society’, Rawes concluded: ‘the only language politicians understand is that of Molotovs + burning police cars [sic]’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Such disappointment at the limitations of punk and the ineffectiveness of cultural revolt became a common trope of punk fanzine writing. Among anarchist milieus, therefore, activism and support for various campaigns were an obvious next step, aligning young punks to women’s groups, the peace movement and, increasingly, animal rights. But it was in the fanzines that arguments were first rehearsed. Positions might shift and evolve over time. The eager and earnest demands of youth might soon give way to more sober rationale. Nevertheless, the questions had been asked and the imagination piqued. Punk fanzines, through their practice and critiques, opened the way for formative political expression and debate.

Ability Stinks: Conclusions

If anarchy infused a particular stream of punk culture, then an array of politics found expression across the range of punk and punk-informed fanzines disseminated over the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. Overtly socialist fanzines in the 1980s covered bands such as Redskins and provided a medium for ‘ranter’ poets to vent their spleen against racism, sexism and the policies of Margaret Thatcher.Footnote ⁵⁹ Far-right punk bands gradually emerged, bringing with them swastika-daubed pages featuring the likes of Skrewdriver and eventually paving the way for the globally distributed Blood & Honour magazine.Footnote ⁶⁰ Feminist content had been evident in punk-related fanzines from at least early 1977 and, by the 1990s, informed a riot grrrl culture defined as much by zines as by music.Footnote ⁶¹ More usually, perhaps, ‘think-pieces’ might only occasionally permeate the dominant music coverage of a typical fanzine, reflecting on anything from education to the miners’ strike of 1984–85. Interview questions, too, sometimes drifted from ‘best gig’ and record news to enquiries on a band’s politics and opinion. Then again, a wholesale rejection of politics was not uncommon, usually on the grounds of divisiveness or tedium (which, paradoxically, was itself an inherently political response). But whatever ideological direction was signalled, the approach remained broadly the same: relatively short statements caught somewhere between the inquisitive and definitive, recognising problems and searching subjectively for solutions.

As this suggests, and like the music they covered, punk and punk-related fanzines could be innovative and formulaic, provocative and crude, exciting and dull, insightful and stupid. Yet they all served as a medium – a cultural and political space – where opinion was aired and ideas tested. For Lucy Robinson, in an influential essay moving from ‘the history of zines’ towards ‘zines as history’, fanzines not only allowed young people to formulate their own politics, but also to construct alternative canons and disrupt dominant narratives. Be it ‘riot grrrls looking for inspiration from suffragettes, or anarcho-punks learning the lessons from a previous generation’s activists, or queer activists building community memorials’, zines proposed competing genealogies and the possibility of new historical interpretations. Fanzines offered – and continue to offer – a way of ‘writing identities into formation’, Robinson argues, drawing attention to their reflexive discussion and multiple lines of enquiry.Footnote ⁶²

Ultimately, as a genre of political writing, punk fanzines enabled young people to communicate what and how they liked. Paul’s Suburban Revolt began from a blank sheet of paper, conveying no formal rules or restrictions as to what could be covered or expressed. Constraints were imposed only by knowledge, imagination and, to an obvious extent, the finance to produce and distribute more than a limited number of copies. As a result, the politics of punk fanzine writing and creation lay as much in facilitating as in formulating arguments and opinions. In general terms, they provided a means of expression and served as hubs in cultural and political networks. They also allowed for future writers, illustrators and political activists to learn and develop their craft and ideas. Punk fanzine writing was formative and generally unresolved; it comprised a genre where politics began to gestate and offer a glimpse of youthful psyches striving to make sense of the world.

The 1984–85 miners’ strike is well-known for the flourishing of women’s activism within coalfields in support of the miners’ cause. During the year-long dispute that occasioned tremendous hardship, the wives, mothers, daughters and friends of miners came together to provide food and other much-needed goods to mining communities in various locally based groups, sometimes operating under the banner of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) – sponsored Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC). Both at the time and later, the stories of women who became involved in such activism were told through many different media, sometimes by other people and sometimes by themselves. Films, articles, newspapers and – most importantly from the perspective of this chapter – books abounded, celebrating the achievements of these activists. As we have discussed elsewhere, most coalfield women during the miners’ strike were not involved in such activism, and in many ways the construction of a heroic picture of working-class women acting in support of their menfolk was overblown and problematic.Footnote ¹ This chapter, however, examines the representations of this subset of women in the group books published by many women who had been involved in local strike support groups to document their history. We want to think further as to the purposes of these texts: why and how were they produced, how did the conventions of genre shape them, and who were the intended audiences? Such works were published by radical presses that both drove and were the product of the community publishing boom of the 1970s and 1980s. They can be seen as attempts by the writers and publishers involved to not simply represent politically active working-class women, but to actively construct them as a new political constituency.

The creative outputs of women from the coalfields during the strike gained significant media coverage at the time: poetry and songs were not only performed at strike meetings and political rallies but also shared in newsletters and pamphlets, and indeed, filmed by Ken Loach in a documentary Which Side Are You On?, shown on Channel 4.Footnote ² These works ranged widely in terms of their publishers and personnel. Some books, such as Raphael Samuel, Guy Boanas, and Barbara Bloomfield’s edited collection, The Enemy Within, and Vicky Seddon’s The Cutting Edge, were large projects, published by established left-wing publishers, and edited and/or written by leftist intellectuals with significant public profiles.Footnote ³ Sold across the country, they were aimed at a broad, albeit left-wing, audience. Some of these works, such as The Enemy Within, were collages of the experiences of many different men and women both within and outwith the coalfields during the strike, often using excerpts from strike diaries or recorded interviews with activists. Others, such as The Cutting Edge, focused on women alone. Published in 1986, this work had been edited by Marxism Today writer Vicky Seddon and was the product of an event at Northern College near Barnsley, where women had gathered to record and write the experiences that went into the book. The book was notably feminist in tone, emphasising the achievements of activist women and their struggles with the patriarchal NUM. Whilst not all contributors shared Seddon’s view that activism during the strike represented the ‘flowering of the mining women’ and ‘the fruit of the current phase of the movement for women’s liberation’, Seddon was not alone in her approach.Footnote ⁴ In 1987, Guardian journalist Jean Stead published a book based on interviews with coalfield activists entitled Never the Same Again: Women and the Miners’ Strike, which claimed that women of the coalfields had invented a working-class feminism.Footnote ⁵ Similarly, Here We Go, a major book funded by the London Region Co-operative Retail Services Political Committee, celebrated the activism of women’s movement from coalfields across the country through excerpts from interviews republished anonymously.Footnote ⁶ Whilst the editors Chrys Salt and Jim Layzell did attend to the complexities of the support movement, their choice of chapter headings such as ‘Grass-Roots Feminism’ suggests how a narrative of political transformation ultimately framed the book. Whether or not the support movement constituted a form of working-class feminism has been a question that has dominated both popular and academic discussions of coalfield women’s strike activism ever since.

The focus of this chapter, however, is the accounts produced by individual women’s groups and regional networks during and shortly after the strike, which, although numerous, are cited less frequently in the academic literature on the strike. It is difficult to put an exact figure on the number of books of this kind that were produced, but there were at least several dozen. They were generally much shorter than the substantial works edited by Seddon, and Salt and Layzell, and usually published by local radical presses that were part of the worker–writer and community publishing movement, which often gave significant aid in the writing and production of these books.Footnote ⁷ A few of these works centred on communities, encompassing the experiences of men and women in the strike, but the majority focused on women alone.Footnote ⁸ These works tended to be more polyfocal than the works published by larger publishers; they gave a platform to a large range of voices and were often a collage of group history, individual biography, photographs and poetry, a format that had been pioneered by the community publishing movement.Footnote ⁹ Unlike the works published by larger publishers, the political message of such works was multifaceted; some of the voices featured clearly had a sophisticated political interpretation of the strike, but in others, politics with a capital ‘P’ was less often to the fore, with discussions of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ taking precedence instead; like the punks of the previous chapter in this collection, some women refuted the very idea of themselves as political. And, in another parallel with punk fanzines, such works were often distinctively homespun in their design and manufacture, with the limited funds available to publishers resulting in books that were often printed on cheap materials, and looked qualitatively different from the productions of mainstream publishers. Such aesthetic choices were perhaps the product more of circumstance than design; yet they also worked to underscore the ‘ordinariness’ of the women who produced the books.

Academic interpretations of this work tend to emphasise the apparently transformational qualities of the strike on coalfield women’s lives. For example, Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson have suggested that ‘after the strike, some women found it impossible to return to their previous roles and relationships and realisation of the impact of this on both men and women was recognised in performative women’s writing’.Footnote ¹⁰ Katy Shaw’s study of representations of the miners’ strike has also reproduced this ‘heroic’ narrative of women’s experiences in the strike to an even greater extent, arguing that coalfield women’s writing illuminates the transformation that women underwent in the strike: ‘women who remained untouched by the previous decade’s feminist revolution were radicalised’,Footnote ¹¹ ‘moved from the private sphere to the public, from passive to active social, political and economic roles’,Footnote ¹² and made a ‘conscious break’ with Thatcherite individualism.Footnote ¹³ But such accounts take women’s strike writing as a transparent record of experience, rather than understanding it as deeply implicated within the political struggle of the strike, shaped by the imperative to support that struggle and construct a political constituency of coalfield women, and written from within a shared culture of images, reference points and ideas. Clearly, these are works that read very differently in political intent compared to, for example, a party manifesto. Yet we would nevertheless argue that it is both appropriate and enlightening to understand these books as a distinct form of political writing. Indeed, it is precisely the genre-crossing nature of these works that allows them to constitute this distinct form. And to examine them as a form of political writing – despite the varying relationships of those featured within them to the idea of the political – allows us to understand something important about the relationship of working-class women to politics; that is to say, the way in which political claims often had to be couched in the language of ordinariness, or even of anti-politics, in order to be regarded as legitimate.

The Making of a Genre

The opportunities for these works by coalfield women to be published and read by a broad audience were hugely expanded by the community publishing boom of the 1970s and 1980s, which – as Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite has previously noted – was partly facilitated by the new popularity of ‘history from below’ and oral history.Footnote ¹⁴ Small presses set up by left-wing activists published huge numbers of pamphlets and books related to politics, history and local affairs. Often, such groups and publishers came under the umbrella of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) formed in 1976.Footnote ¹⁵ This fuelled an appetite to hear more of the stories of ‘ordinary’ people from the past. Books such as Below Stairs – Margaret Powell’s memoir of her life as a servant in the 1920s – and A Child in the Forest – Winifred Foley’s account of her life growing up in the Forest of Dean – were hugely popular during the 1970s, going through many editions.Footnote ¹⁶ They were accompanied by large numbers of books from local radical publishers, such as QueensPark books in Brighton, which published titles such as Daisy Noakes’s The Town Beehive: A Young Girl’s Lot, Brighton 1920–1934.Footnote ¹⁷ The (re)turn to working-class autobiography as a form was a political act. As the FWWCP wrote, ‘Through such books many people are able to find large parts of themselves because they shared the same or a similar environment or experiences.’Footnote ¹⁸ By describing their own lives, it was hoped, other working-class women could also recognise their experiences, and potentially come to a shared recognition of their class oppression. This aim was rarely made explicit in the working-class autobiographies produced either by the FWWCP or by women during the strike – and was probably not consciously recognised by many women who took part in the making of these books – but nevertheless underpinned the politics of many of those who were involved in bringing these books into production.

These books that were written during the strike were not, therefore, the first time that working-class women had written in an autobiographical mode, or had discussed political activism in print. Indeed, they were part of a much longer tradition of working-class autobiography which had roots stretching back into the early nineteenth century. Of particular note are two landmark books that were published in the early twentieth century by the Women’s Co-operative Guild – 1915’s Maternity and 1931’s Life As We Have Known It.Footnote ¹⁹ These books were formed through the collation of autobiographical letters sent to the (middle-class) leader of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, Margaret Llewellyn Davies; in their political purpose and collective nature, these works were perhaps the closest forerunners of the books that we see from the strike. Here, the autobiographical was used to illuminate the condition of working-class women’s lives in order to motivate political action, though not all the women who wrote within these texts considered themselves to be explicitly political.Footnote ²⁰ However, as Chris Hilliard has noted, the letters for these projects – or, at least, Life As We Have Known It – did not appear to have been directly solicited for a book, but were rather collections of letters that Llewellyn Davies had received over the years.Footnote ²¹ Furthermore, whilst working-class women had produced autobiographies before the moment of community publishing, they had been very few in number compared to men. It is, thus, appropriate to understand the group biographies that were produced by working-class women during the strike as something genuinely novel within the landscape of working-class autobiography, at least in terms of the scale of the exercise.

The motivations for publishing books about women’s experiences during the strike were many.Footnote ²² Often, they were a means of raising money for the cause, both during but particularly after the strike, when there was still a great financial need to assist sacked miners and those in debt after the dispute (Northumberland miners’ wives book, We are women, we are strong, even had pictures of those miners that were sacked in the frontispiece of the book)Footnote ²³. But as Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson have suggested, the production and sale of publications authored by the women provided an opportunity for fundraising, boosting morale and continuing community activism beyond the strike’s end. Something of the motivations for publishing these books in the aftermath of the strike was revealed by a visitor from the Dearne Valley Project (run by the Northern College and the Workers’ Educational Association in the aftermath of the strike to assist the run-down community in South Yorkshire):

Confidence (a recurring trope in discussions both by and about women who had been involved in the strike)Footnote ²⁵ and self-pride were clearly key motivators here, as was the idea of recording their actions for posterity, at least in the form of providing a history for friends and family. It is not clear whether or not this group’s attempt at publication came to anything; we have not been able to locate a book for the group itself, though it is not impossible that their stories were incorporated in other works on the strike. Likewise, a series of handwritten autobiographies in the Jill Page collection at Feminist Archive North appear to relate to the activities of women who had been active during the strike in West Yorkshire, but it is not entirely clear how they were produced, for what end, or whether they saw publication (again, we have been able to find no obvious record). That these reminiscences were, however, in the archive of Page – a Women’s Liberation Movement activist and city councillor in Leeds – suggests that she was probably involved in soliciting the material in some way herself, perhaps seeing herself as encouraging or offering assistance to these women.Footnote ²⁶

There are other occasions where we get a small glimpse into the process of how these books came into being, something which occasionally comes to light in other texts. In Askern, South Yorkshire, a writer called Jane Thornton was paid – probably by Doncaster Council, though it is not entirely clear – to interview women from the local support group and write up their words into a book, All the Fun of the Fight, that was published by Doncaster Library Services.Footnote ²⁷ (Thornton later wrote a play about the strike using interviews with women across South Yorkshire, Amid the Standing Corn.) This book was unusual, however, in having a named author who was not a member of the support group. Perhaps more typical was the experience of Janine Head, Mavis Watson and Teresa Webb – members of the Normanton and Altofts Support Group in West Yorkshire, who together produced a book called Striking Figures. They inform us in a section titled ‘How We Wrote this Book’ that a friend of the group knew members of the community publishing group ‘Artivan’, who assisted with the production.Footnote ²⁸ They wrote:

The work took them 18 months.Footnote ³⁰ Collectives such as Artivan were part of the radical and community publishing boom: indeed, prior to the strike, Artivan had already been working on a book with women from Woolley Colliery in South Yorkshire; though again, we have been able to find no record of this, perhaps suggesting the number of such projects which were ultimately abandoned.Footnote ³¹ The process of constructing the working-class autobiographies that such collectives published was described thus in a book published by the FWWCP:

It seems that similar methods were employed for the production of some strike books. The Coventry Miners’ Wives book, Mummy, What did you do in the strike? acknowledged the help of a transcriber, which suggests that at least some of the biographical pieces originated in taped interviews.Footnote ³³ What is certain is that these were collective works, often produced in non-conventional ways that decentred traditional notions of authorship; and such a focus on radical co-operation was, of course, part of the politics of women’s groups in support of the strike.

The distinctiveness of these books produced by coalfield women about the strike came from the mixing of genres, and poetry as well as autobiography featured heavily. Poetry about the strike was often included in books and pamphlets about the women’s support movement; there were also a number of works published that were specifically dedicated to strike poetry. Poems were also published in broadsides and support group newsletters during the strike and performed at meetings in support of the strike; these very much circulated during the strike, too, in written and spoken forms. As with the group books published about the strike, such work also tended to be published by community publishers. Jean Gittins’ 1986 volume Striking Stuff, for example, was initially published by the ‘1 in 12 Collective’ – an anarchist social club in Bradford that had grown out of a particularly active branch of the Claimants’ Union there. This is suggestive as to the politics that undergirded such publishing enterprises.Footnote ³⁴ Unsurprisingly, the NUM also funded some publications, such as Against All the Odds, a book of poetry published whilst the strike was still underway.

This was not the first time a radical working-class movement had placed great value on poetry – the Chartist movement saw a great outpouring of poetry by working-class writers, informed by the Romantics. But the use of poetry was a striking feature of the activism of the dispute. So where did it come from? First of all, poetry had a long-standing place in working-class culture, with recitals of poems, usually comic poems, a staple of music hall and variety performances in working men’s clubs since the nineteenth century. More broadly, Jonathan Rose has pointed to the place of poetry in working-class reading culture in Britain, Christopher Hilliard has pointed to the democratisation of writing in the inter-war period, and Carolyn Steedman has written of the ways in which primary schools and some progressive secondary moderns turned to creative writing as a way of encouraging the working-class child to express herself, and hence to develop her sense of self.Footnote ³⁵ Such developments encompassed poetry as well as prose. Furthermore, as the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers suggested, poetry as a form was much more amenable to being written in short bursts, as opposed to long stints of time required by longer-form writing – something rarely possible for those with exhausting manual jobs and/or domestic responsibilities.Footnote ³⁶ Poetry thus occupied a contradictory place in the democratisation of creative writing, a place which made it particularly attractive to many women during the strike. Poetry was seen as a site for the direct expression of authentic emotion, but to write a poem was also to appropriate perhaps the most culturally elite form of creative writing.Footnote ³⁷

Generally, women’s strike poems followed a rhyme scheme, often rhyming couplets throughout; very few engaged with modernist or experimental forms. Their references were not to the poetic canon but to the experience of the strike. As Spence and Stephenson have suggested, women were not ‘[not] unaware of the question of literary excellence but … this was consciously abjured in favour of expression about experiences and the women’s understanding of the meaning in their experience’.Footnote ³⁸ The meter used varied, sometimes within a poem: iambic meter, or the regular beat of folk songs, chants and nursery rhymes, or the cadences of limericks or nonsense verse like that of Edward Lear. Many of the iconic images and phrases of the strike recur repeatedly: Thatcher – referred to as the ‘Iron Lady’ – and MacGregor – referred to as the ‘butcher’ – and variations on phrases like ‘coal not dole’ and ‘side by side with our men’. To encounter the repetition of such phrases so often is to understand something of the way in which this poetry sprung from a common well of shared references, experiences and idioms, while also expressing the individual writer’s thoughts and feelings; it was a collective endeavour as well as a personal one.

A mixture of the motivations, meanings and forms of strike books and poetry was well indicated by a poem that appeared at the back of the work for Coventry Miners’ Wives Mummy … what did you do in the strike?

In this poem, we see the solidification of a certain narrative about what women’s groups did in the strike, and the narrative arc these books took. We also see a self-reflexivity about the act of writing the book itself, which serves to underscore its novelty; the final stanza also points to the fact that as well as being undertaken to raise funds, the production of the books themselves could cost considerable money. Through providing a written form, narratives such as these (both in poetry and prose) gave a framework through which to understand the activities of the women’s groups, and make them legible to the wider world. Yet, inevitably, such narratives also worked to create and fix the political meaning of the support groups, giving a sometimes spurious coherence to the vastly diverse experiences and politics of the support groups and their members. The figure of the socially conscious coalfield woman during the strike was – if not precisely created by these books – then at least considerably fleshed out.

Women’s strike books thus represented a significant moment in women’s autobiographical and political writing, where working-class women were self-consciously writing as part of a movement of working-class women on a scale that had not been seen before. Sally from the Coventry Miners’ Wives’ Support Group remembered in Mummy … What Did You Do In The Strike? that:

In North Yorkshire Women’s Against Pit Closures’ Strike 84–85, one woman remembered that:

There is a strong sense here of coalfield women becoming visible for the first time as a political constituency. The books were also an attempt at securing a place in posterity for both the strike and the women’s support groups, and to underline the importance of the latter to the former. Through the act of producing these works, women were quite literally writing themselves into the historical record and making a claim for the significance of working-class women. Indeed, the Normanton group began their book with:

This can often be seen through the titles of the works themselves. For example, Mummy, What did you do in the strike? – whilst obviously referencing World War One propaganda posters – clearly has the sense of an imagined future in which women’s role in the strike is significant enough for children to be asking about it. By writing a book with this very title, the authors were trying to will such a future into existence.

The ‘Ordinary’ and the ‘Political’

One of the key mechanisms through which this figure of the socially conscious coalfield woman was created in these works was through the inclusion of substantial biographical detail about group members. The plotted biographies that one can find within these pages often followed a common narrative arc: members would recount their life pre-strike, emphasising they had been simply ‘ordinary’ housewives and mothers, before moving onto an account of their activism during the strike, and how it had changed them as people. Regenia Gagnier observed of nineteenth-century British working-class autobiography that ‘most working-class autobiographies do not begin with a family lineage or birthdate, but rather with an apology for their author’s ordinariness’, further discussing the centrality of the ‘confession of ordinariness’ to these texts.Footnote ⁴³ This ordinariness was also key to the self-presentation of working-class writers who were published by the FWWCP one hundred years later; and in the writing produced by women during the miners’ strike, such dynamics were still central. Examples are not difficult to find. In their strike book, We are women, we are strong, Northumberland miners’ wives started a section entitled ‘The women behind the Northumberland miners’ with the words ‘we were just ordinary housewives when our men came out on strike’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Striking Figures, Mavis Watson from Normanton recounted that:

Looking back on the strike, Royston Drift WAPC wrote, in a similar vein:

And one woman from Barnsley, Maria, remembered that:

Such women’s sense of self was fundamentally rooted in communal traditions and norms; constructed through, and not in contrast with, community. These plotted biographical accounts we see in strike accounts were not quests through which the writer established their individuality. Rather, they were accounts given precisely because the women featured were taken to be representative of their community. Unlike much auto/biography, which makes a claim for the uniqueness of its subject,Footnote ⁴⁸ the point of focusing on these women was that they were typical, not special – ordinary rather than extraordinary. In this, they were again following conventions of the genre of working-class autobiography established by community publishers in the 1970s; as the FWWCP noted in 1982, ‘The detailed autobiography can also function as a “general autobiography” – one that reflects, details, analyses and critically validates much of what has been lived in common with others.’Footnote ⁴⁹ As such, it was deeply important to these women to emphasise that they were ‘ordinary’, ‘respectable’ wives and mothers looking out for their families and communities; this is how these texts established their legitimacy. In emphasising this ordinariness, coalfield women also invoked a particular vision of the family based on heterosexual couples and ‘traditional’ gender roles, and drew on a long tradition of progressive maternalist politics which carved out a public role for women by suggesting that their ‘natural’ caring talents ideally suited them to promoting the health and wellbeing of working-class families and communities.Footnote ⁵⁰ Furthermore, women attempted to position themselves as legitimate political actors through recourse to the authority of their personal experience and the ‘authentic’ expression of personal emotion; these were key ways through which coalfield women could, as subaltern actors, legitimise their political aspirations.

‘Ordinariness’ was also underscored by an emphasis on the quotidian aspects of life in coal-mining communities both before and during the strike. Tales of daily routine abounded; and there was often inclusion of material such as children’s school work. Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures reproduced a six-year-old’s description of a rally in Barnsley, childish handwriting and all;Footnote ⁵¹ Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures and North Yorkshire Women Against Pit Closures deployed the same tactic.Footnote ⁵² Often reproduced in facsimile, such material reminded the readers not just that children were affected by the strike, but that those producing the books had the usual feminine commitments of home and childcare. The inclusion of such material suggested the maternalist basis of some of the politics of women during the strike; this was a fight for families and communities that was being staged from women’s position as mothers, rather than against it. This material further worked to underscore the idea that those involved in fighting the strike were ordinary, everyday people: after all, what could be more ordinary, more everyday, than a school exercise?

Emphasising ‘ordinariness’ also worked as a foil for the narratives of individual transformation which often characterised these accounts, where the strike was presented as a moment that occasioned deep personal change. An Ashington woman whose memories were recorded in a collection of stories from Northumberland miners’ wives said:

An anonymous woman from Sheffield wrote ‘The people I’ve met and the places I’ve been over the past months! I would never have done so if it wasn’t for joining the women’s group.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Likewise, Margaret from the Lothian Women’s Support Group, said that ‘I didn’t think much about politics .… Now, since the end of the strike, I’ve got politically motivated’.Footnote ⁵⁵ (Here, presenting oneself as not interested in politics works as a way of underscoring claims about ordinariness, or working-class authenticity.) Often, these reminiscences could be intensely personal. North Yorkshire WAPC’s Strike 84–85, for example, contained a series of striking personal vignettes about the backgrounds of the group members. One member discussed the physical violence she had suffered at the hands of her husband, who had put her in hospital several times; another discussed her agoraphobia, which had left her housebound for thirteen years; another her severe depression; and another her ‘obsession’ with housework.Footnote ⁵⁶ In all cases, these women claimed that participation in strike activism had substantially changed their lives. Whilst such stories did, of course, make the tales of post-strike transformation seem even more impressive, such intensely personal confessions do not seem to be entirely necessary. Yet we should understand the inclusion of such intimate information as part of a discursive strategy through which women positioned themselves as authentic working-class actors because of their difficult life experiences. Through the authority of their lived experiences, they positioned themselves as legitimate commentators on coalfield communities.

Much of women’s writing in the strike also elucidated and celebrated women activists’ achievements and linked those achievements to a growing self-confidence – or even ‘liberation’ – for those involved. Some of the most vivid examples of this occur in women’s strike poetry. One woman wrote, ‘Lost is our image of a timid housewife/Gained is a new outlook of a woman’s role in life’; women had ‘learned to cook for hundreds’, carrying on a tradition begun in 1926, but had also done ‘much more’, standing on picket lines beside the men.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, some of the most interesting poems imagined what men thought about the shifts they saw in the lives of women. Betty Cook, for example, wrote a long poem from the perspective of a miner who had married his wife – ‘A quieter lass tha couldn’t meet’ – in 1978, but who found that in the strike she had turned into ‘a right dragon’, fighting police on the picket line, and the ‘same in t’house and all/she’s always at some meeting or shouting Coal not Dole’. Cook imagined this husband as conflicted:

However, many of the personal stories included in strike books were not constructed around a dramatic tale of coming to political consciousness, but rather, highlighted more subtle shifts in women’s habitus – their mode of being in the world and of relating to others – during the strike. In the second volume of Barnsley WAPC’s account of the group’s strike activism, for example, one ‘retired miner’s wife’ recounted how one day in summer 1984, another activist phoned to ask if she could go to London the next morning: ‘[t]hat is impossible I replied. I always go shopping to supermarket [sic] on Thursday morning. My friend replied, what happened to the women [sic] that enjoys doing unplanned things? This was a challenge! I drew breath and asked, ‘how, why, what time?’’Footnote ⁵⁹ They were going to join the lobby of parliament in support of the Miners’ Day of Action. The author described the ‘flood’ of coaches, the ‘feeling of optimism’ on the march and the ‘ecstatic’ reception of Arthur Scargill’s speech. She concluded that it was a ‘day I saw solidarity in action’, and added, ‘P.S. I went to the supermarket the day after’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This ending, whilst undoubtedly humorous, served to emphasise just how significant it was to this woman to break with her established routine. Stories like this constructed the strike as a moment when working-class women were able to assert more independence, and to subtly shift their understanding of themselves, from a relational mode of selfhood to a more autonomous sense of self.

The inclusion of so many of these tales of more subtle personal shifts, rather than of dramatic political awakenings, points to the way in which a number of these women were wary of describing themselves as ‘political’, a term which, to many, seemed to undermine their claim to ordinariness. Mavis Watson again remembered that ‘I was not a political person or anything like that, I just wanted to help’.Footnote ⁶¹ Nancy from Lothian Women’s Support Group also remembered that ‘When I got involved, I didn’t have any political reasons for doing so’.Footnote ⁶² And in Cortonwood – where, of course, the strike began – the women’s group remembered that:

Indeed, it was sometimes through the disavowal of the ‘political’ that the authors of these books were able to make claims that often read as highly political: through disavowing politics, activists were able to position themselves as women motivated not by partisan politics, but simply by concern for their communities.Footnote ⁶⁴

Conclusion

The collective accounts of the strike published by women’s support groups must be understood as a product of the community and radical publishing boom of the 1970s and 1980s, even as those involved in their production were rarely directly associated with the FWWCP. The reasons for the books were several; the fundraising efforts through which their production was often framed were only one part of a larger project of bringing working-class women to political consciousness, through giving confidence to those who took part and providing a form through which other working-class women could (it was hoped) recognise their own lives. As a form, strike books are distinguished by their collage of genres, and, within these genres, an emphasis on the everyday, quotidian and autobiographical. They are certainly distinctive as a form of political writing by their sometimes uneasy relationship with the very idea of the ‘political’. Often, the accessible and demotic nature of women’s strike accounts and poetry belies their complexity as texts. Too easily read as transparent accounts of coalfield women’s experiences and activism during the strike, they instead give us insight into the complex and symbiotic constructions of the ‘political’ and the ‘ordinary’, of ‘self’ and of ‘community’. Coalfield women staked their claim to ‘speak’ not as political activists, but rather through their position as ‘ordinary’ women. Deploying the ‘authentic’ self was crucial to being able to make these claims, and explains why writing about lived experience was so central to much of women’s writing on the strike. Furthermore, such a confession of ordinariness was demanded by the conventions of working-class autobiography as a genre. Finally, rather than being a reflection of the experiences of an already existing constituency of socially conscious ‘coalfield women’, these accounts are more accurately seen as a key part in the formation of that identity, and an attempt more broadly to construct those working-class women as a political constituency. As such, it is useful to read these books as a form of political literature and a distinctive moment in working-class writing.