ABSTRACT
By the autumn of 1983 good progress had been made in building up coal stocks and in making other preparations to deal with the threat of a miners’ strike. There were grounds for expecting that a strike could have started before then and although there had been two NUM ballots in the preceding twelve months, in addition to one before Arthur Scargill took over as President, the recommendation to strike had been rejected on each occasion. 1 In October 1983 tensions between the NCB and the NUM were increasing over pit closures and it continued to seem likely that there would be a coal strike.
