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“... and dirty work of separating out dross from coal; many of them became canteen workers instead. Joe Gormley was, and is, firmly against the idea of any ‘modern young ladies’ trying to secure coal-face jobs. He was outraged by the women carrying coal in baskets on their heads whom he encountered on his visit to India in 1975. As one would ...”

“... that cutting off supplies could drastically disrupt the nation’s industrial and domestic life. Joe Gormley accepted planned closures and redundancies, exacting in return wage rises which put miners back at the top of the earnings league. Edward Heath was unwise enough to get into confrontation with the miners, an important factor in his loss of the ...”

“... who rose to the post of NUM General Secretary under the presidency of Scargill’s predecessor, Joe Gormley. Daly was in many ways the opposite of Scargill: intellectually curious, extraordinarily well-read, ostensibly – and certainly in his later years, when he was destroying himself with drink – devoid of the kind of ambition that coursed through ...”

“... than in the coal industry. What the miners wanted was a deal which made them a special case. Joe Gormley even had a bright idea about how it could be justified. It is a mark of Heath’s wish to avoid confrontation that he (and, of course, Armstrong) had a secret meeting with the miners’ leader in the garden of 10 Downing Street. ...”

“... was elected two years before the dispute began, after a miscalculation by the previous president, Joe Gormley, who assumed he could hand over his job to someone else on the right of the union if he stayed in post long enough for the NUM’s communist vice president and Scottish area president, Mick McGahey, to be too old to run for the job (55 was the ...”

“... to ransom’, while some on the left attacked it as a sell-out. In the view of the NUM leader, Joe Gormley: ‘Our role in society is to look after our members, not run the country.’ It seems inconceivable now that British governments would kowtow to, or at least try to persuade and seduce, organisations of workers rather than bankers and financiers ...”

“... NUM in February 1981, when Sir Derek Ezra’s – reluctant – plans for pit closures provoked Joe Gormley into threatening a strike ballot which he could plainly have won. The Government thereafter took care to build up stocks of essential chemicals as well as coal at power stations, did its sums about the possibility of switching to oil if coal ...”

“... for he knows how amply each can enrich the other. Take, for instance, his excellent chapter on ‘Joe Gormley, Arthur Scargill and the Miners’. If all historians during the miners’ strike of 1984-5 had shown such balance, knowledge of context and willingness to face unpalatable truths, their profession might have done more to reduce the dreadful ...”