What has a century of strikes in Britain actually achieved?

There is a striking photograph on a wall in Shirebrook Miners Welfare club - still flourishing 33 years after the local colliery in this small North Derbyshire town closed for good.

- DONALD MACINTYRE

It’s of a shirt-sleeved AJ Cook, the man who led the pitmen’s union into one of the momentous events in 20th-century British history: the General Strike, which started 100 years ago today.

Beneath the portrait, someone has copied - in lovely old copperplate handwriting - some lines from the tribute of the Welsh poet Idris Davies.

“Here is Arthur Cook, a red rose in his lapel/ Astride on a wall, arousing his people .../ And tomorrow in all the hostile papers/ There will be sneers at Cook and all his capers/ And cowardly scribblers will be busy tonight/ Besmirching a warrior with the mud of their spite.”

The portrait and Davies’s verse are a reminder not only of how the strike lives on in the collective memory of British trade unionism, but also of how it divided the country at the time.

Faced with a threat to profits from falling exports, the then entirely private-sector mine owners - described by Neville Chamberlain at one point as “the stupidest and most narrow-minded employers I know” - had announced that pay would be cut and working hours increased for more than a million miners, and they would be locked out of their jobs until they agreed. Cook, who coined the slogan “Not a penny off the pay, not a second off the day”, appealed for wider support, which the TUC, greatly encouraged by Ernest Bevin, the then Transport and General Workers’ leader, agreed to provide by calling out another million and a half other trade unionists.