Special Collections blog

As I reach the midway point of my year cataloguing the Kate Adie collection, my mind is turning to the ways in which we can engage people with its contents. Having a catalogue is the starting point for making the collection accessible and navigable, but there are further steps we want to take. One of these steps is to publish small thematic digital packages of material that give you a taste of what is here and invite further exploration.

The first digital package that we have put together relates to the UK miners’ strike 1984 – 1985, when around three-quarters of the country's 187,000 miners went on strike to oppose expected pit closures and job losses. It feels particularly appropriate to start with this in the 40^th anniversary year of the strike, using material from a collection that is located in the North East of England where memories of mining and of the strike are so strong.

[Click on the thumbnails below to open up individual images and video clips OR access a slideshow of all images and clips here]

The Kate Adie collection is particularly broad in its subject matter.  While Kate Adie is popularly known for reporting on disasters and conflicts around the world, she was a staff reporter for BBC news, covering whatever was assigned. This is evident in her reporter’s notebooks where a report on the miners’ strike sits next to a report on the summer holiday of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

We get a glimpse of the news gathering and reporting process, seeing rough notes and multiple drafts of reports in the notebooks. You’ll see that the text for each report is written in thin columns. Each line when read out would be one second in length, enabling the length of the report to be precisely timed.

Then we see those drafts refined into a television news report.

It’s worth noting the serendipitous survival of some material, with a local news cutting about Arthur Scargill probably being kept because of the news item about Kate Adie on the reverse.

The initial decision to call a national strike without a national ballot was controversial and later ruled illegal.

The striking mineworkers did receive support from some other workers, notably from the railwaymen, but the miners' eventual defeat marked a significant weakening in the power of the trade union movement.

The dispute was a bitter one, characterised by divisions between those striking and those working, and sometimes violent clashes between pickets and police.

Even the Queen was considered to have offered her view on the dispute.

Disputes arising from potential pit closures and job losses were not confined to the UK.

These materials are by no means the whole story of the miners' strike, but they offer a starting point for exploring key themes from one of the major UK labour disputes in the latter part of the twentieth century through contemporary reports. We  hope to develop this package further in future by adding material from a different perspective, that of our mining collections.

Acknowledgements:

• Items 1 and 5 are reproduced courtesy of the Sunderland Echo.
• Items 4, 7-10 and 12 are copyright of the BBC.

Find out more:

• If you are interested in knowing more about the Kate Adie collection or would like to discuss a future visit, please contact us: specialcollections@sunderland.ac.uk
• About the miners’ strike at the BBC
• National Coal Mining Museum miners’ strike resource
• See Mike Figgis’ film of the Battle of Orgreave, together with a selection of photographs taken during the 1984 North East miners’ strike including photos of pickets at Monkwearmouth and Easington collieries, marches and demonstrations in Sunderland and everyday family life at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
• About Archives Revealed, a partnership funding programme between The National Archives, the Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation to ensure that significant archive collections, representing the lives and perspectives of all people across the UK, are made accessible to the public for research and enjoyment.

The Special Collections team at the University of Sunderland Library had a great day at Sunderland History Fair (18th May 2024), showing items from our NEEMARC mining archive, and giving a preview of the Kate Adie Collection, currently being catalogued.  Events like this give a fascinating picture of the rich life of our city through the years.  Suddenly the groups of people working away all year round to conserve their slice of history for current and future generations all come together to form a fantastic mosaic showing how life has been lived here right up to our own time. 

There is so much to discover talking to the stall holders of so many groups, exchanging information and welcoming visitors to our own stall. Many visitors over the years have talked to us about their mining ancestors, their interest in their local area, their research into what life was like for those living where we now live, but in a different time.  Perhaps one day a future generation will be talking about what life was like for us!  

We have attended local history events since the NEEMARC Collection (North East England Mining Archive and Research Centre), funded by a Heritage Lottery award, was set up in 2007.  This collection contains records from The National Union of Mineworkers Durham Area (NUM), The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers (NEIMME) and the Durham branch of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS).  The main aim of the project is to preserve and catalogue the primary archival material within the NEEMARC collections and to make the items accessible to a wide range of users.

 This is a time of anniversaries for our mining history, particularly the miners'   strikes of the 1970s and 1980s and the pit closures, Wearmouth being the last   in the region in December 1993.  The mining industry and mining communities   are not forgotten; their stories are still told and heard through families and    local communities and through the work of the groups who curate their history   and who gather at  events like the Sunderland History Fair.  The current   exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle acknowledges the place of coal in its current Turner exhibition (Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia ), quoting John  Kippin referring to the  tensions between the tragic loss of life and injuries in the industry and the understandable nostalgia for the strong communities it  produced.

…those words in THAT voice are part of the soundtrack of my life. Watching the television news from the 1980s through to the 2000s, I would see Kate Adie reporting from around the world, her presence underlining the seriousness of a situation and her words helping to make sense of it. Now I am engaging with Kate Adie’s work afresh, as I begin the process of cataloguing her archive, which is held in her hometown at the University of Sunderland. 

If you haven’t encountered her work, Kate Adie is a British journalist who was the Chief News Correspondent of BBC TV news from 1989 to 2003. She is particularly known for her reports from disasters and conflicts, including the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege and the Tiananmen Square student protests in 1989, as well as wars in the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. Her reputation for reporting from areas of conflict also permeated broader public consciousness, evidenced in the collection by a number of newspaper cartoons riffing on the idea that having Kate Adie turn up was a signal that a situation was a serious one.

The first thing that struck me about the Kate Adie collection is its breadth. There are over 180 boxes of analogue and digital recordings, photographs, correspondence, souvenirs, objects, and news cuttings; all with a global span, from China to Libya, India to Bosnia, and Sunderland, always back to Sunderland. Through the records of one person’s career, we observe not only worldwide events, but the changing role of women in journalism and the evolution of news coverage, from a radio car in Durham to a mobile satellite dish delivering live links in a 24/7 news cycle.

This isn’t a neat institutional archive with ordered series, but a personal collection that reflects a life being lived: a ticket for a Sunderland football game might sit alongside a BBC assignment, notes for a speech at a charity event with the proceedings of a conference on journalism in conflict. That’s part of the joy of this particular archive, but also a professional challenge as I work to make it navigable by others.

The starting point, and my main focus for the year ahead, is to produce a catalogue that makes the collection accessible. It’s a piece of work made possible through Archives Revealed, a partnership funding programme between The National Archives, the Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation to ensure that significant archive collections, representing the lives and perspectives of all people across the UK, are made accessible to the public for research and enjoyment. Two months into the project and I can already see that there is a wealth of material that will be of interest to students and staff here in the University, as well as to local communities in Sunderland, and to groups, such as veterans’ associations, further afield. 

We’re also planning digital packages of material that support engagement with the richness of the collection. Drawing upon Kate Adie’s reporting from Libya, for example, we have the opportunity to draw together recordings of her news reports and the handwritten notes on which they were based, together with souvenirs and artefacts collected during her time on assignment. We have the contemporary reaction to that reporting from the Government, newspapers and public, as well as Kate Adie’s later reflections in speeches and public lectures on the experience of reporting conflict, ideas of impartiality, and the practice of journalism. 

I am really excited about the challenge ahead. Do check back over the coming months for updates on the progress of the project and as I share a few of my personal highlights. If you are interested in knowing more about the Kate Adie collection or would like to discuss a future visit, please contact us: specialcollections@sunderland.ac.uk.

There is a door on the top floor of Murray Health.  It is a door to different worlds - to the world of mining unions in the North East of England from the late 1800s to the 1990s; to the life of a BBC broadcast journalist travelling the news hotspots of the world; to the public policy work of a renowned film producer in the House of Lords, London; in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century; to the academic life of a social and economic historian who escaped Nazi Germany as a child to become a leader in his field in the second half of the twentieth century.  The building blocks of these worlds within our Library Special Collections are the records created and left by the people who lived those lives, giving us the opportunity to see and understand them today.  

It is too easy to say that archives (often described by critics as ‘dusty archives’!) are a waste of time and money and tell us nothing, and that nobody is interested. Evidence from the media and personal experience tells a different story, of a keen community and personal interest in what archives can tell us about the past and about ourselves. 

We can understand who we are as a community and our place as individuals through what we remember,

and through the stories and objects which are left for us.

A visit to an archive can be a visit to a particular time, community, place, or life. 

For example, our mining collection health & safety registers provide information on the injuries of named miners giving us a clearer picture of what health was like for miners working underground, and the very real dangers they faced day after day.  The minutes of union meetings give us information on wages and welfare and the challenges faced by actual families, and photographs and membership records provide a window into life in the unions. 

More than this, community memory and personal memory are bound together - we are part of continuous communities stretching from the past into the future.  Our personal memories stretch back to people, things and events now gone, but not forgotten, and the stories told us by previous generations take us further back through time.  Archive records illuminate these memories, make them real, provide evidence, and often reveal things we didn’t know or had misunderstood.

In taking archive information and records into the community at heritage events, we have seen people experience a variety of thoughts and emotions.  We have been with people moved to tears by an index entry which gave them closure on an event from years before.  We have watched people passionately arguing about the rights and wrongs of a strike long since ended but still alive in local communities and families.  We have seen peole sharing the experience of loss of community in the lives of families, and appreciating the things which have got better in the way we now live.  We have seen the challenge of researchers discovering that they need to refocus their research as the evidence from the archives shows a different picture from the one they thought had been true.

Archives, even though they have been created by a particular person, group or from a particular point of view, are windows, or doors, into the past or into aspects of the present which we have not personally experienced.  They can help us to understand our lives and they can influence our future. 

All this and more.  Material from the past is preserved in the hope and belief that it can illuminate the way we live now.