The 1972 national miners' strike began on 9 January with no widespread sympathy and very little hope. Joe Gormley, the National Union of Mineworkers' president, had asked for pay rises between 35 and 47 percent. The National Coal Board, under Derek Ezra, offered 7.4 percent. All 289 collieries in the country stopped producing. Woodrow Wyatt wrote in the Daily Mirror that "rarely have strikers advanced to the barricades with less enthusiasm or hope of success... the miners have more stacked against them than the Light Brigade in their famous charge." The strike was, for the men who voted to join it, a question of basic dignity. Miners' wages had fallen behind comparable industrial trades. The fuel that powered Britain came out of their lungs as well as their pits, and they wanted to be paid as if that mattered.

Having closed the collieries, the union's leverage came from what was already above ground. Britain's coal stockpiles were estimated at eight weeks' worth of national supply when the strike began -- but they were unevenly distributed, and they had to be moved by lorry and rail. The Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers instructed its members to stop working at colliery sites. The Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen told its members not to operate fuel trains. Pickets fanned out across the country to coal-fired power stations, ports and fuel depots. The Saltley Gate depot, run by the West Midlands Gas Board, became the symbolic centre because the gas board argued it employed no miners and so should be allowed to continue trading. Mile-long queues of lorries formed at its gates.

On 3 February the Birmingham Mail published a photograph of the lorries. A small group of Staffordshire miners drove down and started a picket line. They were not enough -- a few dozen men against hundreds of police -- and within days they had sent out a call for help. Several thousand miners came from South Yorkshire and South Wales. The South Yorkshire group arrived behind a young Arthur Scargill, a 33-year-old branch official from Barnsley who organised mass picketing with a flair for the symbolic gesture. The real turning point came when Birmingham's own engineering and toolmaking workers walked off the job in solidarity. They marched in their thousands to Saltley. Tens of thousands of trades unionists who had no direct stake in the coal dispute decided that the principle was worth a day's pay. By 10 February the crowd was unmanageable.

The picketing was, for the most part, peaceful. Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, accepted in Parliament that "the bulk of the picketing that has taken place has certainly been peaceful." Where police and miners clashed, the confrontations were described as scuffles and spirited shoving. But on 3 February at Keadby Power Station, near Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, a lorry mounted the pavement and struck Fred Matthews, a miner from the Doncaster area, killing him. Matthews was one of fifty pickets on duty that day. The lorry did not stop. The death sharpened the mood of every picket line in Britain. At Saltley, in the photographs from the morning of 10 February, you can see grief and anger and resolve in equal measure, in faces of men who knew that lorry drivers' brakes were sometimes the only thing between them and the same fate.

Sir Derrick Capper's order to close the depot gates was the first time a British police force had effectively conceded a major industrial dispute to the strikers. Capper had several hundred officers on the ground; he could have ordered them to clear the road, and the result would have been a battle his force would probably have lost without serious casualties on both sides. He chose closure instead. The episode came to be called "the miners' Agincourt," and the comparison was not entirely a joke -- a small army of pickets had outmanoeuvred a much larger industrial and state apparatus. Within days the government accepted the recommendations of the Wilberforce inquiry, granting most of the miners' pay demands. The strike ended on 28 February. Scargill became famous overnight, hailed by Harper's & Queen as one of Britain's leaders of the future. He would lead the NUM into the very different 1984-85 strike, where the state had learned its lessons and the outcome would be reversed -- the Battle of Orgreave standing as the deliberate state response to Saltley. The coke depot site is gone. The closure of the gates on that February morning, however, lives in trade union memory as the day workers defending their livelihoods made the country's chief industrial confrontation tilt their way, and made the next confrontation inevitable.