Contact

Email: emily.gray@warwick.ac.uk

E-profile: Emily Gray

More information on the project:

https://www.derby.ac.uk/research/showcase/orgreave-service-speaks/

Orgreave - The Service Speaks

This is a two-year, AHRC-funded investigation that places the rank-and-file police officers deployed at the so-called “Battle of Orgreave” (18 June 1984) at the centre of the historical record. Four decades of scholarship and public memory have rightly focused on the miners and their communities, but we have little experiential data of those who policed the dispute on the day. By collecting and analysing these officers’ recollections while they are still available (most are now in their sixties) the project addresses a critical evidentiary gap in the historiography of late-twentieth-century industrial conflict and in contemporary debates about police legitimacy.

The study pursues three interlocking aims: (1) to generate the first systematic oral history of Orgreave’s policing; (2) to theorise how officers themselves make sense of procedural justice under acute political pressure; and (3) to re-situate those accounts within the wider documentary record, thereby testing and refining established narratives of the strike.

Methodologically, the project marries life-story interviews with visual elicitation. Retired officers are invited to contribute extended narrative interviews and a single self-selected image that symbolises their experience. This mixed narrative–visual approach allows the team to move beyond factual reconstruction towards the affective and meaning-making dimensions of collective memory.

Once collected the study will lodge the oral histories in the British Library’s oral-history archive, Life Stories.

Taken together, these interventions promise not only to enrich social, labour and policing histories of late-industrial Britain but also to inform contemporary policy discussions on fair and procedurally just public-order policing.