MINERS who broke the strike and scabbed can still expect to be blanked in the street, 30 years on.

Alan Cummings, 66-year-old former NUM lodge secretary in the ex-pit village of Easington Colliery, County Durham, explained: "People have long memories.

"There's very few people talk to them and it split families. But we didn't have a lot in this part."

The strike held firm from March 1984 and the village pit which had 2,700 workers was lightly picketed. Then in August things changed.

A power loader named Paul Wilkinson from Bowburn, ten miles away, was bussed in and hundreds of riot police made sure he got to work.

Mr Cummings, who still lives in a terraced house a stone's throw from the former pit gates, said: "I have never seen as many police before in Easington.

"There's only two ways into the village and it was completely blocked off. People couldn't get in or out.

"After 6am there was vans and vans coming in. Pickets were called back from elsewhere and had to come across fields to get here.

"The atmosphere was really bad."

Police and pickets fought through the day and serious disorder broke out when Coal Board property was smashed and cars wrecked.

Mr Cummings said the self-contained, isolated village had been law-abiding and needed little policing prior to the strike. The treatment by officers - particularly those drafted in from South Wales and Lincolnshire - disgusted many locals, he said.

One striker received an out-of-court settlement of £5,000 for injuries he sustained in the protest, the ex-NUM official said. But it was a hollow victory.

"Miners wives and families in the street could not believe what went on - there was a sea-change in their attitude," he said. "It's been called a village under siege."

The strike ended a little under a year after it began and the pit closed forever in 1993 - just short of 100 years since work began.

And Easington Colliery's reliance on coal meant it was a disaster, Mr Cummings said.

"It's been total devastation," he said. "It's my worst nightmare and I knew it was going to happen.

"Whereas the Germans planned pit closures in their coalfields, here, they just wiped us out."

The village had the second highest percentage of colliery houses in the country and they were sold off to private landlords in the 1990s, bringing in an influx of problem tenants and class A drugs followed.

Seemingly half the shops on Seaside Lane were shuttered and the working man's club life, once so vibrant, was dying out.

Mr Cummings retained a passionate hate for Margaret Thatcher and did not care that the village's celebration of her death last year upset some.

"What an epitaph she has in these mining communities: death, a lot of people have committed suicide, and no hope.

"All down to her, and some of her spawn that's about now."

But he also laid blame at the door of New Labour, which he said failed to make enough impact during its time in power.

Now those who have jobs work in call-centres, for Railtrack, the Nissan plant at Sunderland or the Caterpillar plant in nearby Peterlee.

"But 99 per cent of them would come back to the pit if it was open," he said.