They stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their husbands on the picket lines, organised soup kitchens and made public speeches. And when the miners' strike was over, the women were changed - often for the better - as a new book reveals. Lindsay Jennings reports.

BETTY Cook paused outside the university doors and took a deep breath. Gathering her courage, she strode into the packed hall where she was to take questions from the students. "These are all bloody clever people, and who am I?" she thought, momentarily shackled by her uneducated roots. Standing before them, she scanned their inquisitive faces. Then, she began by telling them about her life.

Betty had been a miner's wife living near Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and ingrained in her every pore was an expectation about her own limits. Her husband worked down the local pit, came home for his tea every night, and went straight to the pub afterwards.

Betty stayed in their bathroom-less, rat-infested home, bringing up her three boys as best she could on very little, and sometimes less when her husband drank the housekeeping money. It was an era when those who had made their beds tended to have to lie in them. There was no solidarity from her neighbours who viewed her as an incomer. No sympathy from relatives. In short, no-one to turn to.

But gradually, the woman who used to cry herself to sleep most nights began to fight back. It began with small victories: standing up to a neighbour, fighting with the council to get running water in her home and getting a job when most wives looked after the bairns and ran the home.

By the time the miners' strike came in 1984, Betty knew she wanted to be a part of it. She joined Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC), joined the pickets with the men and screamed at the police. She organised a food kitchen, gave public speeches and became a political activist. Betty left her downtrodden life behind and her new-found confidence nourished her soul.

'I felt more confident. I wasn't as nervous as I used to be. I could stand up to people," she says.

Betty's story, and those of women who formed an integral part of the miners' strike, has been captured in a new book, Queen Coal, Women of the Miners' Strike, by journalist Triona Holden.

Triona was a 24-year-old BBC reporter when she was sent to cover the miners' strike on her home turf. Her sister was married to a Barnsley miner and thus Triona had a different perspective to that of her journalistic colleagues. Her situation gave her an emotional connection to the people behind the news.

"I was in this unusual situation where I was being abused and spat at as the enemy yet once I'd finished my job I would hop in the car and drive to my sister's where they were all starving," she recalls. "She was having to burn her shoes to keep warm and scavenge among the slag heaps for bits of coal. My three-year-old nephew ended up in hospital with frostbite, which, at the time, he didn't mind because at least he got fed."

Triona, who has since reported for the BBC on major assignments across the world, was one of the few journalists to highlight the hardships the mining families were enduring. She found a kindred spirit among the women she interviewed and took time to get to know them. After the strike she kept in touch with some.

"They were not just nurturing their families, they were nurturing their communities and that stuck with me," she says.

"After the strike there were some massive changes in the women - some for the good and some for the bad. They forged friendships which are as strong today. Some spilt up from their husbands, some grew closer."

She cites the example of one of her interviewees, Chris Fielding, who used to work in a kitchen helping to dish up 400 meals a day to miners and their families. While Chris toiled, her husband was supposed to be picketing. But during his time away he was having an affair with a woman in Nottinghamshire.

After the strike, Christine was faced with bringing her two children up alone. But with her new fighting spirit, she learned how to drive a forklift truck and became a factory foreman in charge of a bunch of men. The same spirit is now keeping her strong as she battles multiple sclerosis.

Chris tells Triona in the book that she took pride, self-confidence and an ability to stand her ground from her strike days.

"It just changed everybody's outlook I think, and you'd got so many more friends it definitely brought people together," she says.

Among the women she interviewed, Triona, 46, of North London, found anger and deep resentment in some. One woman to this day refers to her dead brother-in-law as a scab because he broke the picket line.

Many of the women still harbour a deep distrust of the police, an ideology which has been passed down to their children. But then the women were often caught up in the violent clashes, defending their sons, their brothers and their husbands.

As Triona herself notes from her time reporting the strikes: "I knew they were a tough bunch who weren't scared of getting into a scrap. I had been on the receiving end of enough abuse from women as well as men on the picket lines to know just how ferocious they could be. But that didn't apply to all of them. In fact that image represented the few.

"The many were just women who wanted to get on with being wives and mothers, and were terrified that their husbands would lose their jobs, leaving the family with no money."

Betty Cook had managed to get away unscathed during most of the miners' strike until one day in February 1985, when there was a mass picket at Woolley Edge near Wakefield. A policeman wielding a truncheon smashed it into her leg and broke her knee cap.

After the strike, Betty left her husband and found a new life at college - a world away from the downtrodden, repressed existence she had once endured. She went on to take a degree in sociology and social policy at Sheffield University. Her graduation day was the proudest moment of her life.

"I felt it was an achievement for me, for Women Against Pit Closures," she tells Triona. "Lots of women were denied opportunities in those days."

Today, Betty is asked to speak at schools and colleges about the role of women. The legacy of the strike flows through her veins.

Recalling the day she gave her first talk to the students, she says: "The first time I spoke at a university I really dreaded going through those doors. But as I sat there with those students, talking and answering questions, I thought 'I know a lot more than they do'."

For all the women whose lives changed for the better, there are also those who suffered greatly from the strike. One, whom Triona will not name, found the strike destroyed her life because it awoke in her a desire that she could not fulfil once it was over. She had become a voice for women during the strike and found she wilted once the eyes of the media looked away. She ended up having a breakdown.

But although their lives changed irrevocably, the women also garnered a solidarity from their shared experiences which has stayed with them.

Triona says she is left with an abiding vision after writing her book. It is of a sisterhood, still together in years to come, in an old people's home.

"The group would still be together. They would be grey-haired and wrinkly, sitting in wheelchairs, showing their knickers and having a laugh like naughty children at the back of a classroom," she writes. "They would give the long-suffering staff hell by not doing as they were told.

"Looking deeper into the crystal ball, Queen Coal would see a time when they had all 'shuffled off' to the great soup kitchen in the sky. Death held no regrets for them; they knew they would be leaving a worthwhile legacy."

* Queen Coal, Women of the Miners' Strike by Triona Holden (Sutton Publishing, £20).