Prof Diane Reay and Lesley Burgess (Letters, 29 January) warn us against wearing rose-tinted spectacles when looking at miners’ unity and say that diverse views were common in the past.
Yet in 1963 when working for David Butler and Donald Stokes on research into long-term voting behaviour, published as Political Change in Britain, I can remember having to send a second interviewer back to Mirfield, as the miners and wives all answered the questions in almost exactly the same way.
We thought the original interviewer had cheated and saved time by copying the replies from the first interview and changing a word here and there. However, the second interviewer confirmed that in this mining community we had almost discovered groupthink.
Margaret Squires
St Andrews, Fife
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
