Former striking miners say they were targeted by spy cops...just like characters in the BBC hit Sherwood.
It is now widely known that undercover officers were sent to infiltrate campaign groups, sometimes deceiving women into intimate relationships and even fathering children with them.
No solid evidence that they wormed their way into mining communities has so far beem found.
But the National Union of Mineworkers has been given a key role in an inquiry into the scandal.
In Sherwood, spy cops infiltrate a divided Nottinghamshire mining town and report back to their superiors.
Former pitmen have long suspected they were targeted in just this way and hope the long awaited probe will reveal the truth of what the police did during the bitter 1984-85 strike.
Former miner Tyrone O’Sullivan said the BBC1 show brought back painful memories of a mystery man who disappeared as suddenly as he arrived, abandoning a woman activist with whom he had been living.
Mr O’Sullivan, 76, then union secretary at Tower Colliery in Hirwaun, South Wales, believes the man was sent by Scotland Yard at the start of the strike.
He said: “This guy came down from Yorkshire and he was very active, very left wing, very socially minded. He came to work at Tower Colliery and ended up on the branch committee and was active throughout the strike.
“He started courting one of the girls who was a member of the women’s association.
“What stood out was that when the strike ended he was gone with no care for the girl.
“He was infiltrating the women’s movement, which became a very big part of the strike. The next I heard he was working with a union in a car factory. I went on a march as part of the union and there was this bloody guy.
“There was no doubt in my mind [that he was a spy cop]. Mr O’Sullivan refused to name the man."
In 1968 Scotland Yard set up the undercover Special Demonstration Squad to infiltrate protest groups.
Officers were given the identities of dead children
After it emerged in 2013 that the SDS had spied on the family of murdered teenagers Stephen Lawrence, then Home Secretary Theresa May set up the Undercover Policing Inquiry. The NUM has core participant status, along with groups such as CND, Reclaim the Streets and Greenpeace. Core participants can give evidence and obtain disclosure from the police to find out if, and to what extent, they were spied on.
Victims have raised concerns over lack of transparency and the length of time the inquiry has taken. It is expected to go on for another four years.
In undercover operations nationwide, least 20 officers are known to have deceived women they were spying on into having sexual relationships.
Four are thought to have fathered children. SDS officer Mark Kennedy had a series of relationships with women he was spying on.
In 2020 the Met paid compensation to the son of Bob Lambert, a police spy who had deceived his mother into an intimate relationship while infiltrating environmental groups.
One SDS member, who used the fake identity Christine Green, reportedly quit the job and had a relationship lasting more than a decade with the animal rights activist she had been targeting.
In one scene from Sherwood, Warnock (Stephen Tompkinson) tells a wake for his murdered union colleague Gary Jackson (Alun Arm-strong): “You have a great pretender in your midst. Look to your neighbours, look to your friends.
“Someone who came here during or just before the strike, an outsider with fake job and a fake name, spied on you and stayed and is still here walking among you bold as brass.”
Sherwood follows the hunt for a killer in a community divided between those who crossed the picket lines and those who manned them.
It is based on the 2004 murder of former striking miner Keith “Froggy” Frogson, shot with a crossbow on his doorstep in Annesley Woodhouse, Notts, by neighbour Rober Boyer, who had crossed the picket line.
Current Nottinghamshire NUM boss Alan Spencer – a 27-year-old with two small children at the time of the strike – said the TV drama reflected divisions that still remain.
He added: “Those of us who went through that dispute and can never forgive or forget. If you are a scab, you are a scab for life.”
Alan, from Mansfield, also believes undercover officers infiltrated his community. He said: “I was a picket manager and when you made calls you could hear clicking on the line. We arranged false pickets and the police would turn up so we knew they were listening. There were also infiltrators.”
NUM general secretary Chris Kitchen said: “I do believe that was done. If they were doing it to other groups, I find it hard to believe they would not use that tactic against us.”
David Morrissey, who plays DCS Ian St Clair in the drama, said: “We’ve seen undercover operations within criminal and terrorist organisations in dramas like Line of Duty.
“But the idea there were undercover officers inside legal organisations, sometimes having relationships with people without telling them, is outrageous. It’s something that we need to really look at, right here, right now.”
