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The 1984 Miners Strike and the "Battle of Orgreave' was one such event.
Margaret Thatcher's determination to break the National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM's) strike had a massive impact on industrial relations.
It would leave deep psychological scars on communities split during the strike - many of whom slid into deprivation after the closure of pits.
However it was the scale of the violence at Orgreave and the shocking images of police batoning strikers that seemed like the turning point.
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News footage mostly shot from behind police lines showed an iron fist being deployed against flying pickets at the coke works near Rotherham.
Yet the narrative that the police had come under attack first that day became the accepted line.
This was a source of dispute.
The miners took particular exception to a BBC news bulletin which appeared to confirm this police narrative with images of strikers throwing stones before officers charged them when the reality was the footage that had been assembled was the other way around.
The BBC's Orgreave news report seemed to confirm heavy briefings by the Thatcher Government and its press secretary Bernard Ingham that the miners were deploying mob violence which could not be tolerated.
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Forty years on, Channel 4 has unearthed footage from the strikers' perspective in a new three part docuseries that further disputes those claims.
'Miners Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain' attempts to tell the story mostly from the perspective of ordinary people caught up in the strike.
Each episode is grounded in a particular place impacted by industrial action and features interviews with people who were directly involved and are rarely interviewed.
Episode One focuses on Shirebrook in Derbyshire which had been a bustling colliery town.
Viewers of James Graham's BBC1 drama 'Sherwood' will recognise the working men's club culture and community centres that host the interviewees, as well as the sadness and bitterness that lingers about what happened.
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Director Tom Barrow's opening episode charts the importance of the colliery to the identity of the town and its inhabitants.
It quickly becomes clear that the selection of Shirebrook by Barrow is significant because it became the epicentre of efforts to break the strike.
The NUM initiated the miners strike after the National Coal Board announced a plan to shut 20 pits and axe 20,000 jobs.
Miners in north Derbyshire soon found themselves caught in the crossfire of tensions between miners in neighbouring Nottinghamshire who rejected strike action and those in Yorkshire who were among its most fervent supporters.
The union's decision to overrule the vote of miners who decided not to go out on strike pitted miner against miner.
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It led to intimidation of workers who crossed the picket lines and their families and opened wounds that remain to this day.
Such was the bitterness in Shirebrook we are told it was regarded as "bandit country" - a phrase familiar that will have a particular resonance in Northern Ireland as it was used to describe territory in south Armagh that housed communities hostile to the British Army and supportive of the IRA.
A lot of this material about divided communities will be familiar to those who have studied the 1984 strike.
However like last year's BBC2 series 'Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland,' Barrow's docuseries scores by having the voices of ordinary people reflect on the events rather than relying on politicians, civil servants, journalists or academics.
The strength of that approach really hits home in the second episode of Barrow's docuseries about Orgreave which broadcasts for the first time video footage shot by two NUM officials on the day.
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This paints a different picture of events at the coke works.
Images of battered and bloodied strikers married with the accounts of those who were there give a sense that the South Yorkshire Police were intent on a confrontation.
Miners claim police cordons that would normally have been in force were relaxed and buses of strikers were surprisingly waved through.
On their arrival at the plant, they were confronted by an enormous police presence, with some officers on horseback.
Tony Munday, an officer on duty at Orgreave, reveals the police were ordered to disable strikers by batoning their arms and legs.
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NUM footage shows that did not happen, with images of blood streaming from injured miners' heads.
Striking miner Arthur Critchlow recalls feeling a "big thud" on his head while trying to assist a wounded colleague.
He ended up with a fractured skull and was taken to a police cell where he passed in and out of consciousness.
Even more alarmingly, Munday claims a senior detective told officers afterwards to rip up their statements about what they saw and dictated lines they were to put in instead.
Noting the words were the basic components of the offence of riot - fear and expectation of violence - he was concerned that they were now being ordered not to tell the truth as they saw it.
A subsequent attempt to prosecute miners crumbled when it became clear in court that the statements of South Yorkshire Police officers didn't even match what was in news footage.
Solicitor Gareth Pierce, who came to public attention as the lawyer who represented the Guildford Four, observes in the second episode: "Within minutes of virtually every police witness entering the witness box, each one had committed perjury."
Episode three is arguably the most extraordinary and concentrates on David Hart, a shadowy figure who took a huge interest in the NUM, its leader Arthur Scargill and advised the Thatcher Government on how to break the strike.
A larger than life, cigar smoking, public school educated property developer and novelist, Hart set out to establish a rapport with miners who were sceptical and even hostile to Arthur Scargill's leadership.
Running his own operation to break the strike from a hotel room in Claridge's because he was convinced it was a left wing plot to overthrow the government, he regularly sent reports from the east Midlands to Downing Street about sentiment on the ground.
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Lord Andrew Turnbull, the Prime Minister's adviser on economic affairs, admits some officials were wary of Hart and describes him as a "Scarlet Pimpernel" type figure whose intelligence reports Margaret Thatcher valued.
However his reports to Downing Street and his efforts to undermine the strike undoubtedly strengthened the resolve of the Government to defeat Scargill and the NUM.
'Miners Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain' is a gripping three part docuseries about a seminal moment in 20th Century British history.
But is it enough to secure an inquiry into the events at Orgreave?
Maybe but it might require an ITV docudrama to get there.
('Miners Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain' was broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK between January February 8, 2024)
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