• REGARDING your report (March 7) on local support for the miners’ strike in 1984, you might like to know that schools in Camden also supported the strikers.

As a teacher in Parliament Hill Girls’ School in 1984, I organised a visit by sixth-form students from this school and William Ellis School to Onllwyn, a mining village, near Neath, in south Wales.

I and three staff from Parliament Hill School, drove a minibus with 10 students, food parcels, clothing and money collected by my school’s teachers and NUT members in Camden schools.

We were put up by miners’ families and entertained in the miners’ welfare hall. We also put on an entertainment – a version of A Christmas Carol with Margaret Thatcher as Scrooge!

The visit had a great effect on the students. They were especially moved by the warm welcome they received and by what they learned. They knew little, or nothing, of south Wales or of the life of mining communities. In a society just as divided then as it is now this was a small, successful, attempt to bridge the gap.

A film company now plans to make a documentary about support for the miners, and I have been asked for details of the visit.

If, by chance, any of your readers took part in that trip, or if any of their families remember it, I would be pleased if they contact me via the New Journal.

TERRY KING, NW3