When 'Tubthumping' stars Chumbawamba took part in the miner's strike, and wrote a song about Fitzwilliam, near Hemsworth

Chumbawamba's 1997 song 'Tubthumping' became an international hit.

Back in 1997, the song Tubthumping became an instant and unforgettable chart hit, and its creators fleetingly became global superstars.

But 12 years previously, when Chumbawamba were a penny-counting punk band not long out of uni, they wrote a song about the miner’s strike, centred around the pit village of Fitzwilliam, near Hemsworth.

Among all but Chumbawamba’s closest followers, the song has remained an unknown quantity. Here is the story of that song, the events that inspired it and why the group treasures it.

“We were influenced by other political bands, but at the same time we knew we weren’t anything like them,” says Boff Whalley, the Chumbawamba guitarist who wrote the lyrics to ‘Fitzwilliam’.

The miner's strike lasted for a year between 1984 and 1985.

The band was formed by 10 politically charged Leeds Uni students, who lived together in an old Victorian house in Armley.

After their Tubthumping success, the band would notoriously encourage fans to steal their record if they couldn’t afford it, and threw a bucket of water over deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. More on that later.

But the roots of their anarchic approach to the world lay in their formative years in the early 1980s.

“We were different kinds of people but we shared ideas about things like the miners’ strike, war and the government,” Whalley, now 60, recalls.

Chumbawamba guitarist Boff Whalley looks back at the song's creation with fondness.

“Some were more active than others, but that was a good thing really.”

The band’s members came from working class backgrounds in, among other places, Billingham, Barnsley, or in Whalley’s case, Burnley.

As a result, he says that when the year-long strike started, as it did in the spring of 1984, it became a natural movement for the band to involve themselves in.

Meanwhile, at Kinsley Drift Mine, a little to the south of Fitzwilliam, a then 17 year-old Pete Wordsworth is among the youngest pit workers to be caught up in the industrial action.

Whalley was a guitarist in the band for 30 years, until the group amicably went their separate ways in 2012.

He’s been in the job less than a year after joining straight out of school. His dad Graham, known as Greg to his mates, works there too.

Pete, who is now the deputy mine manager at the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield, recalls: “After I started, I was feeling pretty well established.

“I was earning money, which I obviously wasn’t before and I was working with my dad. So I was in a comfort zone.”

But then everything changed when the strike was called.

The National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield

“My mum didn’t work so there was no income all of a sudden," Pete adds. "So for 12 months it was just a case of getting by.

“Without friends and family I dread to think what would have happened.”

As Pete admits, the nationwide strike which started in 1984 and lasted a year “wasn’t a total surprise”.

Relations between miners and Margaret Thatcher’s government had been in freefall over proposed pit closures since the start of the decade. Things came to a head as the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) claimed there were secret plans to close 70 pits, as opposed to the 20 publicly announced.

Ministers strongly denied any such plans, but Cabinet papers from the time, released for the first time in 2014, proved the claim was accurate.

Eager to show solidarity, members of Chumbawamba joined the picket lines in Frickley, South Elmsall, and spent time with mining families and support groups for the wives.

Wakefield Express newspaper coverage from the time of the strike.

In an effort to offer practical as well as moral support, the band linked up with another punk group to play a UK-wide benefit tour to raise cash.

But a “knackered old tour bus”, which Whalley says “broke down all over the country”, cost them dearly.

“Because of the bus, we ended up making about £60 from a 10 day tour,” he recalls.

“Around the same time we’d stand outside shopping centres with buckets for the Frickley Miners Support Group and we’d make £60 in a day. At that point, we realised we’re doing this wrong.”

Back on the picket lines, Whalley admits he was surprised to find that the atmosphere was not all doom and gloom.

“Before I went down you think of these blokes who’ve got no money, and you think they’re always stood round fires and it’s awful," he explains.

“But then you get there and they’re all just having a laugh and taking the p***. "And then you realise, of course they are, because they’re just like everyone else.”