The word "picket" is correct and usable in written English.
It is most often used as a verb, meaning to stand outside a place typically carrying signs or banners in protest. For example, you could say, "The workers picketed outside the factory for better wages."
The strike could never have happened without the women's groups, on the picket, facing immense brutality and sexual harassment from the police, who called them "Scargill's slags".
Women from the Midlands noted how Asian communities ploughed money into the strikes when they saw the police treatment of miners mirroring their own experiences, and when Asian workers at Kewal Brothers clothing factory in Smethwick went on strike in 1984, 150 women and miners joined them in solidarity on their picket line.
After a second bitter winter on the picket line, the strikers conceded defeat on 14 July 1978.
It is fair to say that those words were of little comfort to me as I stood at the barbed-wire gates of Solsgirth Colliery on an unhelpfully cold March morning on my first picket line 20 years ago.
The last time I saw Peter was in March last year at the annual lecture delivered in memory of David Jones and Joe Green, two Yorkshire miners who were killed on the picket line during the 1984-85 strike.
"I'm fighting for my son's right to work" was a sign frequently seen on picket lines.
Spending so long in the community clearly gave him extra access and deeper understanding of his subjects, so it's no surprise to see that he managed to catch many happy and heart-warming scenes as well as the inevitable ones of confrontation on the picket lines.
Instead, grangers are active, reengaging with the activism of the 1960s and 70s, out on picket lines, cooking up food for strikers, getting arrested at protests, rallying in the streets, peopling anti-fracking and anti-logging and anti-McDonalds and anti-war actions – organising, planning, plotting.
