FEELINGS ran very high when the closure of Cardowan Colliery, near Stepps, was announced in May 1983.

Albert Wheeler, boss of the Scottish Coal Board, was kicked and punched by furious miners after he told them the loss-making pit would shut in five weeks.

In a melee he was bundled against a wall as colleagues and miners' union officials tried to protect him. CARDOWAN finds itself on the roll call of once famous Scottish pits that are no more. Barony, Auchengeich, Polkemmet, Polmaise, Seafield, Bilston Glen - they all went the same way. The industry once employed 150,000 men, a tenth of all Scotland's workers, across 196 pits. In 1958 there were 80,000 coalfield workers in more than 160 pits, says Robert Duncan, author of The Mineworkers. But a gradual downturn in the industry's fortunes meant that by 1967 the workforce had been halved and there were fewer than 50 pits. By 1976, there were 23,000 workers and 21 active pits. By the eve of the 1984 strike, there were just 14 pits and 14,000 workers. In its aftermath, most of them were closed. The last two were Monktonhall, Midlothian, the deepest coal mine in Europe, and Castlebridge, Fife. Many of Monktonhall's 320 miners sank their life savings into the pit when they took it over from British Coal to run it themselves. But it shut in 1997 after the main shaft had deteriorated seriously. Castlebridge shut in 2002 - and deep mining in Scotland was at an end. Today, NUM Scotland has around 50 members, and the only mining activity takes places in open-cast mines.

Mr Wheeler had to be escorted by police to safety.

The National Union of Mineworkers had already promised to fight the closure - nationally, if need be.

The 1100 miners at Cardowan were all to be offered alternative jobs at other Scottish pits. But for people like Margaret Wegg, it seemed like the end of the road.

A canteen worker at the colliery, and a mother of two in her early 40s, she did not have a wealth of other jobs to go to.

Her husband, Jerry, suddenly had a lot of extra travelling to do, as he was transferred under the coal board's plans to Castlehill Colliery, Fife.

But what Margaret could not have foreseen was that, 10 months later, the 1984 miners' strike would give her a new role in life.

Not only did she help run the vital soup kitchen that kept the miners fed, but she spoke in public - something she had never done before - on the role of the miners' wives.

She attended rallies in London, and toured conferences, selling memorabilia to raise much-needed funds for the miners.

In short, like many miners' wives across the UK in 1984-85, she found her political voice for the first time.

Wives such as Margaret and her friends played an important role behind the scenes.

They turned up at rallies, protested as Women Against Pit Closures', raised money and organised food parcels, as well as the kitchens.

"The first thing I did was to get involved in the soup kitchen," says Margaret, now 67 and still active as secretary of Stepps and District OAP club.

"The union called all the wives to the Cardowan social club and said, Can you organise the kitchen?' We were happy to.

"We would open before lunchtime and provide a dinner. Any of the pickets coming back could get something to eat.

"The things that didn't take long to cook, we did in the club's kitchen. Anything that took a bit longer I would do in my house and take it by car.

"We would get donations of food and tins, and one of the other girls would make up food parcels. Jerry would help deliver them in the mini-bus to the different kitchens and they would distribute them to the strikers' families.

"None of us ever thought we would see something like soup kitchens in the 1980s. We thought they belonged to the past."

Margaret's hard work earned her an invitation to speak about the role of miners' wives to what she was told would be a handful of union officials.

She can still remember her shock when she learned she would really be addressing an open-air meeting in Clydebank shopping centre.

"I had never spoken in public before, but I just took a deep breath and did it as best I could," she recalls.

"I did a number of speeches after that, at places like a STUC fringe conference, but it was an ordeal every time."

Like other families, the Weggs' finances were not exactly a picture of health during the dispute.

There was no strike pay for Jerry from the NUM and they had to make do on slender benefits - £13 a week.

"Things like that brought us all closer together. We were thrown in at the deep end and just had to get on with it.

"But I said all along, and still say it now, I was one of the lucky ones. I didn't have any debt. When I was made redundant from the canteen, I had decided to put my money to one side and it helped tide us over.

"But I know a lot of other families had problems. They had debt to start with and got deeper into it the longer the strike went on.

"The wives all worked together during the strike, we did what we had to do, but once the strike was over, most of them went back to normal, back to their families."

For a period afterwards, Margaret and a friend, Mary Lyons, did the tour of party conferences, running a stall that sold mining memorabilia to raise funds for those strikers who had been victimised for their actions during the industrial dispute.

"The STUC and the women's STUC conferences invited us. We did the Scottish Labour Party for a while, but then it started charging us for a stall, which was not much use to us.

"We also did the Communist Party conference, and various unions would ask us along if they were having a meeting over a couple of days.

"It brought in a lot of income the NUM would not otherwise have had. It was an interesting experience."

Margaret had to give up the stalls when her mother's health began to deteriorate.

"I can't believe the strike was 25 years ago," she says. "But I am proud of what we did."

She adds: "You have to fight for whatever you really want otherwise they walk all over you.

"What I remember most was how everybody rolled up their sleeves and got together. It didn't matter whether someone worked in the pits or not, they were still behind you.

"It's a lot different to attitudes today - too much me' and not enough us'."

Margaret's house uses coal-fired central heating, and she has that rarity, a coal bunker, outside.

"I doubt whether today's young people know what a piece of coal looks like," she says. "At least my two grandchildren know. They have been brought up to appreciate coal."