Sarah Jones was just four months old when a Christmas postcard addressed to her dropped through the letterbox of her parent's home in December 1984.

Sent in solidarity by a family living in the Belgium industrial town of Hasselt, its cartoon cover shows two miners marching together through a snow storm.

On the reverse is a typed message for miners and their families in English and Flemish.

It reads: "May Christmas be a symbol of the undefeating struggle that you've been keeping up for all these months in a spirit of combat and endurance that is admired by all workers, not only in Great Britain, but on the Continent as well.

"We're on your side, in hearts and minds."

Sarah's dad Lenny was a mining engineer in Wigan's Kirkless workshop and walked out with his comrades in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) over planned pit closures at midnight on March 5 1984.

Speaking to the Star 30 years on, he remembers what the postcard sent to his daughter meant.

"It was just like, it sounds a bit cheesy, but it made us realise that other people were thinking about us and what was going on," says Lenny. "It weren't easy. I remember when Sarah was christened during the strike.

"Obviously we had no money for beer and parties and I remember doing a lot of home brew. It was absolutely disgusting."

The friendly postcard bringing Christmas cheer from the continent is however just one of the documents Lenny kept from the dispute.

And the others reveal the extent of the campaign of lies, bribes and threats that every striking miner was submitted to by bosses and the government.

Kirkless workshop manager JA Stacey wrote to Lenny in November to tell him that thousands of scabs were producing enough coal to render his strike efforts "futile."

Knowing that striking miners and their families faced a cold, austere Christmas, Stacey asked Lenny to join his "mates who have already come back.

"It is not too late to earn money and Christmas statutory holiday pay and service bonus, which will be paid before Christmas," he wrote.

National Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor was another prolific correspondent throughout the dispute.

A letter from him titled "Your future in danger" was sent to the homes of all miners in July '84.

MacGregor hits back at NUM leader Arthur Scargill's claims that Margaret Thatcher planned to cull 70 pits and over 70,000 jobs.

Typed in capitals, he blares: "THESE THINGS ARE ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE. I STATE THAT CATEGORICALLY AND SOLEMNLY. YOU HAVE BEEN DELIBERATELY MISLED."

Government documents released under the 30 year rule in January confirmed that Scargill was right.

But Lenny says miners "always knew we were right" during the dispute despite the Coal Board's best efforts to hide the truth.

"We never doubted the reason for the strike. We were just dismissive of it all. There was nothing that the Coal Board could have said that would have made me go back."

That didn't put off bosses funding scab newspapers like the Kirkless Reporter to act as a mouthpiece for the local "working miners committee."

Its second edition, posted to Lenny's home in October '84, carried a message from the manager on its front page that warned the strike was "giving our competitors the ideal opportunity to pinch our livelihood."

An inside page carries a cartoon portraying striking miners as the sheep of "bully-boy shepherds" in the NUM.

Lenny was "never moved by the propaganda" but saw some people cross the picket lines for "other reasons."

"There was lads who went back, who the coal board would have you believe went back because they had a change of heart. They went back because they were hungry.

"There was one lad whose mum and dad threw him out of the house.

"There was people getting massively in arrears with their mortgages."

The now 55-year-old says he "doesn't have a problem" with those people, but he still feels betrayed by former workmates who fell for their bosses' propaganda or went back to work on the promise of a promotion.

While letters and newspapers from the strike are fading, memories remain fresh and the fallout from the dispute and subsequent pit closures continues in communities today.

The effects are most evident in unemployment figures for former mining communities but even reach into Lenny's local pub, where he refuses to drink with former scabs.

"There's no arguments or fighting or anything like that," he explains.

"But it still affects relationships, yeah.

"A lot of people might find it a bit petty after 30 years but it was a bit harsh at the time.

"To my mind, they're the reason we were on strike for a year, if they'd have come out with us things would have been possibly resolved in our favour."