Paul Kelly opens the glass display case and takes out a policeman’s truncheon.

“It’s from Brodsworth,” he says, referring to a coalmine outside Doncaster in South Yorkshire. “A policeman threw it at me. I felt it pass the top of my head. Then the policeman buggered off.

“It hit a tree. I heard the crack. If it had hit me it could have killed me.”

He said he picked up the truncheon and took it home with him.

The truncheon is on show at an exhibition at the Working Class Movement Library (WCML) in Salford, Greater Manchester.

In 1984 Paul was a young miner at Agecroft colliery in the Irwell Valley outside Salford. The pit is the subject of a book he wrote last year — The Last Pit in the Valley, now going into its second print run.

He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Great Strike as it is now being called — the miners’ strike against pit closures of 1984-5.

He and his close friend George Tapp travelled the country picketing.

Like Paul, George is union through and through. A construction site electrician by trade, he was blacklisted for most of his working life.

Two years ago he was run down by a car while leafleting against blacklisting outside a construction site in Manchester.

Now retired, he still suffers as a result of his injuries — two broken legs, one of them severely damaged. The young driver responsible got off scot free.

During the strike Paul and George, still close friends 30 years on, collected dozens of strike-related items — the truncheon is one of them.

Their joint collection of memorabilia from the strike forms the basis of the exhibition at the WCML in Salford.

Paul, who was 24 at the time of the strike, was at the exhibition to welcome us when we visited.

He is secretary of the Irwell Valley Mining Project (IVMP), whose aim is to preserve the memory and culture of the coalmining industry in an area which once had dozens of coalmines.

He and others visit local schools and colleges to give talks about the industry. They raised funds to create a memorial to Agecroft colliery.

The Salford exhibition is a joint venture between WCML and the IVMP.

Paul produces the minutes of a meeting of the executive of the north-west area of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) dated March 7 1984.

NUM national president Arthur Scargill attended and spoke at the meeting.

The minutes quote Scargill as saying that the National Coal Board (NCB) intended to close 100 pits and shed 100,000 jobs. This was at a time when the NCB was insisting “only” 20 of Britain’s 170 deep coal mines faced closure, with the loss of 20,000 jobs out of a workforce of 170,000.

Today just three pits and less than 1,000 miners remain — and all three pits face closure.

The exhibition includes the banner of Agecroft branch of the NUM, there are strike editions of the NUM newspaper The Miner, news-sheets produced by miners’ support groups in Lancashire — as elsewhere in Britain, when dozens of such groups sprang up to ensure the miners and their families did not starve.

There are items pre-dating the strike — metal discs known as “tallies,” which were used by coalmine owners to pay miners instead of money and could be spent only in stores owned by the mine owners, who could charge what they wanted for essentials.

Another type of tally was the metal disc each miner had to place on a hook on a board at the pit top when he went underground on shift.

The miner would collect the disc when he came off shift. An uncollected disc meant a miner was missing and a search would start.

One of Paul’s most treasured mementos is a disc from Cortonwood colliery in Yorkshire, where the Great Strike started.

One display case holds a collection of plates carrying union insignia and the names of an individual pit. Many pit union branches produced decorated plates to commemorate a pit closed following the British state’s onslaught against the miners.

Paul talks about his own role in the strike: “I’m proud that I stood up and was counted,” he says. “I disregarded any call for a ballot. I went to my pit and there was a picket line and I joined it regardless of any ballots — especially bosses’ ballots. You don’t cross picket lines.”

The pickets were from Yorkshire. When the strike began in Yorkshire pickets were despatched to the north west and other mining areas to call for support.

Paul goes on: “I’m proud to have fought and would do it again. The only thing I’m sorry about is that we lost.”

He points to a cutting from The Miner which is in the exhibition. It shows a police officer attacking a young miner, throwing a punch at the picket’s face.

“That’s me at Agecroft,” he says. “The police swarmed into us and started beating us up. I was hit in the face and a tooth flew out. They flung us onto the road.”

He was arrested, and tells how he was warned by plainclothes police, who he took to be special branch, that he would be beaten, or worse, if he went back on the picket line.

“One of them patted his chest, as if he’d got a gun,” Paul recalls.

“He said we’d get the same as they were giving the ‘Paddies’ in Northern Ireland. He called me Paddy, probably because my name is Kelly.

“We knew we were living in a sham democracy, but the police violence still came as a shock.”

He smiles as he tells how he and his comrades made Tapp an honorary miner, providing him with a pass identifying him as an official picket.

“Most of the exhibits are mine and George’s stuff,” he said.

The WCML venue for the exhibition is close to Salford University.

“There’s been a lot of young people coming in, students from the university,” Paul says. “And what is good is that we have had people coming in who were involved in the strike, bringing their children and their grandchildren, so we are not forgotten.”

The WCML, and the exhibition, are open every Wednesday and Friday, from 1pm to 5pm, until March 13. Entry is free.

The Last Pit in the Valley by Paul Kelly is available from www.ivmp.org.uk/last-pit-valley, price £5.