October 1984: in windblown Pontefract bus station, I am reading a Yorkshire
Evening Post report about the IRA bomb attack on Margaret Thatcher's Tory
Cabinet in Brighton. The cloth-capped pensioner sitting next to me points at
the paper and explodes. “See what them Irish idiots done? Missed her, the
daft bastards!” He was a former miner and it was the middle of the 1984-85
miners' strike.
Today Pontefract bus station is a weatherproof bubble. But you do not have to
go far to find the old feelings among reasonable middle-aged men and women.
One former miner tells me, only half-joking, that he didn't want to see
Thatcher blown up - “I wanted her to die a slow death”.
It was 25 years ago today that Yorkshire miners walked out in protest at pit
closures and modern Britain's biggest industrial dispute began. A week
later, Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) executive
called a national strike. As a young red journalist/propagandist I went from
London to Pontefract in the North Yorkshire coalfield not only to report on
the miners' struggle, but to support it, writing for the next step, a paper
published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (both long deceased). Last
week I went back to Ponte to dig up memories and see what has become of the
mining communities.
Pontefract was a royalist stronghold during the Civil War of the 17th century,
its castle blown up by parliamentary forces. The miners' strike was another
momentous struggle for the future. “I'm surprised there's not more made of
it these days,” says Rob Lukaszewicz, who worked at South Kirkby pit,
“because I do see it as a civil war.” After his pit closed 20 years ago, Rob
used his redundancy money to retrain as a teacher and works at a local
special-needs school. But he still lives in the former pit village of South
Elmsall and you get the feeling, as with many former pitmen, that he remains
a miner at heart. “I think if it wasn't for the closures after the strike
I'd still be there. I never say ‘Oh, hello, I'm a teacher'.”
Going back to Yorkshire, there is no denying that if it was a civil war the
miners lost. Pontefract and its famous pubs look much the same (although the
clientele look a lot younger) as befits an historic town whose main streets
boast such names as Cornmarket and Beastfair. But the surrounding pits have
almost all closed, so that the pit villages have lost their hearts. You can
wander through the new “Fitzwilliam Country Park” without realising that
there are filled-in coalmines underfoot. The only clue is the big pithead
wheel half-buried near the entrance - even that has been painted bright
green. Near by, and 20 years too late, the pit site at South Kirkby is being
turned into an industrial park, although today it is flattened wasteland.
What was Glasshoughton pit is the site of Xscape, a leisure and retail
development where an indoor ski slope has replaced the mine works; the only
hint of its past is The Winter Seam, a bar named after a seam in the North
Yorkshire coalfield.
Back then I joined the pickets at Pontefract's Prince of Wales pit. I stayed
with Keith, a miner who worked there, in his mum's Pontefract pit cottage
with a coalfire and a heap of blankets for heat and a malodorous Irish
wolfhound for company. The entrance to the pit lane where Keith was arrested
and sent to Armley Prison for “throwing stones” - ie, walking to join a
women's picket - is blocked off with rubble, awaiting a housing development
that may never come. Keith has long since moved on, to Scotland and into a
new career as a university lecturer.
The only working pit left is Kellingley - the Big K. In the cramped NUM office
branch officials are collecting dues and handing out advice and black
diaries commemorating “The Great Miners' Strike 1984-85”. The diary runs
from March 2008 to March 2009 - marking the months of the year-long strike.
Kellingley today employs fewer than 700 people; 2,200 miners worked there
before the strike. The average age of miners is estimated at 48 to 50: men
of my age, the strike generation, still toiling underground in 35C heat and
95 per cent humidity. Nationally, the NUM now has 1,800 members - around 1
per cent of the 1984 membership.
How do they see the strike today? “It was the best thing I've ever done in my
life,” says John Marron, an NUM branch treasurer, originally from Wearside.
“It was hard, £23 a week to keep two kids and mortgage to pay. But the only
bad thing was the result.” He is no misty-eyed nostalgic. “I used to go
picketing every day, I believed in the fight, but from Day 1 I said we were
beat because they were geared up for it and we weren't.”
Keith Poulson, the Kellingley NUM secretary, says: “It showed you what
strength and camaraderie you can get in your community. I don't think you'll
ever get communities like we had then.”
These days NUM officials deal with compensation cases more than disputes.
“There are injuries, it's not like working in Boots the chemists,” Poulson
says. “We had a fatality last year, a really good lad. Then there are
compensation cases for work-related conditions, the likes of vibration white
finger.” Their work has not been made easier by the scandal, exposed in The
Times, of NUM-linked lawyers taking compensation money due to former miners.
Elsewhere there has been some rewriting of the strike's history. Few people
have a good word to say about Thatcher these days and even Lord Tebbit now
expresses doubts about closing down the coal industry. Fear of an energy
crisis and talk of new technologies producing “green coal” seem to have
strengthened the miners' moral case. But at the time, the miners' strike was
not seen as just about personalities or energy policy. It was understood by
many of us as a political war waged by the Government, with widespread
support, to defeat the strongest section of the old working class - whom
Thatcher called “the enemy within” - and break the unions.
In the front-line of that war were the police. There is fearful talk now about
Britain becoming a police state. But 25 years ago a police force
co-ordinated through the National Reporting Centre operated more like a
paramilitary army in the coalfields. Some miners still believe that they
were up against the real army. “Bobbies I know can't run,” says one former
militant, “but these could leap over 6ft fences.”
From the start police blockaded roads to stop miners reaching pickets. In the
summer of 1984 came the battle between battalions of police in riot gear and
thousands of pickets in shorts and T-shirts at Orgreave coking works. “It
was out-and-out war at Orgreave really,” recalls one, “you were in fear from
the time you got out of the car to the time you got home.” When they got
home, the BBC had edited news coverage to make it appear that the miners
charged first and riot police responded - the opposite of what happened. The
BBC insists it was an honest mistake.
After the defeat at Orgreave more miners drifted back to work and the strikers
retreated to picketing their own pits, a war of attrition they could not
win. The police moved into the pit villages. Alongside the daily grind of
the pickets and the shouting at miners returning to work - “My
three-year-old son stood up and yelled ‘scab',” recalls one miner - there
were some fierce nights of violence in semi-rural pit villages. Nights such
as “the siege of Fitzwilliam” where, after police raided the local pub, the
close-knit community rose up. The Fitzwilliam Hotel, where the trouble
started, has been levelled and Railway Terrace, where the fighting spread,
is now a quiet row of cottages. But locals still remember that night.
Keith Poulson was living in Fitzwilliam. “The police came over the bridge,
swinging truncheons that long and chanting,” he says, using a broom handle
as a prop. “They knocked one lad down and kept hitting him. His uncle told
them they'd given him enough, then they knocked him down and gave him the
same. Then the people all came out of their houses.” Villagers built
barricades and set fire to NCB property. “The whole village just erupted.
Whatever they could do to get back, they did it.” Months later I sat in
court while Michael Mansfield, QC, defended several Fitzwilliam men charged
with ioting. Witnesses gave evidence of how police had handcuffed young men
to lampposts in front of their lines to discourage stone-throwing. They were
found guilty anyway. Around 10,000 miners were arrested during the strike,
several thousand convicted and a thousand sacked. Shortly after the strike
started, the Yorkshire miner David Jones died on a picket line at Ollerton
in Nottinghamshire. In June, Joe Green was crushed to death by a lorry while
picketing at Ferrybridge Power Station near Pontefract. Later a taxi driver
taking a miner back to work was killed in South Wales by a concrete block
dropped from a motorway bridge.
As in any war, there were ordinary people driven to extraordinary lengths.
Take the Pontefract “carrot man”. One day some pickets took potatoes with
nails in to try to dissuade police horses from charging them. Vegetables
being in short supply, this miner took spiked carrots, and played a grim
game of pin-the-carrot on a police horse's tail. There was dark humour too.
Pinching police helmets became popular. Legend has it that in Fitzwilliam
pickets stole a uniform and dressed it up with a pig's head. Scargill's
favourite story was about the police inspector who, having told Yorkshire
miners they could have only six pickets, spotted a snowman, with policeman's
helmet, as the seventh. He drove his police Land Rover into the snowman -
and discovered that it had been built over a concrete bollard.
I asked one police officer how he remembers the strike now. He says that most
miners were “not violent criminals but passionate people fighting for their
living. The majority of my colleagues had a genuine empathy for them. Then a
shift would start, the working miners would travel into pits and all hell
would erupt. Pushing, shoving, throwing rocks and fighting. Thinking back, I
would concede we were used politically. Our conduct and the force we could
use then was far different from now. But they were not angels, kicking shins
with metal boots, punching, throwing rocks etc. I think it was right the
working miners were protected but there should have been some other way
politically to deal with it?” He adds that the exception to this description
of the police was the Met. “They were a complete set of violent, thieving
bastards.”
The war against the miners was helped by the division between militant areas
such as Yorkshire and the working miners of Nottingham. Scargill, a union
leader who I thought trusted his rule book more than he did the rank and
file, refused to hold a national ballot and campaign for unity. The
divisions grew bitter, and still are. In Hemsworth Miners Social Club, where
the pit is closed but the bar remains open, a former miner called Peg told
me about trouble at a recent football match between a local team and the
“scabby bastards” of Ollerton in Nottinghamshire, even though the players
were not born in 1984.
When the State cut off benefits for strikers' families, it awakened the ire of
miners' wives. One of the most remarkable things I remember about the strike
was the way that women bypassed by Seventies feminism came out of their
kitchens, albeit often into a larger soup kitchen, and took a stand. I met
some at a reunion in a Castleford pub last week, organised by Ann Richards,
chairwoman of the miners' support group in the village of Sherburn-in-Elmet.
“The hard-heartedness of a Government that would see children starve in
pursuit of its policies made women angry and frustrated,” she says, “and
from that anger and frustration was born the first miners' support groups.”
By the end of the strike, Ann says, she had “realised that there was more to
life than the kitchen sink”. She went to university and ended up a registrar
- she retired a couple of years ago. Her friend Margaret Handforth recalls
the strike as a crash course in “the university of life”. Amid the
campaigning and the 12-hour soup kitchen shifts, she says, “the thing that
slipped was the housework”. After the strike she raised money selling mining
memorabilia and set up the women's resource centre in Castleford. She and
the centre are going strong.
Edith Woolley, whose husband, father and brother all worked at Frickley pit,
sat in the pub with her famous coat of a thousand badges - from Scargill's
TUC delegate's badge to “Support the police - beat yourself up”. The group
from her village called themselves the “Upton LADIES Support Group”. “We
were stupid then - we soon learnt,” she says. When the strike started, says
Edith, “I could not read or write”. After a year of campaigning she went on
to study for a social-work degree and managed a children's home, but had to
retire early because of ill-health - partly due, she believes, to the
effects of that 12-month struggle. “That year was hard,” Ann Richards says,
“but we had a good time being in it together. The community spirit is what
has gone from these villages now.”
What became of the miners after the strike and the pit closures? There are
bitter stories of what one calls “broken marriages and broken people”, of
some suffering nervous breakdowns and of others who died relatively young.
Going back to the pit villages now it seems that many have been cleaned up,
the worst terraces knocked down. But even before the recession there were
few decent jobs to replace the pits, especially for young people, in the new
industrial estates of warehouses and call centres. Yet there are also plenty
of stories of miners and their wives moving on and making new lives and
careers and businesses.
As the end of the strike neared, the defiant slogan was “our day will come”.
Twenty-four years after the war ended, that day might seem farther away than
ever. The mining communities never recovered from the trauma of those 12
months. Yet what I heard again and again last week was “I wouldn't have
missed it for the world”. John Marron insists that though “a lot of people
say what a waste of time, at least we had a go. It was the last stronghold
of the working class”.
Rob Lukaszewicz says: “We didn't want to be on strike, but we're proud of what
we did. I'd have done the same, I've no regrets.” Edith Woolley says when
she sees “people struggling today I think, if we'd all stuck behind the
miners then, who knows, we might not be where we are now.”
Those who called the miners “the enemy within” might have won the war, but
they did not win many hearts or minds.
Additional reporting by Jenny Midwinter
After Scargill: no gain, just pain
The mineworkers have always been the aristocrats of the Labour movement. Their
grievances were the reason for the General Strike of 1926, and they were
central in the victory over the Heath Government in 1974. Nobody believed in
the exalted history of the mineworkers more than the man who, by the time of
the strike in 1984, had risen to the top job: Arthur Scargill.
There are many what-ifs about that strike, viewed from a quarter of a century
later. What if the leadership had not made the fundamental error of refusing
to ballot its members? What if the leadership had been prepared to
compromise in support of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party?
Both these imponderables amount to the same basic question: what if the miners
had been led by someone other than Scargill? His mixture of muddled
political anger and personal certainty led the miners into a strike that
they could never hope to win. For Scargill, the strike was an attempt to
assert the power of the union over the power of the State. It was, for him,
a replay of the question that had defined the 1974 general election: who
governs? This time the answer was, “not you, mate”.
Defeat was a disaster for British trade unionism. Membership has declined ever
since. At the time of the strike, almost half the workforce belonged to a
union. By 2000 it was less than a third. The membership is older than it
was, and is concentrated in the public sector and in contracting industries.
The idea that political ends should be reached by industrial means has never
recovered. Whenever a union leader starts to echo Scargill, as Bob Crow, of
the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) does
sometimes, the effect is to date him horribly. A new style of leadership
quietly took over, typified by John Monks's intelligent leadership of the
TUC. Quiet engagement has secured legal recognition, a national minimum wage
and a range of employment rights, such as maternity leave.
The legacy for trade unionists was worse still. When the pits closed,
stability for mining families vanished. Today the rates of drug-taking, of
criminality, of working men on incapacity benefit, are much higher in the
old mining areas than elsewhere. Norman Tebbit now says he regrets that the
Government did not do more to ease the transition for the miners. It wasn't
their fault that their industry was becoming uncompetitive, or that they
were victims of a battle for supremacy between a militant trade union leader
and a determined Prime Minister.
There was one last legacy. Once battle was joined, the Government had to win.
But the perceived relish with which it conducted the fight left a lasting
mark. It became established that the Thatcher Government and, by extension,
Tories, did not care about the victims of their policies. It was an
impression that they are still fighting to shake off.
Philip Collins
