The FBU brought together activists to assess and learn from a struggle the government would rather ignore, Barrie Clement reports
(Photo credit: Ray Rising/reportdigital.co.uk)
March this year is the fortieth anniversary of one of the most bitter political and industrial conflicts in British history. The year-long miners’ strike of 1984–85, which started at Cortonwood Colliery near Rotherham, saw parts of the country under the virtually totalitarian control of the Thatcher government and the police.
Its impact on the union movement – and, by implication, on workers’ terms and conditions – was without parallel and is still felt today. The fact that many full-time workers are unable to feed their families, is a direct consequence of its impact on the union movement, says former miner and an organiser of the Durham miners’ gala, Dave Temple.
Despite its seismic importance, the strike is barely mentioned in our schools, if at all.
NEVER FORGOTTEN
FBU general secretary Matt Wrack is seeking to ensure that it is never forgotten and recently brought together a small group of activists to offer their reflections on the 40th anniversary of the start of the year-long dispute and to assess the extent to which it has lessons for trade unionists today.
The proposed closure of Cortonwood – probably a deliberate provocation says Dave – proved to be the catalyst which led to walkouts all over the British coalfield. In the Midlands however, most miners continued to work in pits which were not threatened with closure and which attracted the attentions of thousands of flying pickets as a consequence.
Despite its seismic importance, the strike is barely mentioned in our schools, if at all
Dave believes prime minister Thatcher set out, not just to close pits, but to “humiliate” miners. At the beginning of the conflict, he was asked by fellow miners if they were going to win. “I said ‘you can never tell, but if we don’t fight we’re dead’.”
Heather Wood, whose father died from emphysema caused by working underground and whose grandfather was killed in a pit accident, played a key role in the Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC) group. She said it was ironic that so much effort was devoted in her home town of Easington, County Durham, to protect a pit where, on 29 May 1951, an explosion had killed 83 miners. “They were fighting to keep something open that killed men.”
But it was not just a strike to keep jobs, it was fight for the whole community. “Welfare halls, parks came from the pit. In a way mining gave us the NHS. It was the nearest thing to socialism, living in a mining community.” The annual Durham miners’ gala is a celebration of that community: “It’s saying we are here and we’re not going anywhere.”
ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT
The cohesion of the community was an essential ingredient of the miners’ armoury.
Tony Curry former miner and now FBU executive member for the north east, has a vivid memory of the local comprehensive school in Wingate, near Hartlepool, opening up its kitchen in the summer of ’84 to provide meals for the benefit of the strikers’ families.
“Everybody helped. Small communities like mine came together.” The community provided a “life-support machine” for young and old, said Dave. “We have to replicate that again.” Unions should be among the organisations setting up food banks for instance. “There should be a trade union café in every village.”
Women were the backbone of mining communities and were at the very heart of the strike, said Heather. “Unless we got the women together, the strike would fail. If they’d said go back to work, they would have.”
At the beginning of the dispute women at Easington colliery would inform the NUM of their plans to carry out a certain course of action so they wouldn’t replicate it, but gradually they would just tell them what their intentions were.
Women saw what Thatcher was trying to do to communities, said Heather who, with other women of Save Easington Area Mines (SEAM), ran 14 cafes where anyone in the community could get a free meal.
Dave, who worked at nearby Murton Colliery, said he was astonished at the speed with which women got involved in what was seen to be a male-dominated industry. “Within a week, meetings were full of women.” Many refused simply to go back to their role as housewives. “A whole generation of women got involved in politics.”
Many villages had their own police station and those officers tried to keep out of the conflict. But they brought in police from other areas, said Tony. “Everywhere we went there was a police presence.”
Heather argues that the large-scale invasion of officers from other areas helped cement the determination of communities to stick together.
On one occasion police ransacked a house in the village, having entered without a warrant. They told the woman who lived there that things would be worse for her if she insisted on proper documentation. “The house was left a mess and nobody was ever taken to court for it.”
Not all local police officers kept their heads down; one sergeant in Easington was “a right bastard” who shopped one of his own mates. And it should be remembered that “our police were doing it in other areas. I came to hate the police.”
Penniless striking miners used to dig for coal at the side of railway tracks. “You would see police chasing them away, just for trying to heat their houses and warm their kids. These were desperate times.” In the coal strikes of 1972 and ’74, the National Coal Board allowed the strikers a bit of leeway. “In this strike, if you were caught, you were sacked,” said Dave.
After the Battle of Orgreave at a coking plant in Rotherham in June 1984 in which massed ranks of police attacked pickets, Dave was asked by “shell-shocked” colleagues why it was happening. He replied: “It’s the capitalist state and it’s organised against us and this is what they do.” It was one of the most violent episodes in British industrial history.
Some unions withheld their support for the National Union of Mineworkers on the grounds it had failed to hold a national ballot, but many trade unions, individual union leaders and groups of trade unionists, especially those on the left, did what they could to help protect mining jobs.
Matt retold the famous incident when the then FBU general secretary Ken Cameron, who handled finances for the strike when NUM accounts were frozen, asked a bank manager for £100,000 from union funds. The money was for miners’ welfare but on receiving the cash, Ken, a man with a well-developed sense of humour, asked the bank manager for directions to the nearest bookie.
Dave told of a number of occasions when haversacks full of money were used to get cash to where it was needed.
SUPPORT FROM GRASSROOTS
There was also support from grassroots trade unionists. Matt told how as a young firefighter in London, he went out every week raising money for striking miners and urging colleagues in his workplace to back them, “sometimes in challenging circumstances”.
Miners who crossed picket lines in areas where the strike was strong got a hard time of it.
Tony was 15 years old when the strike started. He told how his small community of Wingate, seven miles north west of Hartlepool, came together during the dispute and shunned the “one or two” colliers in the village who continued to work. On one man’s garden fence, the word “scab” was writ large.
Tony became a trainee in a nearby pit in 1987 – two years after the strike ended. On his second day, he was warned not to talk or associate with a “scab” on the shift. Other miners wouldn’t get in the cage with him. “They felt he had betrayed them. He was always on his own. Nobody would change or shower next to him,” says Tony.
While the industrial action did not halt pit closures, it did ensure there were no compulsory redundancies and severance pay of up to £30,000 was on offer
Most accounts of the conflict argue that the miners suffered complete defeat, but Dave pointed out that while the industrial action did not succeed in its main aim of halting pit closures, it did ensure there were no compulsory redundancies.
And severance pay of up to £30,000 was on offer, which proved to be a “life-changing” sum for him when he was finally made redundant in 1993.
“If we’d knuckled under we would have got a minimum of compensation,” he said.
So what should we learn from the strike? We need to “organise”, said Heather. “Wages and conditions are the most important things, but we also need to act as advocates for the general public. It’s the only way we’re going to get anywhere near a socialist society.”
At a time when right-wing racist groups are increasingly voluble, “we need to be getting out there”.
