From a Rock to a Hard Place E-Book

Beverley Trounce

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 129

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

By the end of the notorious 1984/85 miners' strike many wanted to forget their painful experiences. Many years on people are ready to look back and talk about what happened in Britain during this defining moment of industrial action. In this new and updated edition, Beverley Trounce, who worked in a pit village and whose father was a miner, delivers a candid account of this heroic struggle through the voices of people directly affected by the strike. Her research and contributions from ex-striking miners and activists cover the pickets, the collieries, the matter of simple survival through the extreme and grinding poverty of the time, the effects on the women and children involved and the wider community, as well as the aftermath and what its legacy means to people today. From a Rock to a Hard Place is a powerful and moving record of a divisive moment in history.

Leseprobe

Pickets at Celynen Colliery in Wales. (Martin Shakeshaft)

Cover illustrations, front: Riot police attacking pickets. (Ray Rising/reportdigital.co.uk); back: Yorkshire Area banner. (Author); Durham Area banner. (Philip Bowman); Hucknall Branch banner.

First published 2015

This paperback edition published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Beverley Trounce, 2015, 2024

The right of Beverley Trounce to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 603 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Foreword by Ken Capstick

Foreword by Peter Arkell

1   Beginnings ‘All Hell Let Loose’

2   Brothers in Arms

3   Sometimes It All Just Got Too Much

4   No Holds Barred

5   ‘I’d Rather Be a Picket Than a Scab’

6   The Women

7   Aggie Currie

8   Betty Cook and Anne Scargill

9   Survival and Solidarity

10   ‘Pride’

11   Going Back

12   Ghosts

13   The Children … and the Next Generation

14   ‘Trapped in Time’ by Bruce Wilson

15   John Harris, Photographer

Conclusion

Bibliography

For the striking miners and their families

– they know who they are

This living coal just sits and waits

for man alone to seal its fate.

We scoop it up to light the fire

Its heart, it glows, for our desire.

And when it’s dead we clear it out,

Like miners’ jobs, its heart ripped out.

This living coal that filled our needs,

Like miners’ lives, it’s done its deed.

From a poem by Peter Currie, ex-striking miner,Markham Main Colliery

Acknowledgements

With grateful thanks to Peter Arkell, Martin Shakeshaft, Gill and Ian Wroe, John Trounce, Don Utley, Graham Reeves, David Bell, Mick Stowe; Chris Skidmore and Richard Riggs at the NUM, Ian Sternberg, Leslie and Jean Phillips; Sean McKernan, Head of Library and Learning Support Centre, Northern College; and to all those who so generously allowed me into their lives to share their memories. All images are from the author’s collection unless otherwise credited.

Introduction

My father had been a miner before I was born and so I grew up hearing the tales he had to tell of his life underground. During the 1980s I was working as a librarian in a Nottinghamshire mining area where the colliery had always been the lifeblood of the community. This was, however, the beginning of the end of an era. Within the next few years this community, along with many others, would face huge upheaval and, in many cases, the end of a generations-old way of life. The strike of 1984/85 would become, for them, the defining event of that decade.

The miners and their families were forced to shape new identities for themselves and make their way in a world no longer dominated by their colliery. They were witnessing not only their pits closing down but also the collapse of their society. Communities that had been bound by their coal mine now had to separate and individuals had to follow their own path, forging ahead in a world where rules of the old way of life no longer applied. Some never recovered. Marriages ended, families were split and friendships destroyed. The memories, though, remain and, decades later, there are still stories to tell.

Foreword

by Ken Capstick

It seems with every passing year that the great struggle of the miners and their families takes on a higher significance, one that validates not only the reasons for the strike, but also the leadership of it.

The Great Miners’ Strike will go down in history as a working-class struggle to stand alongside the great endeavours of the past, from Watt Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt to the pains of the Levellers, the Diggers, the Chartists and the suffragettes. The coal mines may be gone, but in their place is something that will live on longer than the mines ever would. The struggle will live on in the collective memories of working-class people, as will the dignity of those who so heroically took part.

As Arthur Scargill so often reminds us all, ‘The victory is in the struggle itself.’

Ken Capstick, former Vice-President NUM (Yorkshire Area)

Foreword

by Peter Arkell

The year-long miners’ strike of 1984/85 for jobs was a rare kind of confrontation. The feeling that a terrible injustice was forced on to the 180,000 miners of the time keeps on growing. There are now no deep mines left in Britain and the former thriving communities have largely collapsed. The coal still needed for the power stations is imported.

That year of the strike, for me, was the highlight of my life. The daily News Line, for which I worked, had one reporter and a photographer in the coal fields for the duration. I spent a large part of the year with my camera in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire following every aspect of the strike. Because we reported the strike from the miners’ point of view, we became recognised and trusted by them. We were partisan in that we saw the strike as progressive and necessary, but we never distorted the coverage. On one occasion we arrived at Cresswell pit in Derbyshire at 6 a.m. to find about 4,000 pickets were already there – and not a policeman in sight. The miners had closed the pit, and the scene remained peaceful, almost serene, until the arrival, an hour later, of Transit vans full of riot police, hundreds and thousands of them. There followed a violent clash, with numerous arrests and injuries, as the police tried to fulfil their orders from above to reopen the gates to the pit so that they could bus in a few ‘scabs’ and declare the colliery as working. The picture on the previous page, of two young miners shackled to a lamp-post, was taken on that occasion.

Reading Beverley Trounce’s From a Rock to a Hard Place transported me back to that extraordinary year. The book gives a voice to the miners themselves, from all over the coal fields, forty years on. Their memories remain vivid, and they speak openly and humorously about the hard times, the worries and the implications of what they did in 1984/85. None of them express regret. They fought for their jobs as members of the NUM in the teeth of a vicious assault by the forces of the state, the media included. They were supported by hundreds of thousands of working people throughout the land, but were let down by the TUC and the Labour leaders who hardly lifted a finger in support. Rightly, they have stayed proud of their memories.

Peter Arkell, photographer

1

Beginnings ‘All Hell Let Loose’

One morning in early March 1984, former steelworker Ian Wroe turned the corner at the end of his street to be met with an astonishing sight. There were lines of police on both sides of the road as far as the eye could see. He recalls:

Looking in either direction all you could see were rows of police. They seemed to stretch to the horizon, two or even three deep in some places. A lot had dogs, and police vans were everywhere. Normal traffic was blocked off. At first I couldn’t work out what was going on but somebody told me it was because they were expecting trouble from the striking miners. Looking down the road to see all these police – well, it was surreal.

The focus of all this police attention was the entrance to Cortonwood Colliery in the South Yorkshire village of Brampton. This was the beginning of the 1984/85 Great Miners’ Strike, a strike that would become a bitter battle and would last far longer than anyone expected.

That day the area around Cortonwood Colliery became a no man’s land with running battles between pickets and police. At one point, in their attempt to escape, pickets swam across a canal and climbed up the opposite bank. From here they ran towards a housing estate, climbed fences and bolted through back gardens. Police with dogs chased them while local residents looked on in disbelief. One described the scene: ‘Flower beds were churned up, bushes were uprooted and fences collapsed. The noise was just terrible. Men yelling at the top of their voices and police dogs barking non-stop. It were like all hell let loose.’

Within a few days the local miners’ welfare and social club had become a media control centre where TV cameras, commentators and newspaper reporters gathered. Meanwhile the miners had constructed a ‘picket hut’ at the entrance to the colliery, using whatever materials they could lay their hands on. Nicknamed ‘The Alamo’, after the historic US battle of that name, the hut even had its own crude but effective plumbing system.

These huts provided some protection from the elements and were put together at many sites (as were pit camps, later on, run by women strike activists, many of whom were wives of striking miners). If a plumber, electrician or other skilled worker could be called upon to help then so much the better. During cold weather discarded oil drums with holes punched in the sides served as braziers. The police often destroyed the huts but new ones were quickly erected.

The events in early March were the result of a government announcement that Cortonwood Colliery would close within five weeks. This was to be the first of widespread pit closures that year with a loss of 20,000 jobs under a scheme devised by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her advisor, Ian MacGregor. Hundreds more closures would follow in subsequent years. The government declared these pits to be uneconomical and no longer viable. Opponents, however, insisted that there was another agenda: that of the destruction of the trade union, much hated by Thatcher, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

‘The Alamo’. (Courtesy of Rhoda Allen)

Inside ‘The Alamo’. (Courtesy of Rhoda Allen)

The miners of Cortonwood were particularly shocked by the imminent closure of their pit because, just a few days previously, they had been told that there were coal supplies which would last for at least another five years. Furthermore there had been recent investment in expensive machinery and equipment, along with eighty miners being brought in from the nearby Elsecar Colliery, which had closed down some time before due to coal stocks being exhausted. The decision to shut down Cortonwood seemed completely illogical and nonsensical. It has now become widely accepted that the announcement about its closure was deliberately timed to provoke the NUM into facing up to Margaret Thatcher so that battle could commence. For this was to be the final face-off between the miners and the government.

The 1984/85 strike was the culmination of many years of dispute. In 1910 Home Secretary Winston Churchill sent armed troops into Wales to quell the striking miners of Tonypandy. The year 1912 saw the first national miners’ strike in Britain, followed by the 1926 General Strike. Apart from sporadic local strikes an uneasy truce was maintained until 1972 when the NUM went head-to-head with the National Coal Board over low pay. The strike held two years later resulted in the collapse of the Tory Government under Edward Heath. The miners had successfully managed to block fuel deliveries to the country’s power stations, leading to the government being forced to introduce a three-day working week to conserve electricity.

Pickets at Cortonwood. (Courtesy of Rhoda Allen)

When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979 one of her main aims was to significantly weaken the NUM in order to eliminate future conflict. She appointed Scottish-American industrialist and former British Steel Corporation chief Ian MacGregor as head of the National Coal Board. He had recently implemented a major reduction of the workforce in the steel industry and NUM President, Arthur Scargill, was certain that MacGregor would deal with the miners in the same way. Scargill predicted:

I cannot emphasise enough that the Coal Board’s ultimate intention is to wipe out half the South Nottinghamshire coalfield, cut the Midlands Area by forty per cent, close down half of the Scottish pits, cut the North Western Area’s pits by half, close sixty per cent of the collieries in the North East, wipe out half of North Derbyshire, seventy per cent of the pits in South Wales and shut down twenty Yorkshire collieries. No one can now say that he has not been warned.

Naturally the government strongly refuted this and MacGregor even sent out a reassuring letter to the miners, urging them to ignore Scargill. Scargill’s words, however, would prove prophetic. Government papers released in January 2014, under the ‘thirty-year rule’, confirm that plans had been drawn up to instigate a massive pit closure programme throughout the UK.

Battle lines had been drawn. What the miners could not know, however, was that Thatcher had made careful preparations to avoid a repetition of 1974. These preparations meant that she felt confident enough to challenge and defeat the NUM. The time was right. Many of the strategies to be used had been drawn up using the 1977 Ridley plan, a report written by Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley on how to defeat strikes in nationalised industries. Thatcher’s chancellor, Nigel Lawson, stated that it was ‘like rearming to face the threat of Hitler’. Police numbers had been hugely increased with officers receiving a substantial pay rise. They were given specialist training and were issued with new equipment for riot control. Coal had been stockpiled at power stations and contracts were drawn up with haulage firms to transport it, should railway workers decide to take industrial action in support of the miners. Old laws were resurrected and new ones brought in virtually overnight. The miners were set to face the full might of the government.

Cartoon of Ian MacGregor which appeared in The Miner newspaper, depicting what was felt to be his deceitful nature. NACODS refers to the pit deputies’ union. (Courtesy of the NUM)

Yorkshire striking miner, Charlie Cibor, describes how coal was stockpiled at his colliery of Markham Main in the Yorkshire village of Armthorpe:

We were naïve. We were digging out the coal and we were noticing that the heaps were becoming massive. It never occurred to us that they were soon to be transported to the power stations. Thatcher was using us to bring about our own downfall.