The Valley (51 page)

Gary’s responsibilities are to keep the colliery and its six thousand or so men safe; if the dust ignites, the pit goes up. The job does not bring him automatic acceptance, however. All pits, like towns and villages, have their own character, and Grimethorpe is awkward: ‘bolshy’ in management terms. This is only partly to do with union politics. Despite its scale it is still a village pit in nature, and like all villages, it respects character rather than rank. For men on the lowest levels of management, as Gary now is, this means it can be difficult to give orders – particularly if you are a newcomer and the youngest on the team.

‘Get that box of bolts down to t’ pit bottom,’ the safety engineer tells him in the pit yard on his second day. ‘Ask Tommy.’ Tommy is the shaft service manager, the man who controls what goes up and down the shaft between pit top and bottom. Gary carries the box across the yard to the shaft top, where a slim man in his forties stands making notes with a pencil stub in a notebook. ‘Is thar Tommy?’ asks Gary.

‘Who wants him?’

‘I do, mucker. Will you get us that down to t’ shaft side?’

Tommy looks down at the box and back up at Gary. ‘Fuck off.’

Gary half-laughs, which he knows immediately is a mistake. ‘Go on, mate.’

‘No.’ Tommy turns to ostentatiously pick at flaking red oxide paint on a girder.

He pauses, which is a better move, because it acknowledges Tommy’s unofficial authority. Once this is acknowledged, Tommy can begin to feel some sympathy for him. He stands there, not saying anything.

Tommy cracks first. ‘What?’

‘It’s just that I’ve got to get this job done, and we’re behind.’

‘So?’

Gary knows enough not to say, ‘because my boss wants me to’. The men run the pit, that’s the real rule most of the time; the bosses are merely humoured.

‘It needs doing. There’s some lads down there can’t get on without it.’

Tommy affects boredom. ‘Leave it there,’ he sighs. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘That’s right, lad,’ says the safety engineer, when Gary says that Tommy seems an aggressive bugger. ‘But Tom’s alright. Blokes like that, you just have to learn how to talk to ’em.’

He does learn and he discovers that while some of the aggressive buggers are just bloody-minded, others are the most loyal and cooperative men he has ever met. It is a lesson that he will remember, and apply many years later, in very different circumstances.

*

MacGregor takes over and he and Scargill fall out over a pay claim and alleged pit closures. The mood in the pits grows fractious. NCB chiefs say that, having invested £3 billion to bring new capacity on stream, they need to close old pits that can’t be modernised. There are rumours that fifteen pits totalling 15,000 jobs will close by March 1984. The union imposes an overtime ban, but men in some collieries ignore it, and some managers reorganise shifts to fight it. Rag-ups break out at individual pits in South Yorkshire, and some of the men from these disputes picket others.

In January 1984, the NCB announces a new policy for coal, a familiar set of ideas concentrating production on the new, modern super-pits, and closing the older, smaller ones, with good redundancy terms. Tensions between managers and men increase. In February miners at Polmaise colliery near Stirling in Scotland go on strike when the NCB says it will close the pit. By March the mood in many coalfields is one of rising chaos. In Yorkshire the teatime local television news carries long round-ups from the local collieries, explaining who is and who is not on strike. In the Dearne Valley, in February, a row over new shift patterns at Manvers Main becomes a rallying point, and when the men walk out, others from Barnburgh, Wath, Kilnhurst, Cadeby and Silverwood walk out in support. In Thurnscoe, word goes around that Arthur Scargill is coming to the Cora to talk to the men, and David Hollingworth and Gary walk down to find the club packed.

Union meetings at the Cora are always well attended, but almost everyone in the village seems to be here, and the mood is urgent and serious. Arthur, in a dark suit, stands in the middle of the stage in front of a poster saying ‘NO PIT CLOSURES’, and warns them what is to come, telling them Ian MacGregor has been brought in to butcher the industry, and answering questions at the end. The pay claim is more or less forgotten; everyone in Yorkshire knows what it’s really about. The mountains of stockpiled coal in Hickleton pit yard are there to remind them.

The atmosphere afterwards in the Cora is opaque with cigarette smoke and rumours. Some of the men are ready to walk out now. David hears one man say he wants to get on with it and get a strike called. He reckons it could all be over in six weeks.

53 An Extra Half-Hour in Bed

Highgate; Thurnscoe; Houghton Main, March–April 1984

At 6.30 on the morning of Monday 12 March, 1984, Lynda Burton is woken by the creak of John’s footsteps on the stairs outside the bedroom door. She wonders why he is back at home. He is supposed to be on earlies, and set off for Hickleton pit an hour ago.

‘Tha needn’t bother getting up for work,’ he says, as he comes into the room and tugs off his sweater and T-shirt. ‘We’re on strike. They’ve told everybody to go home.’

Lynda sits up and checks the time on the digital radio-alarm clock built into the padded Dralon headboard of their new bed.

‘What’s gone off?’

‘I don’t know. Managers are at t’ gates turning everybody back, and there’s some pickets on.’ He shucks off his jeans. ‘NUM and COSA’s on strike. They said to tell thee not to go in.’

COSA, the Colliery Officials and Staff Association, is John and Lynda’s union. Most women in the offices joined COSA or APEX, the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff, and most of those in the canteen COSA or the TGWU, the Transport and General Workers’ Union. COSA is affiliated to the NUM, and the two unions strike together.

‘Bit of extra holiday then.’ They came home yesterday after six days in their caravan at Cleethorpes. The lie-in will be a small, unlooked-for luxury.

‘Aye, make t’ most of it.’

Both assume the strike will be settled in two or three days. Working in the offices, Lynda hears every week about short strikes and rag-ups, sometimes a shift at Hickleton, sometimes a whole pit in the area. In the last year it has been getting worse.

‘Is it just Hickleton?’

‘No, there’s some more, I don’t know who though. Shove up.’ He yanks back the sheets and blankets, and climbs into bed.

‘It’ll not last long whatever it is,’ she says, and then lies back down for a last twenty minutes before getting up to see Karl off to school.

At noon they listen to the lunchtime news bulletins as reporters explain that miners at collieries across all of Yorkshire are out. The conflict has been developing for several days. Last week, the NCB’s South Yorkshire area director had met area union reps in the Manvers Main offices and told them that in five weeks’ time he would close the pits at Bulcliffe Wood and Cortonwood. Bulcliffe Wood is a small ‘dads-and-lads’ pit near Wakefield and its closure is not a great shock to anyone. Cortonwood, which stands in the village of Brampton, four miles west of Bolton-upon-Dearne, is different. Last year the same area director had said it was safe for five years, and the NCB had spent £1 million on improvements. Now he says he has been told to reduce output, and this one closure will achieve more than half his target. All 839 men will get redundancy packages or transfers to other collieries, but the Cortonwood miners object that the decision contravenes the official colliery review process that usually precedes closure. A review would at least give people in the area time to plan and adapt, whereas a sudden shutdown would kill off not only the village’s mining jobs but all the other jobs that rely on the pit as well.

After the announcement, the Cortonwood men voted to strike, and 300 of them went to Barnsley to ask the NUM’s Yorkshire Area Council to recommend that other pits vote to join them. The council agreed and proposed a strike in Yorkshire to begin after the last shift on 9 March. Delegates took as a mandate the Yorkshire area’s 1981 vote for a strike in the event of closures.

The next day, Tuesday 6 March, Ian MacGregor announced his intention to cut 20,000 jobs and close twenty pits. Three pits besides Cortonwood and Bulcliffe Wood – in Scotland, Kent and County Durham – had already been named. He said the jobs would be lost gradually through retirement and redundancy packages, but few miners believed him, and anyway, they asked, what will replace those jobs?

Across the county, miners and their families met in clubs and welfare halls and voted as NUM branches to accept the proposal and strike in support of Cortonwood. Some walked out immediately. By 12 March, all the pits in Yorkshire are still.

Watching the television as they eat their lunch, John and Lynda agree with the line taken by the Hickleton miners and union officials. ‘It’s Maggie and MacGregor trying it on to see what happens,’ says John, feeding scraps of boiled ham to Sam the dog. ‘She’ll shut half of t’ pits in Yorkshire if she can get away with it.’

*

In Thurnscoe, David Hollingworth has also returned home early to tell Marie he is on strike (‘We’ll have to tighten us belts for a bit, love,’ he tells her, worried about mortgage payments as they have just bought their house from the NCB) and taken Lisa and Gemma, the family’s Golden Labrador, out for a walk. They stop at the pit gates where a mass picket of about 200 people has gathered, and David talks to some friends; they are cheerful, and full of the usual predictions that it will be settled in a few days or weeks. A mile away to the west, Gary and Kenny have joined the picket at Houghton Main. The Houghton picket is, like Hickleton’s, chiefly a show of unity today, as, other than a few officials, there is little traffic in and out. The men are gathered near the manager’s office at the bottom of the pit lane, and they boo and jeer when the officials, acting as if they can’t see or hear anyone, drive past in their cars. The watching police, who are from Barnsley, laugh.

The preceding Saturday night Gary had attended a meeting at the Cora about Cortonwood and the strike. Hickleton union officials had said that Ian MacGregor had a hit list, and that Thatcher was going to lay waste to their communities. It was the first time Gary had heard ordinary people using the word ‘community’, and it sounded ominous. People in the crowd had shouted about the need to stand and fight, as if an invading army was about to sail down the River Dearne. Kenny agreed, and had suggested that he and Gary start by joining the picket at Houghton on Monday. It is acceptable to go to your mate’s pit, or to the one in your village if you work away, because everyone is standing and fighting for each other.

A member of managerial staff driving a Ford Cortina whizzes past the pickets, and a man standing near Gary shouts, half-joking, ‘BACM bastard’ at the car (BACM being the British Association of Colliery Management). The driver ignores the low-level heckles and parks up in the yard, and everyone resumes their conversations.

‘If nobody’s working in Yorkshire we’ll all be going somewhere else,’ says Kenny.

He means they will be flying pickets at power stations, or at pits where miners are still working. Secondary picketing has been made illegal by the government, but it had been clear at the Cora meeting that people were going to try it anyway.

‘Aye, let’s hope it’s somewhere glamorous. Kent, maybe.’

‘Or t’ posh pits in Nottinghamshire.’ This is only a half joke. Yorkshire miners envy the modern buildings and attractive landscaping of Nottinghamshire’s pits, some of which are concealed by tree screens to make their village look prettier. The old colliers in the valley say it has all been a reward for the county’s blacklegs who left the Miners’ Federation and broke the strike of 1926.

*

The National Union of Mineworkers is a national organisation made up of individual bodies (such as COSA or the Cokemen) and areas such as Yorkshire, South Wales and Nottinghamshire. These bodies and areas are independent unions in their own right, and their members tend to identify as strongly with their own organisation as with the national union as a whole. In 1984 these allegiances partly determine the politics and character of the strike.

It begins with the individual pits in two areas, Cortonwood in Yorkshire and Polmaise in Stirling, voting to walk out and requesting that the NUM’s national executive recognise their action as official. This recognition will sanction picketing of other areas as Yorkshire and Scottish miners ask others to strike in support. The executive votes to recognise the action, though some members, knowing that this will lead to a campaign for a national strike, request that the union holds a national ballot as it had in 1972 and 1974. The NUM executive does not hold a ballot, and critics will say this is illegal and undemocratic – indicative of Arthur Scargill and his supporters on the executive wanting a strike regardless of members’ wishes. Its defenders will counter that as some areas such as Kent and South Wales immediately and solidly walked out in support of Yorkshire and Scotland, it would be unfeasible to instruct them to return to work, even if a national ballot rejected strike action.

Across the country the strike is therefore uneven from the beginning. At some pits all the men come out, at others none; in some areas most NUM and COSA members stop working, in others the majority carries on. Over the border from South Yorkshire in Nottinghamshire, the area union leaders say they want a ballot before they endorse a strike, and most of the miners in the county continue to work.