The Valley (52 page)

To complicate matters further, NACODS (the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers) votes in favour of a strike, but not with the two-thirds majority required. NACODS members carry out safety checks. If they strike, a lack of maintenance could damage mines, so the NCB has no choice but to negotiate. In March 1984, they refused to cross picket lines except to carry out essential maintenance work, but received full pay, to the annoyance of some striking miners who regarded them as bosses’ men. There are arguments and skirmishes in pubs. At Hickleton, a deputy comes out at the end of a shift, flashes his pay packet at the pickets and shouts, ‘Keep it up, lads!’ When Marie’s brother-in-law Maurice, a NACODS member, calls round to visit her and David they all carefully avoid mentioning the strike.

The first day Gary and Kenny go picketing outside South Yorkshire it is to Bilsthorpe, a posh pit in north Nottinghamshire. It is Wednesday 14 March. They drive there with a mate called John and another Hickleton man called Jim, the destination given to them by union men from Hickleton pit. They leave Thurnscoe in the dark at four in the morning in John’s Ford Escort and join other cars leaving the Dearne villages and heading for the A1 to take them south. The other miners’ cars are identifiable by their snap in bread bags on their rear window shelves.

On some junctions of the A1 there are roadblocks where police officers stop vehicles and turn back cars full of men if they suspect them of being pickets travelling to Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire collieries. John turns off early, and follows narrow back roads and lanes through dark fields until they arrive in Bilsthorpe. The pit stands on the edge of the village, its buildings and towers neatly boxed in corrugated casings and screened by banks of trees. ‘Typical,’ says Kenny.

Near the pit gates about two hundred men in anoraks, donkey jackets and bobble hats are standing, rubbing their hands against the cold. A line of policemen in black macs and helmets stands opposite and some of the pickets and police swap jokes about who’s going to push the hardest. Before the first Bilsthorpe men arrive for the early shift the pickets move to form a barrier, and the police link arms and try to push them out of the way. The struggle looks like a stand-up rugby scrum, the police and pickets’ expressions like those of rugby players in a fairly good-natured match. After about ten minutes the police have pushed a way through. The working miners walk, drive or cycle past as the pickets shout ‘Scab!’ and other insults, and point out they’re striking for Nottinghamshire’s jobs as well as their own.

‘This one’s got his mam wi’ him, look,’ says Gary to Kenny, pointing out a teenage lad accompanied by an older woman. The boy looks at the ground. His mam glares at the pickets, daring them to say something.

‘Daren’t tha come on thi own?’ someone shouts.

‘Bugger off back to bloody Yorkshire,’ she shouts back.

‘Looks like she’s doing us out of a job,’ a policeman says to Gary.

Gary, Kenny and the others stay all day, trying to stop the other shifts going to work, and to persuade truck drivers not to make their deliveries. Some of the drivers stop and talk or argue with them. No one turns back, although pickets arriving from other places say that at some other pits, whole shifts have been persuaded to go back home. The last snap is eaten, the police shift changes over and the pit night shift goes on at ten o’clock. Some men leave, and other new pickets arrive. The temperature drops. Gary’s group are preparing to go home when some new arrivals bring news about big crowds at Ollerton colliery a few miles north. There is a rumour that a picket has been badly hurt and taken to hospital; Arthur Scargill is said to be on his way there. A few carloads head off there themselves. Gary and his mates decide to call it a day and go back to Thurnscoe.

The next morning the local TV news reports that a twenty-four-year-old miner called David Jones from South Kirby, a former employee at Hickleton pit, has died after being injured at Ollerton. The official cause of death given is chest injuries after being struck by a brick, though an inquest will later hear conflicting evidence. Arthur Scargill had arrived at three in the morning and tried to calm the situation by climbing onto the roof of a car and by asking for two minutes’ silence from the police and pickets. As news of Jones’s death spread, hundreds of pickets had converged on Ollerton, and the pit manager and union men had talked to the crowd to try to contain the growing tension.

In the weeks that follow, Gary hears from other pickets stories about rough handling by the police and about roadblocks leading into coalfields where miners get themselves or their car windows truncheoned if they refuse to turn back. Yet at most of the pits he goes to in March and April, relations between the managers, police and miners are cordial; managers allow the pickets use of the toilets and telephones, and the police continue to share their snap. In the backs of their police vans they have big cardboard boxes full of provisions: flasks of coffee, soft drinks, sandwiches with fat fillings. When they have breaks to eat it, they bring armfuls across to the pickets. ‘Here, lads, get stuck in,’ they say. ‘We’ll never eat all t’ lot. T’police force allus thinks we’re starving.’

At Cresswell colliery, Derbyshire in April, the pickets are getting ready to leave after the afters shift has gone into work. A policeman, aged about forty with a strong Derbyshire accent, says, ‘Right, lads, are we all off home then? Where are you parked?’

Most of them have left their cars about a mile away and have walked over the fields to the pit.

‘Up there,’ says Gary. ‘Bit of a trek.’

‘Jump in then.’ The policeman opens the back doors of a transit van. ‘We’ll take you up.’

‘You’re bloody joking, aren’t you?’ All of the men look hesitant. Earlier, the policemen have been recounting the story of a colleague who had his hand broken on a picket line.

‘It’s an honest offer,’ says the policeman. ‘Up to you.’

The miners pack themselves into several vans. On the way back up the pit lane, Gary’s mates and the policeman discuss the strike. The policeman says it’s all political and they don’t like being dragged into it, although the overtime doesn’t go unappreciated.

The police stop and let the miners out as they promised. ‘See you later, lads,’ says the policeman. ‘And good luck.’

54 What Are You Doing for Money?

Goldthorpe, April–May 1984

In theory COSA and the NUM pay their members when they go on strike. In practice their funds are insufficient, and while people can ask for financial help if they face unusual hardship, no one expects support as a matter of course. In the 1970s, the Department of Health and Social Security gave mothers in striking families money for their children’s food and clothes, but under new laws DHSS staff must now treat parents on strike as being in receipt of strike pay, regardless of whether they actually receive it or not. When Lynda visits the Goldthorpe DHSS office the woman behind the desk says, ‘I’m sorry, love, but we’re not allowed to give you anything apart from emergency food vouchers for your lad. They’re for £5 a week.’ The woman looks sympathetic, but sounds as if she has explained this a hundred times already that morning.

‘Even though both me and my husband are on strike?’ asks Lynda. ‘I know a lot of women have got jobs and can support their husbands, but me and John both work at t’ pit.’ And, she wants to add, the maintenance from my ex-husband is a rare privilege, and my son will need a uniform for senior school in September. But at the other counters women are saying similar things, and there are still more waiting behind them, and the DHSS woman can’t help. ‘It makes no difference, I’m afraid. That’s t’ law, now.’

‘Aye, so that women’ll nag their husbands to go back to work so they can feed their kids.’

‘As I said, Mrs Burton,’ says the woman, ‘I can give you a voucher.’

Between them, Lynda and John have the £5 voucher each week, vegetables from the allotment, the family allowance, and sometimes maintenance payments from Tony. Some who might have helped Lynda and John either lack the money or the will: John’s mam can’t help them because all her sons are on strike, while Winnie is still not speaking to them a year on from the argument about Tony and the vegetables. Other friends bring food for them, though: a pound of stewing meat and some potatoes, say, or a packet of mincemeat, or a pork joint from a friend who keeps pigs. For a few weeks they manage, but then the first set of quarterly bills clears most of their savings and they start to feel vulnerable. At the same time, they and everyone else realise the strike might last for far longer than the expected six weeks.

Women from Highgate, Goldthorpe and Bolton-upon-Dearne organise a soup kitchen at the Goldthorpe Miners’ Welfare Hall. In the mornings and afternoons they stand outside G. T. Smith’s supermarket on Doncaster Road with cardboard boxes, and shoppers throw in tins and packets of food; in the Welfare Hall they cook the food into pies and stews and serve them up as meals for a few pence. Lynda and John go there for dinner. The mood is cheerful, but as she eats her way through a plateful of stew, Lynda looks at all the men and women and kids sat at rows of tables in the hall where Harry used to perform, and feels two competing emotions. The first is admiration of how people are helping each other; the second is sadness that people have to eat in a soup kitchen. It reminds her of her mam’s stories about Walter and the distress committees of 1926. We shouldn’t be doing this, she thinks, because it’s what our grandparents, mams and dads thought they had saved us from. She looks at John, who is not talking much, and guesses that he feels the same; encouraged by the comradeship, but rueful about the circumstances.

Lynda has seen news stories about how women across the mining communities are organising support for the striking miners. Many wives and girlfriends of men on strike have formed their own campaign groups as part of a movement called Women Against Pit Closures. Some say it has changed them; before the strike, they were limited to being mothers and housewives and would never have dared to go on demonstrations, let alone speak publicly at meetings as some of them now do. Some of their mothers dislike it, and tell their daughters they are not being proper wives, but the women say that even when the strike’s over they won’t revert to the way they lived before. The communities are theirs as much as the men’s, aren’t they? In Nottinghamshire, the wives of working miners walk with their men to the pit to show support against the pickets, and there and elsewhere the wives of striking miners join the picket lines, hoping that the police won’t stop them in their cars.

The press reports do not mention the women from the offices and canteens who are themselves on strike because, she supposes, they don’t fit into anyone’s stories. But if a reporter had thought to ask Lynda Burton she would have told them that the women who work at the pits are as proud of their industry as the men, and she would have recited for the reporter the name of every pit in the Doncaster area and the names of the seams, and she would have told him which pits are fiery and which are wet, and about when she was a young girl, travelling on the pit bus with her dad driving, and about the miners with their dirty faces getting on the bus and touching the top of her head and putting mint humbugs into her hand. The women had always been involved with coal mining; they might be involved in different ways now, and they were able to talk about it more in public, but the history belonged to them as much as it did the men.

Lynda thinks of her boss and the women at work who are in APEX, and who now sign in every day to be paid for doing nothing. There have been demonstrations at the NCB offices in Doncaster and some young men noticed APEX women going in to work and shouted and spat at them, which had disgusted Lynda and everyone she knew. After all, APEX had not called them out on strike. The division and rancour breaking out between different groups of people shocks her, but the worst thing is that it is hard to resist those feelings entirely. It is not pleasing to think of friends being paid for doing nothing, while you cannot buy your child a school uniform because you are striking to save everyone’s jobs.

She walks into Goldthorpe to look for work, past the food collectors, past the Goldthorpe Hotel where the landlady is handing a box of sandwiches to someone to take to the pickets, and past the colliery gates where miners stand guard and police watch them from inside two white vans. Starting at one end of Doncaster Road, she works her way through the pubs, asking and asking, ‘Do you need any work doing? .
.
. Behind t’ bar, or anything?’ until she finds one that offers her part-time work as a barmaid.

Two days later she is walking home from the pub when she meets Frank Tulley, the manager of Hickleton pit. A dark, pensive man in his fifties, Tulley began as a miner himself and worked his way up, and like many such men, he tacitly supports the men and women on strike. When Lynda tells him she and John are struggling, Tulley tells her to send John to his house so he can pay him to do some painting and repairs. These jobs will help with the next quarter’s bills, though not enough for them to live beyond a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth sort of life.

The days lengthen, the weather grows warmer, and there is no sign of the strike ending. Coming out from her shift at the pub one afternoon, Lynda sees hundreds of people and several lines of riot police. There is talk of someone having gone back to work, and the ranks of police having come to push back the pickets so that the man’s bus can get through the pit gates. The crowd is angry because no one knows anyone who has gone back to work and it is a colliery where everyone knows everyone else; they think it’s a set-up to make it seem that men are going back to work in strikebound pits. In the end, no bus comes. Along the street, kids and women stand watching, waiting for something to happen, and the policemen look as impervious as cats.