Strike

The last British miners' strike began on this day in 1984. Forty years ago. My heart was with those miners and their communities then and so it remains. We will not forget.

My mother was born in a South Yorkshire coal mining village in 1921.  Her father was a coal miner before World War One and her maternal grandfather was a coal miner all his working life, like his father before him.

You might say that it was  on the backs of British coal miners that The British Empire was built. They dug the coal that powered industry, the railways and the steamships that fanned out across the globe - servicing the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. It was not the landed gentry or  the descendants of Norman invaders  who did it but hard-working men who sweated in darkness and risked their lives for coal. King Coal as they called it.

My first teaching job after leaving university was at Dinnington, a coal mining village here in South Yorkshire. Back then the local pit was in full operation. I could see the slag heap from my classroom window and I could hear the hooters that marked the beginning or the end of shifts.

I introduced a poem called "The Gresford Disaster" to two of my classes and we made a play about it which was performed in the youth centre. I even put the poem to music which some of the cast sang with me. Even though the village of Gresford is in North Wales, the anonymously written poem seemed very close to home for them:-

You've heard of the Gresford disaster,

The terrible price that was paid,

Two hundred and forty-two colliers were lost

And three men of a rescue brigade.

As 1982 began, the polls suggested that Margaret Thatcher, our then Conservative prime minister was about to lose the next general election but then Argentina invaded The Falkland Islands and British military forces fought back to defeat them. This utterly transformed Thatcher's electoral prospects and indeed she won the election of 1983 quite handsomely on the back of that patriotic fervour.

Statue of a coal miner in South Kirkby

Thatcher is still despised in former coal mining communities up and down the kingdom. She called coal miners "The Enemy Within" but the miners were fighting for their communities and for jobs. It was not about wage rises. She was determined to crush them and close the pits.

She paid for planeloads of police officers and soldiers dressed as policemen from the south of England to fly up to Yorkshire to crush the strike. Though much has been written about the lack of a national ballot, most of us who were on the side of the miners believe that she would have stopped at nothing  to  defeat them. Like Conservatives through the ages, she had little respect for trade unionism or indeed the working class as a whole. 

At Orgreave 18th June 1984

Lesley Boulton (Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures) is about to 

be clouted by a policeman on horseback - fortunately he 

missed as she was quickly pulled back by a striking miner.

With hindsight, you can see how reliance upon coal was becoming uneconomic and it had always been dirty and dangerous. Something had to change but not in the way that Thatcher and her gang cruelly devised it. Those brave men and their communities  deserved negotiation, persuasion and time for redevelopment and change. For generations, they had gone down into the bowels of the earth on behalf of our country and this was how the state treated them.

The mines are gone now. In their place there are retail parks or wastelands where ragged plastic bags are caught in thistles or rusty barbed wire. But listen carefully and from the years that have passed by you may still hear a plaintive echo from the bitter 1984-85 strike... "The Miners United Will Never Be Defeated!"

Back in December 2015, I wrote this poem about the

closure of the very last working  pit in Yorkshire:-

⦿

Kellingley

December 18th 2015

All is quiet now

Only darkness remains

Thick black velvet darkness

As black as coal

Pressed into eye sockets

Like thumbs.

Yes

All is quiet now

Yet somewhere

Deep in this awful labyrinth

Voices chant distantly

Please cup your ears

To hear them

Sweet like forgotten birdsong

Resounding in some

Primeval forest long ago:

"The miners united

Will never be defeated!"

Fading...fading

Melting into the darkness

"will never be..."

"defeated..."

It's all over now

Nothing left to say.

All is silent.