by David Hencke
‘Until June’, wrote Weekes, ‘we were by agreement moving 9000 tons/week prepared (washed) coal by rail into Llanwern ... However stocks of prepared coal were rapidly being depleted and so I started persuading Emlyn that we should begin to wash some of the Gwent run-of-mine stocks. Emlyn privately saw the sense of this but knew that he would face problems with some of the wilder members of his executive.’
But the agreement broke down when Williams and Rees went to Sheffield for a meeting of the NUM National Executive and Scargill ‘put the frighteners on them’. The NUM executive voted to end all dispensations to the steel industry.
Weekes thought that Emlyn Williams’s view was that the strike ‘must not be allowed to destroy the good relations that have existed between the Welsh miners and the Llanwern steelworkers for many years’. But that objective was in serious danger. Llanwern was operating below safety standards, and might be forced to cease. And this was a problem for the coal industry as well as the steel industry, for‘the future of at least five pits and 5,000 jobs are fully tied to the future success of Llanwern’.13
Kinnock sympathized with his old friend, but there was not a lot he could do except try to grease the wheels in South Wales. ‘I knew the South Wales leadership could do little publicly without destroying their own reputation. They were as determined as I not to let Scargill have anyone else to blame.’
He added: ‘Phil Weekes was a colliery boy from Tredegar ... He should have been director of the NCB because he had huge technical skill, immense personal strengths which included great firmness and great humanity. He ... perpetually counselled a measured and rational approach to the strike, he tested Scargill and Thatcher ... He was just trying to keep the show on the road so that the overmen went into pits to make sure the pumps were operating, trying to mitigate damage and gathering of gas so that the pit could be returned to ... He also tried to sustain relations with major customers, the power industry and the steel industry.’
Kinnock was also busy trying to prevent picket-line conflict developing in South Wales on the same lines as in Yorkshire. After a two-hour meeting with leaders of the miners’ lodges, he wrote to Chief Constable J.E. Over of the Gwent Constabulary:
The Lodge representatives registered very strong concern about the clashes between their members and the police and great anxiety about the general policing practice in the area in recent days ... All the people involved in the discussion are known to me and I would regard them as responsible and experienced individuals.
There was widespread feeling that among the police in the area last week, there were additions to the Gwent police from Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Wiltshire forces and the squad formation apparently adopted by some detachments has also given rise to the suspicion that soldiers have been used.
There were allegations that some police officers have appeared in uniforms not carrying insignia of rank, number or force of origin.
Many reports of extensive and unnecessary impediments to movement in the Newbridge and Abercarn areas, of‘rampaging’ by police through the streets and of very aggressive behaviour against small groups who were not running away or seeking to avoid pursuit in any way...
There is great concern about the treatment of alleged offenders at the time of their arrest...
Over insisted that he had only had some assistance from South Wales police and ‘We have never used and will never use soldiers.’14
In Yorkshire the police had by now established domination. After Orgreave, miners sullenly recognized a stronger, better organized, better equipped and better fed enemy - and enemy was the word.
‘At Highmoor on 10/12/84 Chief Insp Moore told the pickets that it was against the law to shout at the strikebreakers,’ reported Sheffield Policewatch.
... Throughout the dispute the police have subjugated the men on the picket lines, exerting their total control through mass arrests, arbitrary law and excessive (and often unlawful) violence and threatened violence. Over the last few weeks the picket lines have become generally very quiet. We feel that the pickets have been forcefully convinced that they have no control of their own picket lines – very rarely are they permitted to speak to the strikebreakers as they enter the pits and frequently they are not allowed a position from which they can effectively picket.
Miners and their wives had by December grown to hate and fear the police. ‘You can tell there’s trouble when they [the police] adjust their chin straps – you know they’re going to come straight at you with their truncheons, arresting people just anyhow,’ one miner’s wife told a journalist.15 And here is another, celebrating a tiny victory:
We’ll never forgive them [police] for what they did to us ... We got one over them, though. They were chasing a young lad, a picket, and he rushed into the community house. We locked the door while he stripped and got some clothes from the jumble. You could always find plenty of jumble clothes here. By the time the police forced their way in he was standing at the sink peeling potatoes, calm as you like. They didn’t recognize him. But we recognized one of the coppers, he was on the picket line later, dressed as a striker, provoking the lads to violence, trying to get them going.16
Allegations that some police were being used in this way as agents provocateurs were very common. Here is another: ‘I was walking home alone (in Abertillery - not a big city!). I have to pass a crossroads on the way, and as I did, a van pulled up just in front of me. It was dark but I could hear the voices of men shouting out, “Slut, prostitute!” I turned my head, actually to see who they were talking to: I honestly didn’t think that it could have been me ... I suddenly realized they must have seen all the badges that I was wearing . . . When I got alongside the van it was full of policemen.’17
Frustration at the fact that the police had the strikers under their thumbs, and were able to prevent them from mounting any sort of picket that might make a difference, gave birth to one of the most terrible deeds of the strike. On 30 November a taxi driver carrying a working miner to a colliery in Mid-Glamorgan was killed by a rock dropped from a bridge.
Kinnock issued a statement: ‘I feel complete horror at this awful tragedy and send my deepest sympathies to David Wilkie’s loved ones. I ask whoever did this terrible thing to come forward now. Others have died and been terribly injured in the course of this dispute. Miners and their families are appalled by what has been happening and I know that they, like me, want the violence to stop.’
Thatcher’s statement was more political, seeking to extract capital from the death: ‘My reaction is one of anger at what this has done to a family of a person only doing his duty and taking someone to work who wanted to go to work.’
It was true that much of the self-righteous outrage in the press about this incident appeared in newspapers which had ignored the deaths of striking miners on the picket lines; and equally true that the police operation to find those who killed David Wilkie was a far more determined and successful one than the operation to find those who killed the striking miner David Jones. Nonetheless, it was a terrible act, and the two men who did it were found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for eight years.
By then Roger Windsor’s carefully constructed cloak-and-dagger methods of hiding NUM money had all unravelled, and the sequestrator was bearing down on the NUM’s money through the Luxembourg courts. The method of hiding the money ‘was what you would expect of a used-car salesman’, a city accountant was quoted as saying at the time.18
The NUM had nothing. It could no longer give its striking members the barest subsistence. The car in which the President drove around the country, the airplane hired to take him and Windsor to Luxembourg and Paris, the food for his members to have Christmas dinner with their children, it all had to be paid for from charity, that of other trade unions and well-wishers at home and abroad.
On 2 December the NUM asked the TUC to bail it out by taking a lease on a building in Sheffield which the NUM could use for its headquarters, its own headquarters now being in the hands
of the sequestrator; by ensuring that any member of staff dismissed by the Receiver would be paid by the TUC; and by giving it enough money to get by from day to day.
It also wanted – and this phrase has Arthur Scargill written all over it – a General Council meeting to be called ‘with a view to mobilizing the movement to take industrial action in support of the miners’ union and ensure the Receiver is not allowed to hijack the NUM or indeed any other unions’. The next day another special delegate conference resolved not to pay the £200,000 fine for contempt, not to purge its contempt and not to co-operate in any way with the sequestrators or Receiver.
The TUC’s legal advice was that, if it did what the NUM asked, it would be in contempt, and would itself risk sequestration. Individual members, of unions giving unlawful assistance to the NUM, could take action against their union. So Norman Willis and his colleagues declined to do what the NUM asked, thus feeding Scargill’s conviction that he had been betrayed by the leaders of organized labour.
Meanwhile the hope of aid from the Soviet Union was receding. At the end of December, Mikhail Gorbachev paid his first visit to London as the new Soviet leader. At their meeting at Chequers, Margaret Thatcher made it clear that any approval of financial help for the miners would damage relations between the two countries severely. Gorbachev assured her that, to his knowledge, no money had been given. He did not feel it necessary to mention the abortive transfer to Geneva, since no money had actually reached the miners. Gorbachev went home and gave instructions that no money should reach them.
This was a dreadful disappointment to Scargill, who had created a bewildering number of ways in which secret payments could be made: through the Finnish trade unions; through an account controlled by the British representative at the WFTU; through an account in Dublin controlled by Nell Myers in her married name of Nell Hyatt; through the Sheffield Women’s Action Group.
Scargill did not give up. He was in constant contact with the CGT General Secretary Alain Simon, who had excellent Soviet contacts, and who by now was regularly travelling to London or Sheffield to meet Scargill because the telephone was not secure. Normally he would see Scargill alone, but sometimes also Heathfield, occasionally McGahey, and occasionally (no doubt when there was money to deliver) Scargill’s driver Jim Parker. It is likely, though Simon does not mention it, that Roger Windsor was sometimes present as well, partly to interpret, though Simon was now learning English, mainly so that he could talk to Arthur Scargill without needing Windsor to interpret. The meetings were mostly in ‘bad, expensive English hotels near Sheffield’.19 (Alain Simon has a very French contempt for English catering, though on his visits to Scargill he has apparently warmed to Barnsley chops.)
Scargill sent a written appeal to the Soviet trade unions on 28 December. The NUM, he said, had spent £30m; it needed £300,000 a week to maintain pickets and day-to-day organization, and more for legal bills. It needed £10-£20m. He also had a new route to suggest: the money could go to a trust fund controlled by Alain Simon, Nell Myers or the Labour MEP Norman West.20
And that, at last, as we shall see in the next chapter, did produce some money – and, like so much else, the money produced more grief than relief for Arthur Scargill.
But no Soviet money had arrived by Christmas 1984, which looked like being a grim time for striking miners’ families. At Christmas we had a toy and turkey appeal so that every child of a striking miner would get at least one toy and every family would have a Christmas dinner,’ reported a member of one of the women’s support groups. ‘It was said that we would never raise enough money, but with the help of sympathetic supporters we did it – despite the turkey lorry getting confiscated at customs. There was even a convoy of toys from the Ruhr Valley in Germany.’21
It was done with real sacrifice. Anne Scargill gave us the flavour of it. She may have been the President’s wife, but she saw herself as just another miner’s wife and she shared their privations. She worked for the Co-op, not as a shop worker but in its administration. She needed to keep the job because Scargill was not taking his salary during the strike (though the exact state of the President’s finances, as we shall see, remains to this day a matter of controversy).
‘I used to finish work at half past five, come home and go to bed at six o’clock and then be off on the picket bus by eleven o’clock. We got to the picket and come back and I’d be at work for half past eight. I think now, how the hell did I do it? And then I also worked in the soup kitchen three nights a week, peeling potatoes and that.’
One writer who was close to the women’s support groups believes that the generosity shown to the miners at Christmas was the last straw – it was the feeling of receiving charity that sent men back to work.
Children, she adds, adapted to Christmas. They decided that Father Christmas was a scab, and if he brought you a present then you were no better than a scab too. But at the last moment, two days before Christmas, French miners sent hundreds of toys. There was no way to share them out equally or distribute them fairly.22
Even though the miners’ plight was desperate, the government did not think the dispute was over. David Hunt recalled that a special operation was mounted while the miners took their Christmas break. Knowing that picketing would cease, a big effort was made to transfer more coal to the power stations over the Christmas period. Whatever ministers officially said, there were fears that if there should be a bitter January and February, coal stocks could run out, handing a last-gasp victory to Scargill. So while the strikers settled down to their meagre Christmas fare, tens of thousands of tonnes of coal were moved to the power stations to make sure supplies would last. According to Hunt the exercise was successful.
Peter Walker was determined to keep as many pits running over Christmas and New Year as possible, despite strong representations from a now exhausted police force. Charles McLachlan, Nottinghamshire’s Chief Constable, privately asked the Home Secretary for a two-week pit shut-down ‘to give the police two weeks off over Christmas and the New Year’. The NCB decided to leave it to area directors, and the police eventually left it to the discretion of Chief Constables. McLachlan reduced his cover to dog handlers and effectively abandoned it on New Year’s Eve.
On 5 December an internal Home Office memo disclosed that the Forward Planning Unit at New Scotland Yard had raised problems about the winter weather disrupting the police operations to block picketing. It said:
Mutual aid units are billeted a long way away from the coalfields in which they are used and in bad weather conditions the units might be delayed or prevented from travelling altogether. PSU’s [police support units] travelling from Chilwell and Ruddington to Derbyshire face a journey of an hour each way, part of which takes them on a section of the M1 which is renowned for being affected by bad weather.
PSU’s rely upon police motorcycle escorts to show them the way to collieries, but motor cycles could very quickly become unusable when the weather deteriorates.
In the end the Home Office official thought little could be done, ‘having exhausted all possibility of obtaining accommodation close to the pits’.
But whatever problems the government felt it was having, the TUC was sure that the miners’ troubles were more serious. As 1984 closed, it was clear to Norman Willis and Bill Keys that the miners’ position was hopeless. Their only hope was a face-saving deal, which would probably have to be done, if it could be done at all, against the bitter opposition of the miners’ own President. Could they do it?
CHAPTER 8
ELEVENTH-HOUR TALKS
30 DECEMBER 1984 TO 20 FEBRUARY 1985
As 1984 turned into 1985, the outlook for the striking miners was bleak. Their morale drained a little more every time another set of peace talks began and collapsed. The NCB’s incentive payments to break the strike were now enormous: enough for a man to pay off his debts. The weapon of mass picketing, in which Scargill had put his faith, had been blunted by ruthless and often brutal police tactics. But still they
fought on, with courage and conviction that seemed inspiring to committed left-wingers, and incredible to outsiders.
They fought on partly because they were fighting to save their jobs and communities, and perhaps because some of them - though fewer every day - still thought that their President, who sounded utterly confident of victory every time he spoke, might have a plan to achieve it. But mostly they fought on because of their loyalty to their union.
Scargill, without admitting it, had modified some of his positions as it became clear even to him that they were no longer tenable, and in doing so suddenly found himself, for the first time in his life, outflanked on the left, which he did not like at all. He urged limited co-operation with the Receiver appointed by the High Court, and was condemned by those who had believed him when he said he would never cooperate, led by Kent miners’ leader Jack Collins.
The left-wing union leaders who had tried to support Scargill, men like Bill Keys and Rodney Bickerstaffe, were convinced that the NUM President was leading the miners to disaster, that there was no hope of real change from Scargill, and that he would drag their members down with his. Their concern now was to minimize the damage; to find a way out for the miners if they could; and, if they could not do that, then to make sure Scargill could not pin the blame for his defeat on them.
Privately, Scargill’s own Vice-President, Mick McGahey, thought the same as they did, and he took action. McGahey went to his grave without ever admitting that he tried to put together a peace deal behind Scargill’s back, but that is exactly what he did.
Bill Keys’ meeting with Lord Whitelaw in December left him feeling that a settlement with the government might be possible, though Scargill would be unlikely to accept it, since it would be designed to prevent him claiming victory. It was still better than the outright defeat that Keys now believed was the only alternative.