by David Hencke
I was not surprised to hear that you were writing a biography of Arthur Scargill – I had already been told that by three different sources.
I explained that I was not prepared to assist or give approval in any way to a project of this kind and that on previous occasions I have refused to give approval or assist other journalists in writing a biography of Arthur Scargill.
The fact we haven’t exchanged a word between 1985 and the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool in 1992, together with the vitriolic and inaccurate articles you wrote at the time of the smear campaign by the Daily Mirror and Cooke Report, does not help.
I have thought over your request for a general interview but feel in the circumstances it would be unwise. It would undoubtedly be used as an occasion for gleaning information towards the production of your book.
A professional PR adviser would probably have told him to see Routledge but stay away from Davies. But it seems to be Scargill’s way to become very close to people, as he did with Routledge, then cut them off entirely and for ever because of some slight or another.
His personal life seems to have unravelled. He parted from his wife many years ago, and was apparently not on speaking terms with her for years, though she too lives in the small village of Worsborough. Nor was he on speaking terms with his only daughter, her husband or his grandchildren, all of whom also live nearby. Recently attitudes have softened a little and he has been seen in the village with his grandchildren. How his family estrangements happened we do not know. Scargill is credited with a number of affairs, but there is no evidence. Today he is close to Nell Myers. Anne Scargill would not talk to us about her husband: ‘It’s too painful. I’m not washing my dirty linen in public. I’ll take it to the grave with me.’
Dave Feickert says: ‘Arthur is now a sad, lonely sixty-nine-year-old [this was in 2007], who does not speak to his ex-wife or his only child or her children. He has a most terrible ability to cut off his friends, through apparently profound disagreements. I have always refused to play this game. I became a Quaker during the civil war of 1984–5 and do not believe, like Quakers generally, that one should do this. So I always chat to him when I see him at NUM events, but we usually talk about our health problems – i.e. I listen to his!’
Of the acolytes – Roger Windsor, Nell Myers, Maurice Jones, Jim Parker – only Myers is left to him. The other three now hate him; hate is not too strong a word. He refused to go to his daughter Margaret’s wedding, so she contacted Rodney Bickerstaffe, an old family friend. In happier days the Bickerstaffes and the Scargills saw a lot of each other, and had regular meals together as a foursome. She asked Bickerstaffe to give her away, and he agreed, making the speech at the wedding that would normally be made by the father of the bride. Scargill was not there.
The union could have lived to fight again, been reunited, secured some sort of negotiating position that would have allowed it to protect its members, says Feickert, but failed to do so because Scargill ‘never recovered psychologically from a defeat he could never acknowledge’. Yet the miners followed Scargill, especially in Yorkshire. The man had charisma. And he has his supporters to this day, who will not hear a word against him. Neil Kinnock puts that down to people trying to avoid ‘a spiritual implosion’ by admitting they were wrong. The pride of the mining communities makes it hard for them to admit that Scargill was not the superman they thought. The union was a major part of that pride, with its history, traditions and status. Outsiders sometimes wonder whether miners in Barnsley resent Scargill’s comparative wealth and his big house. They do not. That is how they believe the President of their union ought to live.
There are those who, even today, feel that they are somehow betraying something if they allow themselves to be critical of Scargill. Rodney Bickerstaffe is like that: he is normally an affable, communicative man, but getting him to talk about Scargill was like drawing teeth. At one point, more to try to get him talking than for any other reason, we said: ‘He’s a vain and silly man, isn’t he?’ No, no, said Bickerstaffe, he’s not a silly man, we shouldn’t call him silly, we’d damage our book if we did; and he chuntered on like that for several minutes, perhaps hoping we would not notice that he had failed to challenge the word ‘vain’.
On 27 May 2002 former Daily Mirror editor Roy Greenslade disowned the corruption story that Roger Windsor had given his paper twelve years before. In an article in the Guardian, he mused on whether Windsor was MI5’s man in NUM headquarters – carefully, because Windsor had already successfully sued the Daily Express for saying he was.
It had been rumoured for years. The former head of MI5, Stella Rimington, fuelled the rumour with the answer she gave to the Guardian: ‘It would be correct to say that he, Roger Windsor, was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine.’
This neither fingers Windsor nor absolves him: it just muddies the waters, and that is how spies operate. They like to spread uncertainty and distrust. These things are the air they breathe. Rimington ensured that suspicion will forever linger over Windsor which, assuming he is not guilty of spying on the NUM, he will never be able to shed. Greenslade, too, is content to leave in the air the thought that Windsor might have been the security services’ mole in the NUM.
Windsor wrote a rather sad open letter to Rimington in a clumsy and forlorn attempt to clear his name of the charge; naturally, it went unanswered. In it, after recounting events that we know did happen, he made the sensational (and unsubstantiated) charge that Scargill was still seeking Libyan funding after the strike was over. He seems to have been desperate to clear his name, for he then wrote to renegade spy David Shayler. According to Shayler’s partner, Annie Machon, Windsor believed Shayler could exonerate him, which was never very likely since Shayler did not join MI5 until 1991.
Having done so, he handed all his papers to one Malcolm Lister, the architect who designed the building in Sheffield to which Scargill moved the union from its former London home, and was also responsible for the improvements to Scargill’s house. Lister, who came from a Yorkshire mining family, admired Scargill and felt honoured to work for him. But his hero-worship turned eventually to loathing, as it did with so many others.
For what it is worth, we agree with the conclusions reached by two journalists who investigated the matter in some depth soon afterwards, Paul Brown and Kevin Cahill. There certainly was a security services spy in the NUM, and probably more than one. We do not know who it was. But it is unlikely to have been Roger Windsor. He is too obvious a candidate.
As for the money, the final word goes to the novelist Marina Lewycka. In her novel Two Caravans, she has her young Ukrainian hero remembering ‘the solemnity with which his parents donated their gold wedding rings to buy food for the British miners. What happened to all that money? The Ukrainian miners could certainly do with it now’. Marina Lewycka was born in a refugee camp after the Second World War, of Ukrainian parents. And she is married to Dave Feickert.
When Arthur Scargill asked that meeting in Porthcawl in November 1984, ‘Can you say to your son or daughter: in 1984 I took part in the greatest struggle in trade union history . . .’, he was borrowing from the famous First World War propaganda poster showing a shamefaced man who does not know how to answer his children when they ask, ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’
An even more obvious First World War reference was offered during the strike by the electricians’ union leader, Eric Hammond, who called the miners ‘lions led by donkeys’, the phrase used about British soldiers in their putrid trenches.
The Great Strike for Jobs, as it is known in NUM folklore, was far more a civil war than an industrial dispute: not just because it was all or nothing, and not just because the two armies clashed with a violence hardly ever seen in British politics. It also shares the defining characteristic of a war. It is politicians who declare war, lead rival armies, cheer and inspire soldiers. But it is ordinary men and women who fight, are hurt and die.
That’s why
we find looking back on the First World War so shocking. We no longer care about Kitchener and Haig, Asquith and Lloyd George, Clemenceau and the Kaiser. What makes that war so extraordinarily vivid is that it left a whole generation deeply and irreparably damaged. They trusted their leaders, and those leaders let them down.
The miners trusted Arthur Scargill with their homes, their families, their future, their safety, everything they had, and he let them down, bravely shouting, ‘Onwards and forwards, brothers, the future lies ahead,’ without thinking through the dangers and hardships into which he was leading them.
The nation trusted Margaret Thatcher. She convinced people that she was fighting an Antichrist, that unless the miners were brought down and humiliated Britons could not sleep safely in their beds, that our economic security depended on destroying the power of the unions and a rapid shutdown of the coal industry. Her legacy from this strike is a fractured society that took years to heal (and in mining communities has still not healed) and an energy crisis.
Neither Thatcher nor Scargill paid the price for their war. Neither has ever once acknowledged even the smallest error. In that, they really are like the politicians and generals who fought the First World War and were memorably excoriated by Siegfried Sassoon:
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death . . .
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.3
ABBREVIATIONS
ACAS
Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service
ACPO
Association of Chief Police Officers
ASLEF
Associated Society of Locomotive Steam Enginemen and Firemen
ASTMS
Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs
BACM
British Association of Colliery Managers
CBI
Confederation of British Industry
CEGB
Central Electricity Generating Board
CGT
Confédération Générale du Travail
COSA
Colliery Overmen and Staff Association
CPBF
Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom
CPGB
Communist Party of Great Britain
CTAWA
Colliery Trades and Allied Workers Association
DTI
Department of Trade and Industry
EMA
Engineers and Managers Assocation
FBU
Fire Brigades Union
FOI
Freedom of Information
GMB
General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union
IMO
International Miners’ Organization
ISTC
Iron and Steel Trades Confederation
MFGB
Miners’ Federation of Great Britain
MIDAF
Miners Defence and Aid Fund
MIREDS
Miners Research, Education, Defence and Support Trust
MoD
Ministry of Defence
MTUI
Miners Trade Union International
NACODS
National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers
NALGO
National and Local Government Officers Association (now called Unison)
NCB
National Coal Board
NCCL
National Council for Civil Liberties
NEC
National Executive Committee
NGA
National Graphical Association
NHS
National Health Service
NRC
National Reporting Centre
NUJ
National Union of Journalists
NUM
National Union of Mineworkers
NUPE
National Union of Public Employees
NUR
National Union of Railwaymen
ORC
Opinion Research and Communications
PSI
Public Services International
PSU
Police Support Unit
SOGAT
Society of Graphical and Allied Trades
SWP
Socialist Workers Party
TGWU
Transport and General Workers’ Union
TUC
Trades Union Congress
UDM
Union of Democratic Mineworkers
WFTU
World Federation of Trade Unions
WRP
Workers Revolutionary Party
CHAPTER NOTES
PREFACE
1. Morning Star, 7 June 1989.
CHAPTER 1: THE SHADOW OF 1926
1. Perkins (2006).
2. Ibid.
3. Beckett and Beckett (2005).
4. Perkins (2006).
5. Marquand (1977).
6. Brown (1986).
7. William Keegan, Observer, 5 January 2003.
8. Davies (1987).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Crick (1985).
12. NUM website.
13. Hennessy (1993).
14. Routledge (1993).
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
CHAPTER 2: ENTER THATCHER, STAGE RIGHT, AND SCARGILL, STAGE LEFT
1. Beckett (2006).
2. Goodman (1985), p. 21.
3. MacGregor (1986).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 110.
6. Routledge (1993).
7. Ibid.
CHAPTER 3: THE GREAT STRIKE
1. TGWU Record, May/June 2005.
2. Interview with Trevor Bell.
3. Wilsher, MacIntyre and Jones (1985).
4. Callinicos and Simons (1985).
5. National Archives, released under the FOI Act.
6. Released under the FOI Act.
7. Cabinet Office document released under the FOI Act.
8. Ibid.
9. Interview with Peter Walker.
10. MacGregor (1986).
11. Martin Kettle in Fine and Millar (1985).
12. Jones (1985).
13. National Archives, released under the FOI Act.
14. National Archives, Coal 31/394.
15. Goodman (1985).
16. Guardian, 3 June 1985.
17. Jones (1986).
18. Ibid.
19. Guardian, 3 June 1985.
20. Jones (1986).
21. Ibid.
22. Milne (1994), p. 41.
23. MacGregor (1986).
CHAPTER 4: THE BATTLE OF ORGREAVE
1. Kinnock Papers.
2. Beckett (1995).
3. Paul Mackney, Birmingham and the Miners’ Strike, Birmingham, Birmingham TUC, 1987.
4. Papers from David Pavett.
5. Mackney (1987).
6. Ottey (1985).
7. Callinicos and Simons (1985).
8. Kinnock Papers.
9. The Miner, 2 April 1984.
10. Bill Keys’ diary.
11. Interview with John Lyons.
12. The Times, 16 April 1984.
13. Bill Keys’ diary.
14. Wilsher, MacIntyre and Jones (1985).
15. The Times, 5 April 1984.
16. Abdel-Rahim (1985).
17. Home Office document released under the FOI Act.
18. The Times, 18 April 1984.
19. Routledge (1993), pp. 148–9.
20. Kinnock Papers.
21. MacGregor (1986).
22. Jackson and Wardle (1986).
23. Ibid., p. 32.
24. Routledge (1993).
25. The Miner, 2 June 1984.
26. The Miner, 15 June
1984.
27. Callinicos and Simons (1985).
28. Jones, Petley, Power and Wood (1985).
29. Nicholas Jones, Free Press, May 2004.
30. Home Office document released under the FOI Act.
31. Jackson and Wardle (1986).
32. Guardian, 19 June 1984.
33. Ibid.
34. Jackson and Wardle (1986), pp. 23–4.
35. Callinicos and Simons (1985).
CHAPTER 5: THATCHERAND THE ENEMY WITHIN, SCARGILLAND GENERAL WINTER
1. Goodman (1985).
2. National Archives.
3. National Archives, released under the FOI Act.
4. Bill Keys’ diary.
5. Document released under the FOI Act.
6. National Archives, Coal 26/1410.
7. Goodman (1985).
8. Patrick Win tour, Guardian, 20 July 1984.
9. The Times, 20 July 1984.
10. Ian Aitken, Guardian, 20 July 1984.
11. Document released under the FOI Act.
12. Document of 22 August, released under the FOI Act.
13. Bill Keys’ diary.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Goodman (2003).
17. Interview with Geoffrey Goodman.
18. Goodman (2003).
19. Callinicos and Simons (1985).
20. Document released under the FOI Act.
CHAPTER 6: PIT MANAGERS, MOSCOW GOLD AND A FATAL LIBYAN KISS
1. Interview with Kevin Barron.
2. Nicholas Jones, Free Press, 28 April 2004.
3. David Jenkins, The Calling of a Cuckoo, London, Continuum Books UK, 2002.
4. Report of press conference at York, The Times, 27 September 1984.
5. Document released by the Cabinet Office under the FOI Act.