by Mark Austin
It would become our daily routine or a ritual: we would wake before dawn, more often than not in some drab, soulless hotel close to the mining villages where from house after house would emerge the men intent on defending their livelihoods.
We would drive through dark streets to the gates of the pit or the coking plant or the power station, wherever the pickets were targeting on any particular day. By first light, all the players in this hideously choreographed but all too real confrontation would be in place. The pickets, the police and the press.
And, eventually, the still-willing workers would arrive, by car and coach. Either scabs or brave heroes, depending on your point of view. Needless to say, the striking miners hated them. Cries of ‘Judas’ and ‘scum’ filled the cold morning air, missiles flew, miners charged and police beat them back.
The strikers hated us, too. Particularly the BBC, which, for some reason, they viewed as merely an extension of the Thatcher government. ‘BBC – British Bullshit Corporation,’ they yelled at us. ITN got similar treatment: ‘Here they come, Lies at Ten’ was the greeting they got from the miners.
My job was not only to report, but also to keep an eye out for missiles, half bricks or bottles, which would often come flying at the camera whenever we tried to film. One morning, at the entrance of a threatened pit near Rotherham, I saw something hurled towards the cameraman. I shouted a warning, he ducked and the projectile hit me square on the shoulder. It wasn’t a brick or a bottle, and was mercifully soft. It turned out to be a plastic bag full of liquid which burst on impact. It was warm, and steam rose from my soaked overcoat. Then the smell hit me. It was urine. A cheer went up. ‘Take that, you lying BBC bastard,’ shouted one of the strikers.
I wanted to talk to them, to tell them that they had got it wrong, that we sympathized with their plight and were not on Thatcher’s or anyone else’s side. But there was no point. The narrative was set in their minds and nothing could shift it now.
It went like this… Thatcher wanted to destroy the mining communities in a politically motivated attack on the working class. The police were Thatcher’s ‘boot boys’, doing the dirty work of the state. And the media, specifically the BBC, had the job of portraying the miners as the bad guys.
It was the way the strikers saw it, or most of them. And it was desperately sad. But the daily violence became the story, and, consequently, the barrier to the real reporting of the human stories of suffering that the closure of the pits was causing.
I often used to wonder about the tactics of Arthur Scargill. Confrontation and illegal picketing were always going to lead to violence that would in turn play into the hands of the government. I thought they would have done far better to give the media stories of the decimation of traditional mining communities. Stories of families struggling to survive in the face of heartless government decision-making would have influenced public opinion more than endless pictures of violent picketing.
But the battle lines were drawn and the dispute took on a momentum of its own. It reached a terrifying and violent climax at a coking plant in a place near Sheffield called Orgreave.
I remember the day like it was yesterday: 18 June 1984. A warm day, and perhaps the defining day of the dispute. In the fields around the entrance to the plant, thousands of miners were confronted by six thousand police, many in riot gear, some on horses, and all, it seemed to me at the time, determined to exact brutal revenge if the bricks started flying in their direction.
Inevitably they did, as the lorries the miners wanted to prevent leaving exited the plant under police protection.
Then it began. First a barrage of missiles, a flurry of fists and lots of pushing and shoving. The police ranks separated and the horses charged through, followed by baton-wielding riot police on foot. The fighting lasted for hours. Hundreds were injured, and I remain astonished to this day that no one was killed.
It ended in a terrible and bloody defeat for the strikers, a beating that was to herald the eventual capitulation of the miners in what became a rout for Mrs Thatcher.
But while she may well have claimed victory it was nothing of the sort, unless you consider the deterioration of communities where drugs, drink, depression and divorce would take hold at great personal cost for thousands of British families some sort of victory.
I went back to Orgreave to present a programme just after Mrs Thatcher’s death a few years ago. You will not be surprised to hear that the hatred for her remains. Maybe it will for generations. It is the scar that refuses to heal.
What I was too young and too inexperienced to realize at the time was that it was a watershed dispute, and that industrial relations in Britain would never be the same again.
The following year, I had the sort of career conversation of which dreams are made. John Exelby asked me if I fancied becoming a BBC Television News sports correspondent, which also involved presenting the sports news on the main BBC1 Saturday night bulletin. In those days it was an incredible job because the BBC had most of the big sports contracts, and the TV news correspondent would get automatic access to all the big events. I would spend my life attending Wimbledon, Lord’s, the British Open and Twickenham. I would go on England cricket tours and to the Olympics for weeks on end. In short, Exelby was offering to pay me for what I loved doing… watching top-level sport.
I said yes.
A SPORTING LIFE
FOR THE NEXT seven years, I was doing little other than travelling the world watching sport. It really doesn’t get much better than that. Olympics, World Cups, Wimbledons, Royal Ascots, Open Championships, Grand Nationals, England cricket tours to the Caribbean and Australia. I did the lot. And loved every minute of it.
It was not only hugely fun, it also helped me realize my real dream of becoming a foreign correspondent. Many times I would be sent abroad to cover a sporting event, only to find myself at the centre of a big news story.
After a couple of years in the job, I was poached by ITN to be their sports correspondent. It was a tough decision to leave the BBC, but ITN offered to double my salary and gave me a verbal undertaking that I would get a foreign correspondent job when one came up. I agonized for a couple of weeks. Part of me was excited at the prospect of joining a smaller, more risk-taking, adventurous news organization. But I also worried about leaving the biggest broadcaster in Britain and all the possibilities it offered.
I decided to take the plunge, and was taken aback by the BBC’s attitude. They were very hard-nosed about it. My boss, Chris Cramer, famous for being stuck in the Iranian embassy during the siege in 1980, basically told me to empty my desk and bugger off there and then. It was Cramer’s style. ITN was the enemy and I was defecting. He seemed to take it personally, but I didn’t blame him.
The extraordinary thing is that I didn’t set foot in the ITN newsroom on Wells Street in central London for more than three and a half months. Instead, I was ordered to Heathrow for a flight to Australia to cover the America’s Cup sailing and the England cricket tour. They also sent one of their top foreign desk producers, Mike Nolan. We touched down in Sydney, checked into the wonderful Sebel Townhouse Hotel, and didn’t stop working and travelling all over Australia. It was astonishing – the stories just kept coming.
We had to cover the Spycatcher trial, where the British government sent over senior diplomats to give evidence to prevent the publication of a former MI5 officer’s memoirs in Australia. The spy, Peter Wright, was represented by a cocky but very bright young Aussie lawyer called Malcom Turnbull.
Turnbull ran rings around the witnesses struggling to make Mrs Thatcher’s case for a ban. They included the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, who was challenged by Turnbull about an apparent ‘lie’ in a letter. It was a famous exchange.
Sir Robert said: ‘It is a misleading impression in that respect, it does not contain a lie, I don’t think.’
Turnbull: ‘And what is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?’
Armstrong: ‘A lie i
s a straight untruth.’
Turnbull: ‘What is a misleading impression − a sort of bent untruth?’
Armstrong: ‘As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.’
That phrase haunted Armstrong; it became a huge story and we were in the middle of it. The British government lost, Turnbull later became Prime Minister of Australia, and the trial enabled me to get on air, not as a sports correspondent, but as a foreign correspondent. Mike Nolan and I did more than a hundred stories in three months. We were based in Sydney so long that the Sebel Townhouse made us ‘resident guests’.
We weren’t the only ones. The other resident guests at the Sebel that Australian summer included Phil Collins and Elton John. Elton had the penthouse suite, and when he wasn’t performing he was watching the Test cricket.
England had a great tour, and actually won the Ashes in a memorable match in Melbourne. We were allowed to film the celebrations in the dressing room, and as the champagne was spraying and the beer was being downed, in walked Elton plus entourage with more crates of champagne.
That night, the England boys had a huge party. Ian Botham − who had become a good mate – invited me along. There are not many parties where Elton John is the DJ for the evening. It was quite some celebration.
Botham likes a party. He came to my fiftieth, by helicopter, and landed in a friend’s paddock. He’s a good man with a big heart and the constitution of an ox. You go drinking with him at your peril.
The job of sports correspondent was not only a guaranteed ticket for the greatest sports events you could imagine, but also a ticket that got you behind the scenes, in with the players, into the inner sanctum of sport.
It was all an utter privilege. But why? Why sport?
I’ll tell you why. Because it matters.
Sport holds us in thrall, it transcends the humdrum and the routine, it lifts the spirit and crushes the soul, it breaks down barriers and ignores national boundaries. It is inspiring and deflating, exciting and tedious, uplifting and depressing, and most of all… it is important. As important as a Shakespeare play or a Mozart symphony.
My sporting hero at that time was David Gower. Strange in a way, because sporting heroes are normally formed in childhood. Gower is my contemporary. But from the moment I saw him bat, I thought, ‘That is how I would like to bat, that is how players should bat.’ He didn’t actually get that many runs in that game at Bournemouth’s Dean Park in August 1975, but those he did get were pretty stylish. He batted with what seemed to be effortless grace. I am sure it was not effortless, but that was the impression. Leicestershire’s Gower got 20 or so that day; Hampshire’s Barry Richards got a century. Richards was already a great, but it was the teenage Gower that caught the eye.
Now, they say never meet your heroes because you’ll be disappointed. I not only met him, but I pissed him off wretchedly, nearly cost him the England captaincy, and it is a wonder that we’re now – reasonably speaking – mates.
Within three years of that day in Bournemouth, he was playing for England and was becoming a star. He famously dispatched his first ball in Test cricket for four. The thing about Gower is that I have seldom seen a cricket ball hit with such power and yet with such a lightness of touch. It is called timing. It is the essence of batting, and Gower had it in spades.
There is no question that Gower qualifies as a great batsman. He scored 8231 runs in Test cricket at an average of 44.25. The thing everybody says about him is that he could and should have been even better. With that talent, he should have worked harder and more runs would have followed.
But that is to miss the point about Gower. Simon Barnes caught the essence of it, as he so often does, in his book on sporting heroes. ‘People said Gower would be better if he put his mind to it,’ writes Barnes. ‘It seemed to me that Gower’s basic strength was that he didn’t put his mind to it. Rather he gave himself up to his gift.’
I actually think Barnes is half right. It seemed to me that Gower worked harder and tried harder than he appeared to. He certainly cared more than he allowed people to know. At least I think so. You’re never quite sure with Gower.
What is sure is that his record as captain of England was not so great. But his reign was at least highly entertaining, for which, as a reporter at the time, I was exceptionally grateful.
While still with the BBC, in early 1986, I was lucky enough to be covering the England tour to the West Indies. It was my first overseas cricket tour, and Gower was the England captain. He was under considerable pressure, having predicted the West Indians would be ‘quaking in their boots’.
It was a typical Gower throwaway comment, made after crushing the Australians in the summer, and one, if he’s honest, he probably regrets. The truth is, it inspired the West Indies’ fast bowlers to produce the most consistently dangerous bowling ever seen – and Gower and England paid the price.
Sadly, the first Test match at Sabina Park in Jamaica was untelevised. There was no Sky Sports live coverage in those days, and I was supposed to be there with a single cameraman to record events for posterity. Unfortunately, the West Indies Board of Control asked us and ITN for £300,000 to produce news coverage and a few longer pieces for Sportsnight and Grandstand. It was outrageous, and we refused to pay. Consequently, we missed what has been described as the ‘scariest Test England ever played’.
It’s the last England Test match of which there is no footage whatsoever. Or none that I have seen. And from all accounts, it is probably just as well. It was brutal. A dodgy wicket, a hostile crowd and even more hostile bowling. There was no respite from the bouncer onslaught led by a fearsome character called Patrick Patterson. He was not one of the very best West Indian bowlers, but he was certainly, on that tour, one of the most lethal.
The correspondent for The Times, who had seen a bit of cricket in his time, wrote that he thought someone would be killed. One England batsman, Mike Gatting, had already gone to hospital. He was hideously injured when a ball from Malcolm Marshall in a one-day game skidded off the pitch and smashed into Gatting’s nose. Marshall apparently found a piece of bone lodged in the leather of the cricket ball.
Needless to say, England were well beaten in the first Test. It was a slaughter in the Caribbean sunshine, and in many ways set the tone for the entire series. And Gower and his team were under as much pressure off the field as on it. It was the height of the tabloid wars, and Ian Botham was newspaper fodder.
Into this unhappy camp, I arrived for the second Test.
Things didn’t get any better. The cricket was one defeat after another, and myself and ITN’s sports correspondent, Jeremy Thompson, spent as much time covering the off-field shenanigans.
Gower was accused of not caring about practice and was criticized for going off sailing instead. Ian Botham was making headlines for allegedly taking dope – and breaking a bed in Barbados during a ‘love romp with a model’ – and the narrative became about an ill-fated tour where the wheels were coming off.
When the Botham story broke in the News of the World, I was called early one morning and told to get his reaction. Jeremy Thompson was asked to do the same. I spent an age outside Botham’s hotel room being told he would be making a statement and to hang on.
I waited more than an hour before his lawyer emerged, closely followed by Thompson and his camera crew. ‘All done mate, not sure he’s doing another interview.’ Fortunately, he did, but he was in a terrible mood and basically just slagged off journalists. It was that sort of tour.
In a way it was wonderful for us, a different story every day, but it was a nightmare for the players who saw no respite from the battering, on or off the field. And relations with Gower, who felt under siege, were not easy.
At one press conference early on in the tour, Gower was actually asked whether he was having an affair with the wicketkeeper Paul Downton’s wife – he wasn’t. It tied into reports that Gower’s relationship with his long-term girlfriend was on the rocks.
; Tabloid reporters were suddenly everywhere. Gower later wrote: ‘Every non-native face on the islands was a potential booby trap, and not even the cricket correspondents could recognize every one of the scandal-seeking merchants.’
The atmosphere between press and players was ghastly.
During one interview, Gower rather impatiently asked me if the BBC was here to cover the cricket or the ‘off-field distractions’. I told him I would cover both and he cut short the interview.
It didn’t help that, in Trinidad at the time, a calypso song by Gypsy with the lyrics ‘Captain, this ship is sinking’ was playing everywhere. Unfortunately for Gower, it became the soundtrack to the tour and also the soundtrack for a BBC Sport piece I put together as things fell apart. He was not impressed, though he seemed to understand it made good telly, and my relations with Gower and the team suffered.
At the end of this turbulent tour, Jeremy Thompson and I decided to throw a beach party for players from both teams and the press guys. We thought it was the least we should do. Everybody got stuck into the rum punch and it was a long night. Gower was in no mood to party, he was fed up with the whole trip, and later described it as the lowest point of his international cricket career. It was pretty disastrous, but I can’t imagine any other Test team would have fared much better against the most fearsome pace attack in the world.
But here’s the point about Gower. What often goes unacknowledged in relation to that tour is that he was, by some distance, England’s most successful batsman. In the last four tests, he made scores of 66, 47, 66, 23, 10, 22, 90 and 21.
Gower’s languor conceals real guts and serious courage in the face of such dangerous and intimidating bowling. It was failure, but it was an immensely brave failure, and that will do for me. He lost his job the following summer.
But if Gower was unimpressed with me in the West Indies, he was furious with me a couple of years later.