by Andy Beckett
That a shrinking union with a membership of less than 300,000 was able to undertake such an effective campaign demonstrated something important about the NUM, and about striking unions generally, in Britain in the early seventies: their political and social clout extended far beyond their memberships. Striking miners could be deployed in small numbers because they would be supported or obeyed by other trade unionists and members of the public. The left-wing sociologist and NUM ally V. L. Allen later cited ‘the case of the train driver [during the 1972 miners’ strike] who stopped at a station to discharge his goods, looked back and saw a solitary picket standing on a bridge over the railway lines and, on realizing he had crossed a picket line, backed his train to the other side of the bridge’. On 18 January, a civil servant wrote in a briefing note to the new chairman of the Coal Board, Derek Ezra: ‘The union are winning a lot of public sympathy. That has its roots in history. We are not going to be able to change that.’ Three days later, NUM headquarters felt compelled to include a paragraph headed ‘casual helpers’ in its latest set of instructions for pickets. The paragraph read: ‘In many areas, members of the public are offering help on picket lines. This help should be accepted but there must be at least one NUM member in charge of the line at all times.’
Much faster than the government had anticipated, the coal-fired economy became vulnerable. In November 1971, at the beginning of the miners’ overtime ban, the power stations held 16,900,000 tons of coal, their highest-ever reserves. By the start of the strike the following January, the overtime ban had already reduced stocks to 12,300,000 tons. By the beginning of February, stocks were down to 7,600,000 tons, enough for less than four weeks’ electricity in average winter weather. On cue, a cold snap began.
Sewill remembers the anxiety beginning to seep through Whitehall. ‘I heard the Treasury Permanent Secretary talking about the possible need to activate the regional government centres, as in the case of nuclear war. Because if all the lights went out, there would be no way of governing the country from the centre. Some civil servants were … absolutely traumatized by the fact that the country was facing that sort of shutdown.’ On 11 February, a secret official report on the effects of the strike recorded: ‘The first unplanned power cuts occurred yesterday … The [planned] 9–10% power cuts which are being introduced today will have to be increased to about 20% in about a week’s time; to about 30% after a further week; and to about 40% in about three weeks.’
On 21 February, the children’s television programme Blue Peter opened with an item on how to cope. ‘Power cuts are an especially difficult time for old people,’ began the presenter Peter Purves. ‘They get cold. But you can look out for the ones you know …’ Behind him, in the optimistic white expanse of the Blue Peter studio, stood a narrow single bed made up with brown blankets. Purves walked over to the bed and was joined by his co-presenter John Noakes. Together they started vigorously pulling apart tabloid newspapers. ‘Lay out sheets of newspaper,’ said Purves. ‘Place them fairly thickly between the blankets.’ He and Noakes bent over the bed, sifting heavy wool and flimsy newspaper. ‘And if you do that, the old folks will stay as warm as toast.’ With his trademark Boy Scout smile, Noakes added: ‘With all this newspaper, I shouldn’t go to bed with a candle, though.’
For a prime minister who had promised ‘to change the course of history of this nation’ less than eighteen months earlier, it was not a glorious outcome. But the decisive, televised moment of the 1972 miners’ strike did not happen on Blue Peter. It happened in the less controlled environment of a live news broadcast, from a type of political arena with which British viewers in the seventies would become very familiar.
Saltley was a dying industrial suburb a mile east of the centre of Birmingham. In the seventies, there were places like it in almost every town and city in the country. Tools and other metal goods had been manufactured in Saltley and neighbouring Nechells since the early sixteenth century, but by 1972 its dim reddish landscape of Victorian brick and low hills, terraced houses and canals, viaducts and cobbled factory yards was fast depopulating and had been officially earmarked as ‘a demolition area’. There were a few neglected shops and too many pubs. The air smelled vaguely of gas on windless days. A dark dust constantly got into people’s houses. ‘We used to have a saying in Saltley,’ says Roger Harper, a union activist who lived there in the seventies, ‘that you used to wake up to hear the birds coughing.’
The source of the smell and the dust was the coke depot. It occupied a large, roughly triangular site at the bottom of a hill and was operated by the West Midlands Gas Board, a local state-owned company that would soon be absorbed into British Gas. One of the Gas Board’s businesses was the extraction of gas from coal – a common way of extending coal’s usefulness – and the sale of the resulting husks, known as coke, as a smokeless fuel for hospitals, schools and other premises. At Saltley, the coke, which had lost the glossiness of coal and was a dry matt black instead, was heaped up into a great uneven ridge, like a range of small grim mountains, while awaiting sale. The coke pile was Saltley’s landmark. ‘For a hundred years the local urchins would go [to the depot] and buy a bucket of coke for their mum,’ remembers a former West Midlands Gas Board manager. ‘Otherwise it was three lorries a day at most on a normal day.’
But with the miners’ strike this trade changed dramatically. The day before the stoppage started, the Birmingham Sunday Mercury found ‘panic buying’ of coal in the city. ‘Merchants were reporting last night that the rush … would leave them out of stock in a matter of days.’ Yet buried on an inside page, at the end of one of many strike-related reports, was the following:
A West Midlands Gas Board official confirmed last night that there are coke stocks of at least 100,000 tons at the board’s Windsor Street depot in Saltley … ‘The reason we have so much is because demand has been so low due to a mild winter,’ he said. ‘We would be willing to sell the coke to coal merchants, subject to loading facilities being available.’
Like other coke depots, at the start of the strike Saltley had been given ‘guidelines’, agreed between the government and the NUM, that it should continue to supply only ‘priority customers’ such as hospitals and the vulnerable. Yet the West Midlands Gas Board argued that the guidelines did not apply to Saltley: unlike other coke depots, it belonged to a gas company, which was not and should not become involved in a strike concerning a different industry. It was a legalistic, restrictive view of industrial disputes that was not – yet – widely shared in Britain. But the effects of the Gas Board’s stance were undeniable. By the beginning of February, with the miners having steadily cut off the movement of coal and coke in the rest of the country, Saltley was receiving and filling several hundred trucks a day. They came from Wales, Cornwall, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Wiltshire, queueing along the roads to the depot from early in the morning. Birmingham’s rush hour was disrupted, at times by up to a mile of idling articulated lorries. On 3 February, the Birmingham Evening Mail ran a feature on the queues, with photographs. ‘The coke drivers said today they feared that striking miners might start picketing the stockpile next week,’ the paper reported. ‘Bolton driver Mr Arthur Saxon said: “I’m amazed they haven’t started picketing it already.”’
The Midlands NUM had known about the activity at the depot for a fortnight, but it was a small, politically cautious part of the union and it had not had the manpower or the will to blockade the site. Instead, it had tried to negotiate with the Gas Board; when that tactic failed, it despatched two dozen pickets. They arrived outside the depot on 4 February, a Friday. Half a dozen policemen arrived too.
In Britain in 1972 the law regarding picketing, like much of the law regarding trade unions and industrial disputes, was at best vague and at worst contradictory. Strikers had the right to picket ‘any place’ except for people’s homes, as long as their activities went no further than ‘peaceful persuasion’. But as Heath’s home secretary Reginald Maudling put it in a Commons de
bate that year, ‘It is difficult to know in any particular set of circumstances when the right of people to persuade others not to go into a factory becomes intimidation.’ The Labour MP Leslie Huckfield pointed out that the law could be equally unsatisfactory from a trade union perspective: ‘If pickets just stand harmlessly and aimlessly by the roadside, that is called peaceful picketing. But if they are successful … that is intimidation.’
For the first few days at Saltley, the former of Huckfield’s two scenarios seemed to be unfolding. The pickets stood either to the side or in front of the high metal gates used by the lorries to enter the depot. They indicated to the drivers that they should stop, declare whether the coke they were picking up was for a permitted ‘priority customer’, and if it was not, submit themselves to verbal ‘persuasion’ and agree to drive away empty-handed. Almost to a man, the drivers – who were not required by law to stop and talk to pickets – ignored the miners’ wishes. ‘We weren’t stopping even half of the lorries,’ remembers McLaren, who went to Saltley as part of the NUM contingent from the Midlands. ‘And even the ones who we stopped and talked to, most of them said, “We sympathize, but I’ve got a family to support.” A huge cheer would go up if a driver said, “All right then,” and turned back. And we didn’t get many bloody cheers.’ Some of the truckers, when they got to the front of the queue of lorries, simply accelerated towards the gates and their flimsy cordon of pickets. The miners had to get out of the way as best they could.
Over the weekend, 200 more pickets arrived from pits in the Midlands. The police presence increased to fifty officers, and there were one or two arrests for scuffling and obstruction. A slightly greater proportion of lorries were persuaded to drive away empty, but the situation remained essentially the same. Then Arthur Scargill intervened.
Both his father and grandfather had been miners. At twelve, Scargill began going to political meetings with his father, who was an NUM activist and a Communist Party member. At fifteen, Scargill started at a pit near Barnsley in south Yorkshire. At sixteen, he joined the NUM; at seventeen, the Young Communist League. He quickly realized that politics appealed to him more than mining. Even when he worked above ground at the pit, he would later tell interviewers, he had to wash the caked dust from his lips before eating lunch.
By his early twenties, however, he had lost patience with the stifling orthodoxies of British communism. Instead, he favoured a loosely defined militant leftism that emphasized aggressive direct action – primarily the use of strikes – and the potency of trade unions as a crusading vanguard for socialism. In the cautious Yorkshire NUM of the late fifties, Scargill’s thinking and methods encountered considerable resistance from union colleagues, as well as from the local Coal Board management, but he was shrewd and relentless. In 1960, aged twenty-two, he led a noisy and successful campaign over the seemingly minor issue of the timing of union branch meetings at his pit, which climaxed in a thousand-strong miners’ march through Barnsley. Journalists and NUM officials across Yorkshire took note.
With his youth, his smart suits, his ease on television, his deliberately concise, quotable rhetoric and his ability to build broad left-wing alliances – he stayed friendly enough with the Communist Party to secure its backing at critical moments – Scargill was a new and formidable kind of trade unionist. In 1962, he set out to widen his understanding of the Britain beyond the pit and union branch meeting by beginning a part-time course in economics, industrial relations and social history at Leeds University. By the late sixties, he and a group of fellow left-wingers, working in public and in private as the anodyne-sounding Barnsley Miners’ Forum, had effectively turned the Yorkshire NUM, the union’s most powerful regional organization, from a byword for caution into a byword for radicalism. In 1969, and again in 1970, the Yorkshire miners went on unofficial strike. Neither campaign won the gains the miners wanted, but a pattern of self-perpetuating militancy had been established.
The 1969 dispute also featured the first widespread use of a potent new strike tactic, the flying picket. In a long admiring interview with Scargill published in the grandest British left-wing journal, the New Left Review, six years later and titled ‘The New Unionism’, he explained how flying pickets worked:
We launched from the coalfield here [in Yorkshire] squads of cars, minibuses and buses, all directed on to predetermined targets, with five, six hundred miners at a time. Of course, the police were going to come, but they couldn’t cover forty points at a time, without bringing the British armed forces in.
In the 1972 miners’ strike, this Yorkshire innovation went national. With no strike pay available, the NUM shrewdly agreed to give its members £2 a day in expenses, roughly half their normal daily wage, if they picketed premises away from their own area. Charlie McLaren was one of thousands who took up the offer:
For the first couple of weeks of the strike we had just picketed our own pit. A few people would turn up for work, see the pickets, turn around and go home … One day we got word from the union saying, ‘Go to Saltley.’ Two buses would be laid on the next day to take anyone that wants to go … I don’t think I’d even heard of Saltley, but it was, ‘Come on, let’s go and cut the bloody boredom. Better than standing here talking to each other.’
Scargill was already busy in the weeks before Saltley. When the strike started, the Yorkshire NUM divided itself into four local strike committees, and he became spokesman for Barnsley. After it was decided that the Yorkshire miners should also picket in East Anglia, he helped devise a picketing strategy. At the time and afterwards he skilfully played up his role, telling the Observer magazine – he was beginning to win national media attention – that he deployed flying pickets from a military-style headquarters in Barnsley ‘like shock troops’. In fact, he was a relatively junior member of the strike committee, but the effectiveness of the strategy was undeniable: large numbers of Yorkshire miners, despatched at short notice to form a succession of ‘mass pickets’ at significant locations, had shut down East Anglia’s coal-related economy by the first week of February.
Hundreds of miles from home, the miners were put up by sympathetic university students and academics. Scargill was thrilled by the potential of the coalition he saw forming: ‘I went on a tour of all the universities in East Anglia and spoke to enthusiastic audiences packed with university students and miners together,’ he recalled in the New Left Review. ‘The barriers were completely down … That was, I think, one of the most remarkable experiences that I have ever had.’ The University of Essex, which was well known for its left-wing students and relatively tolerant authorities, became the miners’ East Anglian headquarters. ‘We showed to the university students a degree of discipline and organization which they had probably read about in their Marxist books … We had the International Marxist Group, the International Socialists, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and all the other [campus] organizations coming together … and agreeing with us they would have to sink their differences; that we would have to fight one common enemy and that we had no time to discuss whether Trotsky said X, Y or Z in 1873.’
Scargill also felt these heady campus weeks had an effect on the miners: ‘Our people … in a matter of days, they were changing … not only listening to speeches, but actually getting on their feet and speaking themselves.’ There were other benefits for some of the miners who stayed in the university’s residential tower blocks, which were only lightly supervised by the campus staff. The tabloids began to report that the attraction between students and miners was sometimes more than political. As Scargill put it, ‘Some of our boys were very comfortable there. We had difficulty in getting them home.’
After the success and triumphalism of the miners’ campaign in East Anglia – and in most of the rest of the country by early February – the news that huge quantities of coke were still moving freely out of Saltley came as a shock to Scargill and his strike committee. Over the weekend of the 5th and 6th, he quickly set about turning it into an opportunity.
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nbsp; At teatime on the Saturday, Barnsley, like several other strike committees, had received a request from NUM national headquarters for help with the Saltley situation. In his autobiography Gormley remembers telling his NUM subordinates: ‘Get some bloody pickets down there as soon as you can.’ While the other committees hesitated, unsure how to mount and finance a mass picket in an inner-city suburb far from most mining areas, Scargill spent the late afternoon and evening arranging coaches, alerting Yorkshire miners and despatching 400 of them to Birmingham. Later that night, he drove down there himself.
He had allies in the city. The Communist Party district secretary Frank Watters had been an NUM activist in Yorkshire; more significantly, he had been a close friend of Scargill’s for decades. In Birmingham the hub of the CP’s activities was the Star Club, a plainly decorated but innovative venue that held political and cultural events attended by the whole broad church of socialist Birmingham. The resourceful, deceptively genial Watters oversaw proceedings. When Scargill phoned him from Barnsley on the afternoon of 5 February, Watters already knew about Saltley; in fact, he had been trying for several days to drum up local reinforcements for the struggling depot pickets, with limited success. Watters now put the Star Club and his Birmingham network at Scargill’s disposal. Some of the arriving Yorkshire miners were bought a few pints in the club, then allowed to sleep on the floor between the plastic chairs. Blankets had been procured from the Salvation Army. Other miners were taken home and put up by the club’s Saturday-night customers. Scargill himself arrived in Birmingham at 3 o’clock in the morning.