by Andy Beckett
The next day, he and the miners went to have a look at the depot. ‘I have never seen anything like it in my life,’ he remembered in the New Left Review. ‘It was like the most gigantic stack of any colliery that I’d ever seen … It was like a mountain … It was an Eldorado of coke … You can imagine the reaction of our boys.’
Some of the details of what followed have become blurred by myth-making and credit-seeking and by the opposing positions of many of the Saltley protagonists. Scargill and Watters, both of whose accounts have a romantic tinge, have claimed that the miners forced the depot to stop admitting trucks that Sunday. In 1985, British Gas, into which the West Midlands Gas Board had been absorbed, published an internal report, ‘The “Saltley” Incident’, which it described as ‘inevitably subjective’. The report claimed that the depot was not open for business that Sunday at all.
However, the direction and significance of events at Saltley between 6 and 10 February can be established with more certainty. Although there were already hundreds of miners from the Midlands picketing the depot, under the command of the secretary of the Midlands NUM, the well-known moderate Jack Lally, the much more junior Scargill quickly took charge of the operation. He had swapped his television-studio suits for a more proletarian donkey jacket, with the collar turned up and trade union badges on the lapels, plus a baseball cap and a thick red scarf. He held a loudhailer, and his speech was even quicker and more staccato than usual. He sensed faster than many of those present that a historic moment might be at hand. Scargill described his mindset during the strike in the New Left Review: ‘We were in a class war. We were not playing cricket on the village green … We were out to defeat Heath and Heath’s policies … Anyone who thinks otherwise is living in cloud-cuckoo land.’
Not all the Midlands miners were delighted at the arrival of this faintly messianic Yorkshireman. ‘We’d heard of him,’ McLaren remembers. ‘I’m a bit of a cynic, and I thought, “Here’s another bloody union man come to make a name for himself. We haven’t asked for help from any other area. We’ve got our own fucking union men. What the hell are you doing here?” I’m a big Arthur supporter now, but at the time I thought, “Just keep your bloody arse out.”’
Scargill ignored such sensitivities. By Monday, he had between 500 and 2,000 pickets (the numbers went up and down during each day, and the estimates differ wildly) to deploy against the depot. He swiftly established a command post. Opposite the depot gates, on a small triangular traffic island, there stood a public toilet with a low, flat roof. He climbed up with his loudhailer. From there he could see every element of the crowd as it thickened in the thin February sunshine: the police, over 200 of them, drawn up in two parallel lines to make a corridor towards the gates for the incoming lorries; the miners, many of them men of a certain age with old-fashioned haircuts, massing either side of the police corridor like a restive seventies football crowd; and, on the fringes of the action, left-wing newspaper sellers, students who had come to support the picket, local schoolchildren and residents who had come to have a look, and the television cameras.
Each time a lorry came down the hill towards the depot, Scargill would try to get the pickets to surge forward. The miners would duck their heads and shove together like a giant rugby scrum. The police, standing with their backs to the pickets, would link arms, brace their legs and dig their heels into the cobbles. Extra officers would run to the points where the police lines threatened to give way. Strained shouts of ‘Dig in, lads! Dig in!’ reverberated off chipped Victorian walls. Then Scargill – or simply the group mind of the shoving miners – would decide to switch the picket’s angle of attack. If the police reacted too slowly, the miners would break through and spill onto the road. The depot gates would be blocked.
If the incoming lorry was caught in the sudden crush of pickets, the encounter could be volatile. Few of the drivers were trade unionists: the TGWU, the main union for lorry drivers, had warned its members their union cards would be withdrawn and their companies blacklisted if they crossed the picket line. By the Monday, with the Saltley mass picket fully established and gaining notoriety, the truckers still driving and queueing for many hours to get into the depot were determined or desperate for work, or both, and often self-employed – effectively frustrated small businessmen sitting in very big vehicles. The pickets would lie down in the road in front of them or climb up to their cab windows and cling on. They would bang on the sides of the trucks. There would be shouting matches. If a lorry finally got into the depot and out again with a load of coke, it would sometimes be pursued. ‘When they stopped at the traffic light at the top of the hill,’ remembered McLaren, ‘miners would knock out the two pegs that held up the loading flap at the back. The coal came back down the hill.’ He smiled: ‘It was a bit of sabotage.’ Was he ever involved? He gave a slightly shifty look. ‘No.’
The Birmingham Evening Mail reported on the Wednesday that one driver had been seen wearing a crash helmet. ‘Two others had Alsatian dogs in their cabs.’ Richard Webb worked as a police constable at Saltley throughout the mass picket. ‘The drivers had got pickaxe handles,’ he told me when I met him, still cropped and broad-shouldered, in a cafe in Birmingham. ‘I remember one time a lorry stopped and a pickaxe fell out.’ He unfurled a worldly smile: ‘That got the pickets stirred up.’
The truckers were hard to get at, high up in their cabs, but the miners were ingenious. ‘The Communist Party would come round with sandwiches and pies for us,’ said McLaren. ‘We all started chucking the fucking pies. And then after we did it, I said, “I’m fucking starving.”’ In his memoirs, Watters records with relish the sight of truckers driving into the depot with steak and kidney pie hanging off their faces. The pickets also threw pies at the police, and during the shoving matches the police responded with a needling violence of their own. ‘They were up to their bloody tricks,’ said McLaren. ‘I remember one day you had the police in front of you, just sort of standing there with their backs to you. And they’d start kicking you in the legs. And if you turned to react, they’d drag you away and arrest you.’ I asked Webb if there had been kicking by the police. He wrinkled his big forehead. ‘There probably was.’ Just inside the depot gates, a ‘truce area’ was set up for administering First Aid. ‘I went in to have some treatment,’ Webb remembered. ‘Somebody [had] pulled my thumb back – strained it. It swelled up. Initially it was quite painful.’
The week before Saltley, a miner had been killed by a truck as it drove through a picket line outside a power station in Scunthorpe. There was an immediate and melodramatic debate in the Commons – ‘This could be the start of another Ulster in the Yorkshire coalfield,’ warned a Labour MP with a mining constituency – and so the Saltley confrontation built up in an atmosphere of heightened sensitivity to violence. By the Monday, the Birmingham Evening Mail, whose coverage was notably more restrained and factual than that of many national newspapers, was already referring to the ‘Battle of Saltley’. That day, the paper reported ‘bottles, bricks, [and] stones’ being thrown, ‘crush injuries’, and ‘one driver … almost dragged from his cab’ before defending himself with an iron bar. The same day, even the mild NUM official Jack Lally warned of retaliation if the police kept ‘putting the boot in’. Meanwhile, the nightly television news, with its footage of pickets chanting, police carrying away wounded colleagues and the grappling crowd at the depot gates surging this way and that, seemingly uncontrollably, appeared to confirm that an ominous, even apocalyptic political disorder was breaking out at Saltley.
On the Tuesday, there were 350 policemen outside the gates. On the Wednesday, there were 600. On the Thursday, 800. Officers arrived in coaches. Police vans waited in side streets to receive arrested pickets. Plainclothes officers tried to mingle with the miners to pick out troublemakers or – some pickets alleged – act as provocateurs. Alongside this small army of policemen was a unit of the Special Patrol Group. It had been founded in 1961 as a mobile police force for dealing with situations
thought beyond the capabilities of local officers. By the early seventies, this increasingly meant problems of public order, for which the SPG’s sometimes violent solutions would become increasingly notorious. Richard Webb was an SPG member. ‘We did a lot of work at football matches,’ he recalled, with a police veteran’s easy deployment of euphemism. The SPG also began to appear at political demonstrations and industrial disputes. At Saltley, Webb remembered, ‘I think the thing that got us was Arthur Scargill on top of the toilets egging them on.’
In fact, the confrontation outside the coke depot was less ferocious than much of the coverage suggested. The British Gas report on the mass picket found that until its climactic stages,
Notwithstanding the evidence of violence depicted in the media … relations between police and pickets on the whole remained friendly and low key. Only when either lorries and/or TV crews arrived did the atmosphere change … Once the lorries and TV cameras had left the scene, the atmosphere relaxed, and often cigarettes were exchanged between pickets and police. Gas Board personnel had free access through the pickets …
In 1978, in a doomy book called Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence, a retired major general and self-styled expert on social turbulence called Richard Clutterbuck – the British seventies were a boom time for such people – published casualty and arrest figures for the Saltley mass picket. They were modest enough to inadvertently undermine his book’s melodramatic argument. ‘During the six days,’ wrote Clutterbuck, ‘thirty people had been injured, sixteen of them police. Seventy-six arrests had been made.’ He categorized most of those arrested:
61 miners
3 drivers
2 motor workers
1 insurance agent
2 unemployed
5 students
1 academic
In 1985, in a more sober book called Policing Industrial Disputes: 1893 to 1985, the sociologist Roger Geary suggested that the early seventies were, in fact, a relatively peaceful period for picket-line behaviour. Until the early twentieth century, he wrote, the police had effectively acted ‘as an employer’s private army’ during British strikes, with all the street battling that implies. But between the Edwardian and Heath eras a whole host of factors – stronger trade unions, closer government supervision of the police, the growth of civil-liberties groups and the emergence of a more consensual, less starkly divided country than in Victorian times – changed the nature of factory-gate confrontations. The ‘mass pushing and shoving’ of the early seventies, Geary wrote, ‘can be seen as a solution to the problem of making picketing effective without resorting to violence’. On the police side, he noted the absence of riot shields, riot helmets and even truncheons for officers on picket-line duty. At Saltley, even the SPG were lightly equipped. ‘We’d have been bloody bollocked if we’d used truncheons,’ Webb recalled. ‘It wasn’t that sort of incident.’
Of course, the British police in the early seventies were hardly social workers in uniform. Many IRA suspects, ethnic-minority Britons and other members of the period’s lower-status groups could testify to that. And Geary acknowledges that in 1972, arrested miners (his anonymous informant does not say where) received brutal treatment ‘on at least one occasion’ once they had been removed to the more private, lightly regulated world of the police station. Yet on picket lines members of powerful trade unions were often protected by the invisible shield of their social standing and connections. Webb summarized his feelings towards the miners at Saltley: ‘I went to school in a mining area in Kent. There was a friend of mine whose dad was a miner. We [the police at Saltley] were on poor money too, so we had sympathy with the miners. My view was that … there were one or two hotheads. The rest were ordinary working blokes looking after their interests.’
The residents and businesses of Saltley, despite the disruption the mass picket brought, also basically accepted the miners’ presence. The struggling pubs and shops eagerly sold them beer and sandwiches. At J. H. Richards, a long-established manufacturer of metal bearings immediately round the corner from the depot gates, the managing director Philip Bellingham watched the mass picket ebb and flow. ‘It built up from about 8 o’clock in the morning. The police would arrive at the same time as the pickets. It became something for people here, to go and have a look. The scene was just like the road outside a football stadium just before kick-off. I found the pickets polite, friendly. You could certainly sort of pass the time of day.’ The miners’ manners were not impeccable, though: ‘We had to shut our gates at the front because they were walking in and, frankly, peeing up our wall.’
As the picket grew, Bellingham remembered, someone painted ‘THE MINERS WILL WIN’ in big white letters on a wall just up the hill from the depot. Tactical mistakes by the police made this more likely. In 2006, when I belatedly met Scargill, by then in semi-retirement as honorary president of a much-reduced NUM and much less available for interviews, he recalled one of them. ‘At Saltley,’ he said, ‘the police were either side of the gates at the bottom of the hill, and we were above them.’ His tiny, slightly tired eyes suddenly flashed with triumph: ‘They had to push uphill!’ Webb, for one, found it hard work. ‘I was knackered each night. Most policing is quite boring, and I found Saltley quite exhilarating. But I got back absolutely knackered.’
The fundamental weakness of the police’s position at Saltley, and ultimately that of the Heath government, was their shared belief that the miners could not or should not be taken on too aggressively. In mid-February, a secret civil-service memo on the miners’ strike included a section titled ‘Police Views’:
Chief officers of police … are naturally anxious to avoid exacerbating feeling by strenuous action which would both embitter relations with the community and … lead to still greater numbers turning out to support the pickets … The police have on the whole felt relieved when those having charge of fuel depots … have come to terms with the miners about arrangements for access to the premises, although recognising that these have in effect been victories for the miners.
The government was more supportive of those who defied the NUM – but only unofficially. On the Tuesday at Saltley, the British Gas report records, ‘The Chairman of the [West Midlands Gas] Board received a message from a senior Government Minister: “Whatever happens, don’t close the gates – but don’t say I told you as I shall deny having said it.”’ Moreover, the Heath administration remained squeamish about what supporting the Saltley management might ultimately involve. As the home secretary Reginald Maudling put it in his memoirs six years later:
… the number of strikers involved was so great, and feelings were running so high, that any attempt by the relatively small body of police who could be assembled to keep the depot open by force could have led to very grave consequences. Some of my colleagues asked me afterwards why I had not sent in troops to support the police, and I remember asking them one simple question, ‘If they had been sent in, should they have gone in with their rifles loaded or unloaded?’
All Scargill needed to win at Saltley was enough pickets. During the Tuesday and the Wednesday, more miners arrived from Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Scotland and Wales. A few dozen local students and car workers came to help out, but the flood of people required to swamp the depot completely did not materialize: pickets, like policemen, got tired, and by midweek many miners had been sleeping on floors and shoving and chanting in the cold for days. A hardcore of lorry drivers were still forcing their way into the depot by forming tight convoys of a dozen vehicles, grinding forward en masse and refusing to stop in any circumstances. The West Midlands Gas Board was still refusing to limit its coke sales as the government and NUM had requested. The Gas Board received a joint telegram from local MPs urging it to compromise with the pickets. In the Commons, Maudling was pressured by senior Labour figures from Wilson downwards to force the Gas Board to concede ground. Maudling replied that the distribution of coke was not a matter for the home secretary. And the Gas Board continued to insist th
at the miners’ strike was nothing to do with them. This supposed neutrality, however, did not stop the canteen at the coke depot from supplying the policemen outside the gates with tea and sandwiches.
On the picket line, Charlie McLaren’s morale was dipping. ‘It didn’t seem we were making any bloody progress. We felt we weren’t going to shut it unless something bloody big happened. There were rumours going round that the other unions were going to come … And then nothing would happen … My own thought was, “It’s just a rumour to keep our spirits up.”’
But it was not just a rumour. Starting on the Tuesday evening, after his loudhailer duties were over for the day, Scargill set up meetings with representatives of the main Birmingham unions. ‘I said they could come out on strike and write themselves into history,’ he told me, ‘or they could do nowt.’ Roger Harper was one of those who heard Scargill’s appeal. Besides living a few hundred yards from the coke depot, Harper was strongly left-wing and active in the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) and the Birmingham Trades Council, both important local union bodies. He had his reservations about the miners: ‘The NUM was a very insular union. It was never affiliated to the Trades Council. We were having collections for the miners every week in the factory. There were rows because the power was being knocked off thanks to the strike, and guys were losing money.’ Yet, in the end, Scargill’s rhetoric and feelings of collective union solidarity – and a long-standing local resentment of strike-breaking truckers – prevailed. On the Thursday, 10 February, it was arranged that sympathy strikes in support of the miners would take place across the city. Workers would be encouraged to converge on Saltley.