by Andy Beckett
From 7 o’clock in the morning, miners and police began to gather outside the depot as usual. The weather was bright and crisp, but the imminent sympathy strikes gave the now-ritual deployments an additional charge. The chief constable of Birmingham, Sir Derrick Capper, had joined his officers. Richard Webb was slightly nervous: ‘We’d heard that there were more pickets coming.’ The previous day, the Cabinet had been warned by the Department of Trade and Industry, the section of Whitehall in closest touch with developments at Saltley, that if pickets arrived at the depot in overwhelming numbers the situation might ‘oblige closure on public safety grounds’.
For the first part of the morning there was an uneasy lull. No trucks tried to get into the depot, and the pickets were quieter than normal. Nine o’clock came and went. No reinforcements came over the hill.
The Birmingham trade unionists wanting to picket Saltley had been instructed to assemble at their workplaces. Roger Harper had a surprise when he got to his factory: ‘Even the guys who had been against it were expecting to take part. We got the old banner, and we walked down the hill. We had thought there might be some aggravation at the depot, but there was a body of us, 800 or 1,000 out of 5,000 in the factory, so we weren’t concerned any more. And I remember the Lucas workers coming down the hill opposite. People coming down other hills, over the Saltley viaduct …’
Webb was outside the depot gates with the 800 policemen. ‘We heard that some pickets were coming over the Saltley viaduct. The plan was to block off the bridge, steer them away. But’ – he made a helpless, sweeping gesture across the cafe – ‘I can still see it now, them coming over the hill …’
McLaren was outside the depot gates with the 2,000 miners. ‘We heard someone playing the bagpipes first. I thought at first that one or two factories had come out. And then you saw more, and more behind them. I thought, “The whole of bloody Birmingham’s out!”’
Scargill remembered the moment with a sudden wolfish smile: ‘It was so big, you had to see it to believe it. I could see thousands of people. The five roads into Saltley were all filled with marchers. The police tried to tell them to carry on past the gates, but I said to the marchers through my megaphone, “No, stop here. Close the gates.” And when the crowd got to the gates, it began to move forward six inches at a time. The police were hemmed in’ – Scargill almost licked his lips – ‘like the cream in a cake.’
Webb remembered: ‘They just overwhelmed us. They were in front of us, behind us …’
Harper remembered, ‘We filed in behind the coppers. We made no attempt to push the coppers. Then it sort of went quiet. All the traffic in the area had stopped. We thought, “What has happened to all the cars?” We didn’t know that the people marching were blocking all the roads.’
By about ten-thirty, between 10,000 and 20,000 trade unionists and their supporters were standing on the pavements and in the road in front of the depot gates. There were men in their best clothes, with ties on under their work coats. There were women holding shopping bags. There were pensioners. There were people with small children. A bedlam of clashing chants – ‘We shall not be moved!’, ‘Support the miners!’, Heath out!’, ‘Tories out!’ – echoed off the cobbles, and then settled into a single, incessant one: ‘Close the gates! Close the gates! Close the gates!’
The line of police protecting the depot was four officers deep but obviously insufficient. Standing next to the gates, Capper looked at the crowd and then down at the ground. Beneath his chief constable’s cap, his mouth was set and grim. He made his decision. Between 10.42 and 10.45 a.m. – accounts vary – the police by the gates waved the pickets nearest them back. The pickets grudgingly obeyed. Then a middle-aged man in a straining grey overcoat, an official of the West Midlands Gas Board, appeared from inside the depot. Behind him the coke mountain, lower and flat-topped now, loomed black in the low sun. A young policeman swung forward one of the heavy gates, eight feet high and topped with iron spikes, with visible haste. The end of the gate swung past where it was supposed to come to rest, and had to be swung back. Finally, the two gates were brought together with a heavy metallic clank, just audible above the whistles and chants. Two policemen approached and stood in front of where the gates met, facing the pickets. Then the man in the grey overcoat walked over with his hands in his pockets. His eyes were narrow, his face tight. He glanced at the pickets and then turned his back. He seemed to bare his teeth in something like disgust. He took a key from his pocket. Around the bars of both gates there was a thick chain and, attached to it, a padlock. The man turned the key in the lock.
From all sides there was a deep, lingering roar like the sound of a goal in a Cup Final. The mouths of the people in the crowd were gaping with joy, their heads tilted back, their eyes closed. Policemen were slapped on the back. People cried. Children were held up in the air to catch the moment. ‘We were all bloody shouting,’ McLaren recalled. ‘I remember thinking, “Jesus Christ, what we could do if we stuck together.”’
Capper asked Scargill to help him disperse the crowd. Scargill agreed, on the condition that he could make a speech first and that he could borrow a police loudhailer, as his had stopped working. Then he climbed back on to the roof of the public toilet. ‘This will go down in trade union history,’ he declared. ‘It will also go down in history as the Battle of Saltley Gate. The working people have united in a mass stand.’ When he had finished speaking, the crowd quickly dissolved. A small picket remained to ensure the depot stayed closed, while many more people headed for the local pubs. McLaren got the NUM coach back to his colliery. ‘I never saw the gates closing. But I felt great. You felt that if need be, that can happen again.’
In London that morning, the Cabinet was meeting to consider the already bleak situation in the miners’ strike. The topics for discussion included ‘the deadlock in negotiations’ between the Coal Board and NUM; ‘the increasing difficulty of maintaining supplies of coal’; and the urgent need ‘to introduce severe restrictions on the use of electricity’. Then Maudling was given the news from Saltley. He told his colleagues, and declared the depot closure ‘a victory for violence’. He went on: ‘This experience … provides disturbing evidence of the ease with which, by assembling large crowds, militants can flout the law with impunity because of the risk that attempts to enforce it would provoke disorder on a large scale.’ The next day, Capper was quoted in the Birmingham Post. ‘I understand the views of those who think I might have given the impression of bowing to a mob,’ he conceded, ‘but … when I saw the crowd, I said to myself: “Is it worth pushing forward a principle … when the result might be a serious danger to public safety?”’
Within hours of the closure of the Saltley gates, the Cabinet resolved that ‘the Secretary of State for Employment, in consultation with the Attorney-General, should arrange for the law governing picketing to be reviewed’. The minutes do not record a contribution on the subject by Margaret Thatcher, but she wrote in her memoirs: ‘For me, what happened at Saltley took on no less significance than it did for the Left.’
When I went there in 2004, it was hard at first to find much trace of the battle. Most of the old Saltley had made way for poky new houses and dual carriageways. When I eventually found the site of the coke depot, it was an expanse of rusty brown rubble. A solitary workman told me that the last of the depot’s facilities, its gas holders, had been demolished a few months before. ‘We’re doing them all over the country,’ he said. ‘They don’t need gas holders any more.’
In the pub just up the hill, where the landlord had once talked about getting a special afternoon licence to serve the picketing miners, the net curtains and corned beef in white rolls still suggested 1972, its provincial food and fussy social niceties. But there was a landlady now, and she and the lunchtime drinkers at the bar had not even heard of the coke depot. I went back to the pub later in the afternoon and found an older man who remembered the pie throwing. I asked him about Scargill standing on top of the public toilet. ‘Best
place for him,’ the man said. ‘He spoke a load of crap.’ Everyone in the bar laughed.
The only reliable eyewitness I found was Philip Bellingham at J. H. Richards. He had been thirty-six in 1972; now he was semi-retired, with a lean, wise-looking face. We talked for an hour in one of the company’s old-fashioned offices, all dark wood and frosted glass partitions. Then we walked across to where the Saltley gates had stood. There was nothing left of them. Instead, Bellingham told me about the graffiti which had promised ‘THE MINERS WILL WIN’. It had stayed up for years after the mass picket, he said. ‘To see that, decade after decade, knowing the history that they didn’t win …’ He paused. ‘I remember going to power stations during the early days of the Thatcher government – we were supplying bearings to power stations then. The huge additional equipment they’d got, to be ready for the next miners’ strike. The stores had become vast warehouses of materials. It must have cost millions …’
A few months later, I went to south Yorkshire for a day of commemorative events for former miners. It was held at Wortley Hall outside Sheffield, an old colliery owner’s mansion that had been taken over by trade unions and other Labour-affiliated groups in the fifties. The house and gardens were still elegant, their careful stewardship as ‘the workers’ stately home’ quite inspiring. A brilliant autumn sun shone. But there was something melancholy about the occasion. The main hallway of the house was dominated by stalls selling memorabilia from the defeated miners’ strike of 1984. ‘Superb Poster: A Badge for Every Pit We Had in 1984,’ ran one neatly handwritten notice. ‘There Are Now Only 10 Pits in the Whole of Britain.’ The ex-miners I met were all still full of the injustices and lost possibilities of ‘’84’, not the victory of 1972. I began to wonder slightly why I had come.
The answer arrived after lunch when the hallway suddenly emptied. I followed the stragglers through a maze of panelled corridors until we came to a large windowless back room. Beneath a low strip-lit ceiling rows of chairs had been laid out facing a small stage. Every chair was taken: by ex-miners, their wives, their children, their grandchildren, all of them quiet and expectant. The Banner Theatre company of Birmingham, a survivor of the seventies boom in left-wing stage troupes, was about to stage a section of its long-running Saltley Gate show.
Initially it was underwhelming. Three actors in plain T-shirts with acoustic guitars sang and chanted – ‘I’d Rather Be a Picket than a Scab’, ‘We’ll win through/Just like in ’72’ – between telling the story of the mass picket in the simplest political terms. People in the audience sang and clapped along or listened, apparently rapt, but to an outsider it felt like a slightly routine religious occasion. Then, almost imperceptibly, a more charged atmosphere started to build. The actors sang louder and louder. The hum of their guitars got bolder and harsher. By the time the narrative reached the march of the workers of Birmingham on the coke depot, the performers had lost themselves in the words: ‘… We are the engineers/Close the gates/ Close the gates/You servants of the Crown/Close the gates/Close the gates/No power in the land/Can gain the upper hand/When we are united …’ At the climax, some bleached-out old footage of the gates being shut flashed up on a screen above the stage. A woman standing next to me at the back of the room, who could not have been more than twenty-five, cheered and whooped and stomped her feet as if she was personally witnessing Sir Derrick Capper bow to the workers. A few minutes later, I shared a taxi back to Sheffield railway station with an ex-miner. Had he been at Saltley? ‘No,’ he said. ‘But everyone says they were.’
In some ways, Saltley was a merely symbolic triumph. By the time the gates were closed, barely a third of the coke that had been in the depot at the start of the strike remained, and it can be convincingly argued that the miners were well on the way to a national victory before the Birmingham mass picket began. Yet the manner and visibility of the unions’ success at Saltley gave it an immediate as well as a long-term importance. The day after the depot’s closure, on 11 February, Heath’s political secretary Douglas Hurd wrote in his diary that the government was ‘now wandering vainly over [the] battlefield looking for someone to surrender to’. On 18 February, a hasty government-appointed Court of Inquiry led by Lord Wilberforce recommended that the miners receive an average pay increase approaching 20 per cent – less than the 25 per cent the NUM had originally demanded but more than double the previous highest offer, and more than double the maximum permitted by the government’s national pay guidelines. The NUM’s executive, sensing weakness, rejected the offer.
National coal stocks were now down to ten days’ supply. After a brief stalemate, the bargaining resumed, this time in Downing Street, with Heath himself involved, as well as the Coal Board and the more emollient TUC president Vic Feather. While Joe Gormley and his negotiators worked into the night, the rest of the twenty-six-man NUM executive sat in an adjoining room consuming rounds of beer and sandwiches. The miners now presented a ‘shopping list’ – as Gormley put it in his memoirs – of additional demands, including free transport for miners to their collieries, free work clothes and increased overtime payments. ‘At one point,’ Scargill’s biographer Paul Routledge records, ‘the union’s industrial relations officer … was scratching around in his files for conference demands that had been rejected by the Coal Board in previous years.’ Every demand was conceded. When the NUM negotiators finally could not come up with anything more to ask for, the union’s executive voted to recommend that the strike be called off. ‘We left Downing Street at two o’clock in the morning,’ Gormley recalled with satisfaction, ‘and as we got into our taxis, Vic Feather said, “I don’t know what the hell you did to Ted Heath, but you frightened me to bloody death!”’
Early on in my interview with Heath in Salisbury, I risked asking him about the way the strike had ended. ‘The Wilberforce report did give the miners – well, not everything they were asking, but quite a lot of it,’ he said. He paused. ‘Most of it, in fact.’
And the miners, I suggested, had ended up with even more. Had that been difficult to swallow?
There was a much longer pause. From somewhere beyond the sitting-room door came the distant clatter and chatter of the ex-prime minister’s staff. ‘Yes,’ Heath said finally, his voice even deeper and slower than usual. ‘Yes.’ Then he changed the subject back to his government’s housing policy.
5
Questions of Sovereignty
In Salisbury, there were moments when Ted Heath brightened. Most of them came when we got onto the subject of Europe. His cold blue eyes would take on a slight glitter, his voice unclot a little, his answers grow more expansive. ‘I knew that de Gaulle was favourable to me,’ he said at one point, with evidently enduring pride. ‘He told me in 1965 that if I came into office and did the European things which I’d proposed, then our application to join the Common Market would go through.’ At another point, I asked a general question about his government’s ambitions and achievements. With a hopeful lift to his voice, he replied: ‘As far as Europe is concerned?’
The negotiations for Britain’s entry into the Common Market, as the European Economic Community (EEC) was informally known, began in July 1970, the month after Heath won power. They concluded in January 1972, the month the miners’ strike started. ‘Everyone who worked closely with him’, writes Douglas Hurd, ‘knew that [taking Britain into Europe] was the first … of the two aims which he had set for his premiership.’ Like the other goal, the transformation of the British economy, the issue of Europe preoccupied Heath in office and arguably distracted him from the less predictable challenges, such as the arrival of the Yorkshire miners at Saltley, that would undermine his government. But Europe and the economy had dominated Heath’s political thoughts for so long before he became prime minister – and he was by nature such a ruminative rather than spontaneous politician – that even the shocks of the early seventies did not prompt him to adjust his priorities. Nor had he reconsidered them since. I asked him if, in retrospect, it had been too much for
his government to cope simultaneously with EEC entry and the mounting difficulties at home. In an instant Heath switched to his prickly, contemptuous mode. ‘Quite honestly, no.’
By 1970, he had been admiring and visiting continental Europe – undertaking his own personal version of cross-Channel integration – for almost forty years. The official British appetite for involving the country in a united Europe developed over the same period. But it was a much more halting process.
In 1930, the year before Heath had his first continental epiphany amid the gateaux and Citroën showrooms of Paris, Winston Churchill wrote a pioneering article for an American magazine, calling for a United States of Europe. By the Second World War, having moved from the margins to the centre of British politics, Churchill was able to set out his European vision more publicly and more concretely. In a 1943 prime-ministerial broadcast, he put before Britons the prospect of an ‘integrated life of Europe that is possible … without destroying the individual characteristics and traditions of its many ancient and historic races’. Three years later, he made a high-profile speech in Zürich, addressed to the public and politicians right across the battered post-war continent. He urged the creation of a united Europe based, just as the future EEC would be, around a partnership between France and Germany. He concluded: ‘We must begin now.’
Yet, as enthusiasts for British participation in Europe would soon discover, that ‘we’ was monumentally ambiguous. Post-war Britain still had substantial connections to its colonies and former colonies; a strong official desire to collaborate with the US; stubborn hopes of remaining a global rather than merely European power; and a centuries-old foreign-policy and public-opinion tradition of keeping ‘the Continent’ at arm’s length. During the fifties, the EEC was put together without Britain. Only slowly did the humiliation of the Suez crisis and other evidence of post-war delusions and decline create a momentum in Britain for Common Market membership.