In the bar of the lightship that evening, I heard how the town was clinging to life by its fingertips. Everyone had heard rumors that the National Coal Board wanted to close Bates’s Colliery because its seams were geologically difficult to mine. Twenty percent of the coal shipped from the docks came from the colliery. Of the men who still had jobs, one in four was directly employed by Bates’s. But the pit was “uneconomic.”
“If the N.C.B. does close it, what will it mean?” I said.
The Northumbrian businessman with whom I was talking shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. The end of Blyth, I suppose. But what does that mean?”
All through the summer of 1984, the news on television looked as if it were being beamed from somewhere far abroad. The sky was too blue for England and the events too bloody. In a rolling landscape of little hills, like the background of a Florentine painting, ranks of uniformed men crouched behind their glittering riot shields while another army, of people dressed in pastel holiday clothes, pelted them with rocks. Cavalry charges, on handsome chestnut horses, were mounted out of coppices of trees, and packs of Alsatian dogs were set loose by their handlers, to go snarling round the heels of the retreating rioters.
If this was really England, it looked at first as if it must be some kind of historical reconstruction put on by the Tourist Authority: the Roman legions in conflict with the Saxon hordes, perhaps. If the cameras tracked back, they might reveal an applauding crowd of onlookers, checking the illustrated program to see who was supposed to be on Hadrian’s side and who on Athelwulf’s. At the end of the day, everybody, combatants and tourists alike, might sit down to a traditional banquet of roast ox, syllabub and mead, with musicians plucking at harps and blowing hautboys.
The National Coal Board had announced a major reorganization of the coal industry. The “uneconomic” pits were to be closed, and several thousand miners were to be put out of work. The closure plans unveiled by the Coal Board chairman, an American industrialist, were in line with the Conservative government’s larger plan for a new, slimmer, more efficient and cost-effective Britain. These were received by the miners and their leaders with rage and fear.
Arthur Scargill, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, saw the plans as part of “a concerted attack by the ruling class,” not just on the miners but on manual workers everywhere in Britain. We were living under “the most ruthless government seen in our lifetime,” which was heartlessly bent on turning “our people” into “industrial gypsies, wandering from coalfield to coalfield, pit to pit, searching for work.”
“We are involved in a class war,” Scargill said:
and any attempt to deny that flies in the face of reality. Confronted by our enemy’s mobilisation, we are entitled, indeed obliged, to call upon our class for massive support.
Miners arrested by the police on the picket lines were labeled as “political prisoners,” and Scargill claimed “the battles of Orgreave, Ravenscraig and Llanwern” as heroic feats of class warfare, to be set beside Mrs. Thatcher’s famous victories at Goose Green, Teal Inlet and Port Stanley.
In her turn, Mrs. Thatcher used her triumph in the Falklands as a metaphor for the struggle between the government and the striking miners. Again Britain was faced by an impertinent invasion, this time of foreign ideas. The miners’ leaders, speaking in the language of European Marxism, were hardly less alien to us than Galtieri and his Junta. They would be defeated, as Galtieri had been defeated, by patient resolution, by another tot of Falklands Spirit.
As the pitched battles were fought out in the sunshine on television, the most curious aspect of the whole affair was the intense family resemblance between Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher. Both had the same upstanding quiff of wiry fair hair and looked as if they were attended by the same coiffeuse. Both had their roots in pious working-class Methodism, Scargill in Yorkshire, Thatcher in the adjoining county of Lincolnshire. When interviewed, their air of truculent intransigence was exactly the same. Neither would give away a rhetorical inch, or admit, at least in public, that any argument, other than their own narrowly ideological one, was worth even listening to. Both were admired by their supporters for their toughness and firmness, that English heart-of-oak quality which so often looked to outsiders like mere pigheadedness. And their supporters themselves were very nearly the same people. Thatcher was loved by the sturdy, chapel-bred English working class, who respected her for being a plain speaker in their own mold. She wasn’t toffee-nosed, wasn’t a havering, on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other Conservative aristocrat, she didn’t own land; she talked in the language of the corner shop, and made you see England simply, as an enlarged version of Roberts the Grocer, the shop in Grantham (next door but one to the Primitive Methodist Chapel, 1886) where she had grown up.
This was Scargill’s constituency too—the constituency of the chapel, of self-help, of prickly independence and forthright blunt talk. The miners saw themselves as the proud elite of the northern working class; had they been born a few miles south, away from their hereditary loyalty to the Pit and The Union, they would have been exactly the sort of untraditional Conservative voters who had brought Mrs. Thatcher and her untraditional Tory government to power in 1979.
For nearly ten months I watched the televised war from an incredulous distance. The violent scenes were taking place in The North, more than a hundred and twenty miles away, and therefore beyond the imaginative range of anyone from southern England. Like the bombs and assassinations of Ulster, the miners’ strike was foreign rather than domestic news. When, late in the day, I arranged to join a “flying picket,” friends in London regarded me much as if I’d said that I was packing my bags for El Salvador.
The arrangements had to be made in secret, as for a real war. Miners and police both had intelligence services spying on each other’s plans and movements, and there were Fifth Columnists on each side. I was checked out, vouched for, and passed on the telephone from “Nottinghamshire George” to “Yorkshire George,” who gave me a number I could call at eleven o’clock at night for details of the pickets’ rendezvous in the small hours of the next morning.
Early in December 1984, I arrived in Sheffield, two hours up the motorway from London, another world. The city was full of signs of the strike. In the concrete shopping precinct in the town center, frozen miners in parkas and donkey jackets stood by clothes-drying racks to which they’d clipped sheets of colored Christmas wrapping paper for sale at 25 pence each. Others were selling Strike greeting cards—linocuts of Davey lamps and winding gear saying “Merry Christmas, Peace and Solidarity, Keep the Lamp Lights Burning.”
In the middle-class suburbs, there were men up ladders everywhere. For the teaching and lecturing classes, the Miners’ Strike had brought an unexpected bonus: you could support the cause by getting your house redecorated by a striking miner at the windfall labor rate of £2 an hour. In the house where I stayed, a miner was wallpapering the hall and stairwell between spells on the picket line; next door, a miner was repointing the brickwork and putting up new guttering.
“You have to have a miner working for you here, otherwise your neighbors start putting it about that you’re a closet Thatcherite.” I had heard all sorts of funny claims made by people trying to argue the case for having servants, but this one was new to me.
At eleven o’clock I made my call and was told to report at 0230 at a pithead between Sheffield and Doncaster.
“Is that where we’ll be picketing?”
“No.”
Awakened after an hour’s sleep, I drove off into the icy dark, along empty ring roads rimmed with rags of dirty snow. There were untimely lights on in the windows of the squat pit villages—a party-time air, confirmed by the firelit scene on the square of snowy mud outside the colliery at Kilnhurst. Forty-five men were gathered round the oil-drum brazier, and, as I raked the group with my car headlights, I was puzzled by the fact that half of them were in fancy dress. One wore a guacamole-green cloak with silver butto
ns and a tyrolean hat; another had on a pair of baggy trousers, far too long for him, in an outrageous, Evelyn Waugh check. There were huge multicolored scarves, fun-fur overcoats and a few bright red ski suits. The general impression was not of a band of determined men with revolutionary designs on the social fabric of England; the pickets looked like a stranded circus. Two clowns, one short, one tall, in ludicrously ill-fitting get-ups, were playing at being Flanagan and Allen. They had linked arms and were singing “Underneath the Arches.”
My contact, Yorkshire George, was a little embarrassed about the appearance of his men. The previous day, a truckload of clothes donated by the Italian miners’ union had been distributed by the local Women’s Support Group.
“Very generous of the Italians,” Yorkshire George said, “but it’s not quite what our lads were looking forward to. Still, they’re nice and warm, and it’s that bitter, they’ll wear anything they can get.”
He had the latest reports from the miners’ intelligence organization. At 0327, six “contractors,” members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, were to be bused into one pit; at 0430, eight “working miners” were to be smuggled through the gates of another. And so on. The forty-five men around the brazier were assigned to separate cars and a tight schedule of pithead pickets, each lasting just five or six minutes, as the “scabs” were swept to work behind the police lines.
The phrase “flying picket” was a romantic misnomer. We did not fly, we trundled in overloaded Ford Cortinas, sagging on their springs, through the dark and slippery lanes from one pithead to the next. Each time we stopped, we had just time to leave the car, join the shadowy crowd at the gates of another colliery where policemen stood four deep in line backed up against the wall of their blue vans, and shout “Scabby bastards! Scabby bastards!” as the speeding bus went past in the foggy distance.
By six in the morning, I’d lost count of the number of picket lines that I’d manned. It was cold, dark, anticlimactic work. The police defenses were so solid that one rarely saw the hated buses, and never the face of a working miner. At each pit it was the same: the resentful crowd, packed into a narrow brick gully, the policemen, pale under the arc lights, with, waiting behind them, the dog handlers and their animals, the emerging shapes of lift cages and winding gear in the slow and sunless dawn.
“This isn’t a picket,” said Bob, the driver of the Cortina in which I was riding. “We’re nobbut spectators now. This is our pit—and the police won’t let us inside of a hundred yards of our own bloody gates.”
At one pit, somewhere in a suburb of Doncaster, I came within a whisker of getting our picket into serious trouble. The cars had been parked in a crescent of council houses a quarter of a mile from the pithead. After twenty seconds of shouting at an invisible bus, we were walking back to the car in the half-light. In our grandfatherly group of five, I was the youngest man by a year or two; everyone was in his forties or fifties. As we turned the corner into the crescent I saw we were being followed in by a street-wide line of very young policemen. They were wearing capes and carried truncheons. With their bulging Adam’s apples, their sprays of acne and half-formed adolescent faces, they looked like the school bullies on the rampage. They were smacking their truncheons against their palms.
“Get a move on,” Bob said.
“But this isn’t the pithead—it’s just a council estate,” I said.
“No matter. Better get on back to the car, quick as you can.”
A milk cart was parked on the grass verge. Women in dressing gowns stood curiously at half-open front doors.
The police were so close behind us now that they were treading on our heels. Bob, still walking, still looking ahead, said: “Where you lads from then, the Met?” No answer. Just the crunch of marching feet, within inches of our own.
I turned round, to face a teenager with a face as blank as a scoop of lard. “This is a public street,” I said. “No one’s demonstrating here. No conceivable offense is being committed. We’re just walking to our—”
“He’s new here,” Bob said to the police; then, to me: “Come on, lad, don’t argy with them.”
As we piled into the car, eight policemen stood round, batons at the ready. They made a slow, menacing show of investigating the license plates, the tax disk, the tires, the windows. A gang of kids, they looked as if they were getting their morning ration of fun out of intimidating a few old farts.
“Let’s get out of here,” Bob signaled, and backed with exaggerated deliberation, doing everything by the book.
“Christ,” I said.
“That were nothing.”
“That were just the Met,” said a voice in the back.
“Or the Army.”
“They certainly weren’t local lads.”
“Did any of the buggers have numbers on them?”
“No. Not a number to their name.”
It was part of the basic folklore of the miners’ strike that many of the “policemen” who were defending the pits were really soldiers in unmarked police uniforms. Men on picket duty claimed that they had recognized on the police lines their brothers, cousins, nephews; sons, even—men who were supposed to be serving in Ulster with the Army. None of these stories was conclusively proved, but they vividly dramatized the strikers’ sense of having been betrayed by their class, of having found enemies inside their own families. They felt that they’d been left in the lurch by other unions, by the working miners of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and by the Labour Party. The essential idea behind the rumors was that the men with the dogs and riot shields ought to have been the pickets’ brothers. The quisling policemen served as convenient symbols in a story that required several million Judases to account for the miners’ predicament now.
“Don’t you think you’d have got more support if you’d held a national ballot at the beginning?” I said. It was a dusty question, but it still seemed to need an answer.
“Look,” Bob said. “When Margaret Thatcher went to the Falklands, did she need a national ballot? She had a mandate to govern. Same as Scargill. He’s got a mandate from us. He was democratically elected, just like Thatcher. Why is a mandate so good and democratic when it comes to the Government and so ‘undemocratic’ when it comes to the miners?
“If we’d had a ballot back in March, it would have been a clear sign of weakness. It would have been giving in to the demands of the Tory Party right at the start.”
“But with a binding majority—” I said.
“We got our binding majority. When we elected Scargill and the rest of the executive.”
Briefly back to base at Kilnhurst, waiting for our next assignment, I stood at the brazier with Yorkshire George. “There’s no question about not winning,” he said. “We have to win this struggle, even if we’re still standing here next year. If we were to lose, they’d close this pit tomorrow, and hundreds like it. You know what that would mean? If this pit were to close? This whole valley—everything you can see—it would be dead, completely dead.”
I looked down at the territory we were defending. The hillside below us was gray with snow and slurry. A few figures were moving diagonally along it, carrying brightly colored plastic fertilizer bags. They were searching for scraps of loose coal to feed to their domestic fires. At the end of the valley there was a huddle of low, sooty blockhouses. Watching the people trudging past with their ironically gay plastic bags, I realized that until Yorkshire George had told me otherwise, I’d been looking at a landscape which I thought had died already.
On our next picket, we were walking away from the shouting when we were joined by a man from another pit. He and Bob were talking about moving on to Rossington, where contractors were due to go into the colliery in half an hour.
“How far’s Rossington?” I said.
The man separated from Bob and stood square in front of me, staring. Without a flicker of expression, his eyes went from my hat down to my boots. He turned back to Bob.
“What you doin
g with that?” he said. “Sleeping with it?”
Feeling sudden bars of steel in my cheeks, I said, “No, he wouldn’t have me.”
“Leave him be,” Bob said. “He’s all right. He’s only writing a book.”
The man spat a gob of pearly mucus on the ground. “I wouldn’t touch a fookin’ thing like that,” he said.
It was the extraordinary speed of it that was so English. It wasn’t my clothes—the Italian truckload of winter fashion wear had guaranteed that I couldn’t possibly look conspicuous on a picket line. It was accent, and nothing but accent. How far’s Rossington was enough to open the chasm of all the dirty and invidious distinctions of the English class setup. It was like the boy scout trick of starting a fire with two sticks. In three words, you could spark off the whole miserable, loggerheaded confrontation between state and private schools, owner-occupiers and council tenants, The North and The South, Chapel and Church, Labour and Tory, those with jobs and those without. It was no good pretending to be a coaster here; you don’t coast in Doncaster, you sail with your class colors firmly nailed to the mast. And I was wearing a blue ensign defaced with crowns and anchors and the lord knows what.
It was a small, bitter, inconclusive skirmish in what Arthur Scargill himself had labeled a class war. It was probably the most revealing incident in my short career as a trespasser on the picket lines.
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