Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ strike was a very emotive business: lives were destroyed and even lost as attitudes grew increasingly polarised. As I said just now, it’s been mythologised as a struggle between the right-wing government (and its puppet police force) and the traditional working classes. But though it’s certainly true that Margaret Thatcher had unfinished business with the unions when she came to power, the strike was more complicated than that. For one thing, it was also a matter of miners against miners.

      The catalyst for the initial walkout was the announcement on 6 March 1984 by the National Coal Board (NCB) that it intended to close twenty pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Six days later Arthur Scargill, the Barnsley-born former Young Communist president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), called a national strike. Colliers in Scargill’s own county, Yorkshire, and Kent were the first to heed their master’s voice, followed by pit employees in Scotland, South Wales and Durham. Others, meanwhile, refused to strike. These ‘scabs’ – you might alternatively call them courageous independents: given the physical threats and actual violence offered in the subsequent struggle, continuing to work was certainly not a coward’s option – were led by the Nottinghamshire miners, with Mansfield men in the vanguard.

      In fact, you could say that the strike’s great fault line ran straight through Mansfield: one of the great mass marches was held here in May 1984, when dockers and railways workers made common cause with colliery workers; and it was here that the breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), was eventually set up. Note the name: democracy was at the heart of the Nottinghamshire miners’ resistance to the NUM’s strike declaration. Looking back years later, Roy Lynk, the founder of the UDM, insisted that it was Scargill’s refusal to hold a national ballot of his members – rendering the strike technically illegal – that led to the bitter division among miners and the break-up of the NUM.

      When an area ballot was held during the early part of the strike, Nottinghamshire miners voted to carry on working. They were far from alone in rejecting strike action, but the NUM’s use of flying pickets intimidated most of the initial refuseniks into joining the strike willy-nilly. The Nottinghamshire men showed particular resolve, then, in standing firm against the bullying of Yorkshireman Scargill and his militant cohorts. ‘In a sense sending pickets was a self-defeating exercise. The more they picketed the more people would keep going [to work]. No one wanted to back down from what they were doing,’ Lynk told the Chad, the local Mansfield newspaper, two decades later. ‘A lot of people resent being told what to do and go against it if it’s being forced down their throats.’

      I come from a mining family. My maternal grandfather spent his whole life ‘wokkin’ in wattah fah two tiddlahs’, as the local dialect has it. (Roughly translated, that means he laboured hard in extremely damp conditions in return for a bit of extra money, or overtime.) He died in 1980 – he had long suffered problems with his breathing; that’s what a lifetime on the coalface does for you – but my Uncle Jimmy was still employed as a pit engineer at the time of the strike and vividly remembers the hail of bricks that greeted him and his fellow workers on their path into work or the sound of battering at the door as wild-cat strikers tried to smash their way into the pit workshop. The fact that he disobeyed Comrade Arthur and continued working meant there was little tension between him and my Auntie Hilda’s husband, Alf, who was a policeman and consequently very unpopular with NUM loyalists. Of course, some local miners did go on strike and there were plenty of striking non-locals who were in the habit of hanging around town at the time too, which put an extra crackle of electricity in the air – not to mention long scratches down the sides of parked cars whenever there was a show of militant unionist strength locally.

      Alf is dead now, but my father used to go down the pub with him on a Friday night. ‘When the strike was on, you’d get all the NUM supporters on one side of the pub, and all the UDM people on the other,’ he recounts. ‘There would always be friction across the bar, and at some point during the evening a member of the NUM lot would approach Alf looking for a fight, and there’d often be a bit of nonsense between the NUM and UDM factions outside. Every Friday without fail someone wanted to take Alf on.’

      A friend recently reminded me of an incident that reflected the general atmosphere at the time. ‘We’d thrown a party at my parents’ house and some kids we hadn’t invited had turned up and were wrecking things. It was really getting out of hand,’ he says. ‘The neighbours noticed and called the police, and because of all the aggro in the area from the miners’ strike the riot squad turned up! That sorted them out, I can tell you.’ There were moments when you were grateful for all that added police presence. As Jimmy remembers, without it, ‘There’d have been a piggin’ bloodbath.’

      Naturally, the harsh realities of Midlanders’ experience of the strike are ignored or dismissed in the film of Deller’s ‘The Battle of Orgreave’. Instead, we get references to wealthy Notts colliers airily driving around in Range Rovers, Mercedes and BMWs. ‘They’re just a bunch of scabbing bastards’ is the documentary’s verdict on their role in the affair. And that’s just not true.

      The Notts men knew that the strike was futile, if not positively damaging to the industry’s chances of survival. As another ex-miner tells me: ‘The government wanted a fracas like that so they’d got a damn good excuse to shut the mines.’ Modernisation was inevitable, as was restructuring. ‘Without a strike they wouldn’t have shut all the pits, but they’d certainly have thinned them out. There were too many around here. Blidworth, Rufford, Sherwood, they were all about two miles apart. With the new equipment that had been introduced since the pits were first sunk, you could go underground and travel six, eight, ten miles on the trains to your work real quick, like. You didn’t need all this “one pit here, one pit there” business.’

      It’s too easy to caricature the non-strikers as cash-grabbing ‘scabs’. The decision to go on working wasn’t just about money. It was about democracy; it was also about realism. Pragmatism is less sexy than heroism, but sometimes it’s more progressive. It’s time we rethought that idea of the miners’ strike as a civil war between North and South.

      The nation’s great individualists, Midlanders are above kneejerk class-based political loyalties. The Mansfield-led Nottinghamshire miners were accused of being Thatcherite stooges, but name calling, and actual violence, made no difference to their resistance to Scargillite coercion. Truculent independence of mind is a very Midland attitude: we’re used to our outsider status. Perhaps it’s because of this – and because we’re excluded from the lazy black-and-white cultural distinctions inherent in the idea of the North/South divide – that Midlanders are able to take a more nuanced view of life’s little complexities. It is, if you like, a mark of our civilisation. And that means I’m proud to come from a scab – or, if you wanted to make it sound more romantic, you might instead say an outlaw – town.

      

       A bit of crust and jelly, Thomas Cook and crook-back Dick, and the call of the Shires

      ‘Shut yer clack, Denis!’

      Mum’s in a grump. Dad and I are waiting for her in the car but she’s resisting all our attempts to hurry her along. In fact, she’s now decided that she doesn’t want to come to Leicestershire with us at all as she’d rather go into Mansfield with her friend Joan, or ‘Scooter Girl’ as my father calls her. (Joan is a seasoned member of the Mansfield mobility scooter club.)

      After much persuasion the Joan project is dropped – her friend threads her scooter in and out of pedestrian traffic with such dizzying virtuosity that she leaves her shopping companions in a spin, so it’s a relief not to have to go with her, my mother eventually decides – and we are able to set off. In СКАЧАТЬ