The Enemy Within

[Sully]

Twenty years ago news reports started to contain a small item about a strike at Cortonwood Colliery in South Yorkshire which was threatened with closure. As the weeks went on the vast majority of the nations 180,000 coal miners stopped work in support of their comrades.

The strike lasted a year, two men died, two hundred were imprisoned, about one thousand were sacked and the average striking miner lost about £10,000 in support of men he would never know. The men didn't strike for money or greed there was one simple reason and that reason was principle. The principle was solidarity with your fellow working man and assisting those who were unable to protect themselves. Some strikers were committed 'socialists' and 'communists' (whatever those terms mean) but the vast majority were not. However, they did believe in solidarity as an end in itself. People from the community not working in the pits donated large chunks of their wages to the strike fund which was used to stock the soup I'M A SCAMMER SPAMMER!!! and hand out £3 a day to the strikers.

'Scabs' and 'blacklegs' were recruited by the government with the help of the media and the simple appeal was that of greed. "I'm alright jack, pull the ladder up". Striking miners ate with their families in soup I'M A SCAMMER SPAMMER!!! and on the picket lines watched scabs and coppers alike waving wage packets at them, especially at christmas when they and their families went without. Men like Phil Pudney BEM (formerly of the Inniskillen Fusiliers and Scots Guards) approaching retirement were roughed up by spotty policemen just out of Hendon going to town on the "enemy within" theory.

Christmas dinner came from a food parcel and hand outs from generous benefactors. It was shocking to me that people, denied benefits, could live in such poverty in the 1980's but they (we) stuck to their guns.

I was lucky to work behind the bar in some of the colliery welfare clubs and to meet some very special people. Fred Rhodes worked in the pits all his working life apart from spells in the Army in two world wars. I saw him once in the club, at the tender age of 96, wearing his medals (two rows) on route to a reunion and asked him which ones were special to him (stupid question I know). "This one" he said pointing at his International Brigades medal (for fighting fascism in Spain in 1936 - before it became fashionable). He was also fond of an MID he received for his "rum runs" through the trenches.

Fred was a regular fixture on the picket lines at the crack of dawn (when they happened, nobody returned to work in Kent for many months) proud in his uniform of NUM badges and Coal not Dole stickers. Waving his stick, I know he despaired of the men that were turning their backs on their roots and their culture. If anyone was entitled to an opinion, he was.

The end of the strike marked the end for many communities. Coal mining communtities like the one I grew up in have never been salubrious places but they were governed by a code of honour and integrity. They policed themselves. I was very lucky to stumble across the Royal Marines a few years later and came across an almost identical code of hard work, camaraderie and self sacrifice towards a greater goal. Coal miners didn't get gongs or any form of recognition apart from within their own communities (which was, I suppose, all they needed) but the work was hard and many, many thousands have died either underground or have suffocated from the effects of emphysema and pneumonicosis in later life. The road that my dad lives in is populated mainly by widows and he struggles for breath every minute of the day.

The Thatcher government vilified coal miners as "the enemy within". People watching the television, if they gave it a moments thought, must have wondered what had happen to make these thousands of decent hardworking men with families to support suddenly become subversive maniacs intent on destroying the rule of law.

The government destroyed the NUM (and the communities of its members) with the help of the media, the creation of a temporary national police force and the courts. It destroyed trade unionism and the ability of working people to protect themselves. We can all moan about British Leyland and Red Robbo but those of you who have worked in a dangerous civvy enviroment without union protection will understand how devastating this was. Unions were destroyed so as to give the City a free reign over its gambling chips in the casino that determines strategy in our economy. Working people bought BT shares and glibly considered themselves in on the act.

The basic fact that there are only a limited number of places 'at the top' and that these are largely reserved by birth right seems to have escaped most. The basic fact that those below should be treated with a certain amount of dignity and respect whatever their role on the good ship UK seems also to have fallen by the wayside.

From then on a 'me' culture has been pushed on us. 'I' this and 'I' that. Marketing men taunt us that you can be a better or happier person if only you buy this product. A culture of social responsibility and altruism doesn't fit neatly into this scheme. Why would someone want to help somebody if there's nothing in it for them? The Great Britain that I identify with (still) was dealt a heavy, maybe fatal, blow with the defeat of the NUM in 1985. I wonder who has done the country a greater dis-service.

I'll finish my ramble now but would like to pay tribute to the men, women and families who fought (and lost) on the principle of all for one and one for all.

[Spannerman]

..............and Politics apart Sully what did all of this achieve....................?

[Pasha]

Hello Sully,

That was a pretty moving post. I don't you if you've already seen it but the Guardian are running a series of articles looking back on the strike and today's one might strike a few chords with someone like yourself: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,36 ... 20,00.html

I do remember the Miner's Strike (still upper cased all these years later) though obviously not with your perspective. Growing up in Maidenhead in the 1980's (a town and a decade that were meant for each other, read "Things Can Only Get Better" by John O'Farrell) the strike was, as you've said, a news item for most of us. My dad was a Shop Steward in the AUEW at the time though, so we had 'our side' already picked out.

Today, my local pub is frequented by some of the lads who work in the nearby paper mill, many of whom are from South Wales who work up here during the week and drive home on Friday nights. There are still groups among them that won't speak to each other, and I mean completely blank one another, because of that dispute. I have on more than one occasion put it to several of them that they and their communities will never get beyond that strike if can't even talk to each other. We preach tolerance and reconciliation to warring tribes throughout the world but keep alive our own battle-lines from a twenty year old industrial dispute.

I think most of the Welsh lads agree with me on an intellectual level, but viscerally just can't let it go. People often talk about how passionless politics is these days and how nobody believes in anything like we used to. I agree with that a lot, but what many people forget is just how savagely polarised everything was then. So much so that two decades on neighbours still don't acknowledge each other.
Best regards mate!

Pasha

[Sully]

I'm not sure I understand the question. The strikers didn't close the coal mines, the government did for purely political (not economic) reasons and turned once peaceful, content communities rich in culture and providing the nation with its power into latter-day Gulags. It was social engineering of the grossest kind and the repurcussions extend far beyond the valleys of Wales.

It's what it could have achieved that matters my friend. You don't just roll over at the first sign of adversity and they didn't. They showed amazing resolve and put themselves (easy enough) and their loved ones (not so easy) through hard times on a point of principle - the vast majority of those on strike had safe jobs. As British as the Union Jack in my book and I'm proud......I wanted to make that point.

[Sully]

Pasha,

A good friend's dad was the only scab from our village and the last time I spoke to him was the day his dad went in to work. They moved out shortly after and although I did see him about 10 years later I couldn't bring myself to talk to him. I know this sounds bad but it's hard to explain mate. A shocking revelation from a tree-hugger like me.

You're right that politics is passionless these days. Ideology and principle have gone and when that happens all that's left is ambition. My time in the forces meant so much to me because what was valued couldn't be measured in monetary terms...friendship....brotherhood, in fact. If that's what matters to people then they can't be bought. My mate's dad was bought and that was a bad, bad thing.

Must dash mate, I've a new DVD player being delivered and then I have to wash the Lexus and take my son to McDonalds Maybe I'll pick up a copy of 'Things can only get better' on the way

Sully

[barryc]

I empathise with Sully on this one. I am the son of a miner with 45 years underground working, he's dead now and no wonder the conditions he worked in back in the 1920s and 30s. I was born and grew up on the Notts/Derbys coal field were passing the 11+ was the possible ticket out of the pits. We were a close community where whole familes worked for the colliery, Dad and son on the coal face, daughter in the wages office and Mum in the canteen. The closure of collieries hit everyone, and all for cheaper foreign coal, which is now as expensive as any Uk coal ever was, but have we got a coal industry left to extract the many yeras of coal we sit on? Have we hell!

I am not sure that my dear old dad thought that his son had necessarily gone one better when I joined the RM but at least I got away from the dependency on coal. Miners were never that popular with the general public, who seemed to think they were big earners. If they were I don't know where it went, we lived in a Coal Board house, holidayed in Skegness and my dad was a non drinker, non gambler. I wouldn't have wanted to work underground for all of my working life but the miners had the sort of cameraderie that we in the Corps had. Arthur Scargill did them no favours but the government did the counrtry less favours in destroying the industry.

Barry

[Sully]

holidayed in Skegness

That's where the posh ones went barry My first holiday was at the Derbyshire Miners Holiday Camp in Rhyl - coach up there and back - we dreamed of going to Skeggy one day

barry, it all sounds about right to me but I do harbour a soft spot for Arthur. He does get on people's nerves and can sound like a stuck record but he was spot on about the significance of the strike and turned down a very lucrative job with the NCB in the early 70's to serve his own. Compared with the shower that's around today in the Labour Party I think that's worth a mention.

Did you notice from your time in the Corps that you could always get a good scrap with the locals in Deal (of all places - but home to many miners from Betteshanger Colliery) if you wanted

[Spannerman]

..............and Politics apart Sully what did all of this achieve....................?

What I am asking is, at the end of the day, the miners took on the Government or vice versa, the miners stood shoulder to shoulder no doubt about that one, but at the end of the strike what did the miners achieve?

Did they recoup their lost wages, did they have a better standard of living thereafter, were more jobs created because of it, was more coal produced or was it that industry and homes were turning away from coal fired heating and becoming more reliant on the cleaner fuels of oil, gas and nuclear power.

Those jobs were without doubt one of the most hazardous occupations in Britain but you have to move with the times, did we want slagheaps dotted around in Yorkshire, South Wales, Notts, Kent etc that no one was using anymore or the little coal that we were using in days of yore could be extracted from open cast quarries in Australia and shipped here at a fraction of the cost.

We owe those miners and their fathers and grandfathers a great debt of gratitude in the past and no amount of compensation for pneumonicosis (sp?) would ne'er be enough.

The only thing I regret in those 12 months of strikes was the attitude of one Arthur Scargill whose sole ambition was to bring down the Thatcher Government for political gain thus resulting in a lot of deprivation to the miners families and violence to both the miners and police. Despite what has been said on this forum about 'King' Arthur is if he had not been around at that time I am sure that the public at large would have had a lot more support for those guys that kept the wheels of industry working and those home fires burning.

[Sully]

'King' Arthur didn't lead anybody where they didn't want to go. It's easy to pity those poor souls who were too stupid to see what everybody with a tv could see. It was a media trick. How could anybody support all these stupid people blindly following that man with the bad hair?

I'm glad that the good people of wherever no longer have to put up with their views being spoiled with slag heaps and that seeing old fellas stopping every ten yards for breath is a thing of the past - but that's not why the coal industry in this country was destroyed. Not one pit was 'uneconomic' by any objective standards at the time of the strike. North Sea oil money was used to pay dole money, break the unions and change this country into the thrusting vibrant (for some) utopia we have now, fuelled by greed and unencumbered by tradition.

[Spannerman]

Your views against my views Sully, nothing more nothing less.

The point I was trying to make about the slag heaps was why have slag heaps dotted around the countryside when fewer people were in to buying coal, that does not make economic sense. As for "and that seeing old fellas stopping every ten yards for breath is a thing of the past" I am ringing these guys praises not denigrating them, surely you are not that blinkered.

Your views on King Arthur is obviously very much the opposite to mine and for that reason we will have to agree to differ

[Sully]

Spannermen, how can I make the point that Scargill is irrelevant. The mantra then, as it is now, is that those on strike blindly followed him - I don't call that singing anyone's praises. I wanted to get something of my chest about a period that, though long forgotten, meant a lot to me. You want to slag Arthur Scargill off and pity people who clearly aren't as switched on as you. We will indeed have to differ my friend.

[El Prez]

The harshest result of the strike from my limited knowledge is the devastation caused to tight knit communities who respected each other. Nowadays violence and robbery seem to be the stok in trade of the younger generations, brought up during and post strike, with little if any opportunity to work. The men who worked in th epits cannot control these 'lads' as they once would have done, social order and respect seems to have disappeared with their occupations.

[Sully]

I've just put the phone down from speaking to the old man (taking Sully jnr down there tomorrow). El Prez, you've been bugging my phone. That's exactly what the old man said

[anglo-saxon]

I don't know if this is a north-south isue or what. I can definitely empathise with the miners and did so at the time. What I and a great many people couldn't accept, though, was the manner in which the miners were lead. In our view, Arthur Scargil was a traiter to his country. The nail in his coffin for us was open statements of embracing Stalinism and when he visited Colonel Goddafi in Lybia.

I was in Cyprus when Maggie finally put Scargill out of business. We had a platoon piss-up to celebrate.

No offense intended. It was 20 years ago after all. I wouldn't have wished those living/working conditions on anybody, and I've seen the devastation caused by the closure of the mines. It was the politics that got me.

[Tab]

I have known many a miner and they deserved better than what they got, but just who led them down this rocky path and why. Auther Scargill wanted to show the world that he was a better leader than Joe Gormley who managed to bring down the Heath Government, and he was going to smash Thatcher, he was going to show the world that he was bigger than the ballot box and he would say in future would go. Luckily Thatcher won the fight becuase I think we would now be in a right mess had he won. Forget about the pit closures that was just a platform for him to start this fight, and just what did he achieve for the miners with strike, even more pit closures than was planned as people had found other ways of producing electricity. Now what about Arthur, well he never went short of anything, he has changed the rules of the union so that he will remain president for life or till he decides to retire, he will pick up a fine big pension paid for by his memebers. What has he said or done for the remaining miners, one wonders, and I wonder if he is lonely sitting in his office every day with nothing to do.