Secretary of the Kent NUM Jack Collins addresses a miner’s picket watched by police at the Tilmanstone Colliery near Dover in Kent, 1984
The 1984-85 Miner’s Strike
by
Dave Westacott
There have been people I have talked to who took part in the 1926 nine-day General Strike and the six-month miners’ strike that followed it who told me many years later that it felt that it was just like yesterday.
There were a few strike breakers but, for nine days, basically no train moved, no ship was loaded, no factory operated, the steelworks went into lockdown. No national newspapers were produced, apart from the government’s own hurriedly produced propaganda sheet. Whole towns were effectively governed by the local trades union councils, without whose permission nothing happened.
The TUC capitulated after just nine days, more because they were scared of their own members than because they had no route forwards.
When the working class organises on a truly massive scale and affects every part of the country, and indeed the world, that feeling of timelessness is what happens.
The same is true of the 1984 to 1985 miners’ strike, possibly the biggest and longest industrial action in our history.
The cause of the dispute was the announcement of the closure of Cortonwood colliery in Yorkshire and 20 other pits. But its roots go back far longer. In 1972 and 1974, the miners had inflicted hefty defeats on the Tory government.
In 1972, a thousand Yorkshire miners — the first “flying pickets” — led by their regional official Arthur Scargill, picketed the Saltley Gate coke works near Birmingham, the biggest distribution point in the country. They were joined by over 10,000 engineers, mainly from the local car plants, led out by the communist shop steward Derek Robinson. The local police chief ordered the gates of the coke works to be closed.
In 1974, prime minister Edward Heath called an election in the middle of the strike under the slogan “who governs Britain”. He got his answer in that he was voted out of office.
When I was staying with him in April 1984, Jack Collins, the general secretary of the Kent area National Union of Mineworkers, told me that the National Coal Board’s collapse in 1974 was so total that the NUM headquarters was ringing up the regions and asking if they had any other demands that they wanted to add to the list.
Thatcher came into office in 1979 determined to wreak her revenge on the miners. Initially, in February 1981, plans were announced to close 25 pits. But the coal board let the government know that it only had coal stocks to last six weeks and there was a climb down.
The real declaration of war came with the appointment of the American Ian McGregor as head of the NCB in 1983. In 1980, as head of British Steel, he had overseen a 14-week strike by steelworkers ending with the halving of the workforce.
In 1984, Scargill claimed that the NCB had a plan to close 70 pits. In fact, McGregor’s plan would see 75 pits closed over three years. Today there are no deep-mined pits in Britain: in 1984 there were 174.
Solidarity
When the strike began, on March 6, there were some who questioned the wisdom of starting a strike in the spring when there was a long summer ahead and there would be less demand for coal. But the miners’ overtime ban had already run coal stocks down.
The other important factor was the solidarity movement. In every small town and city in Britain, miners’ support groups sprang up which collected money in high streets around the country every week throughout the strike. They also organised food deliveries to mining communities, where communal kitchens were set up by local miners. Miners were severely penalised by the government’s Department of Health & Social Security, which deducted a presumed payment of strike pay from the union, which obviously did not happen.
The Tories also hoped that miners’ wives would force their men back to work. But, led by Betty Cook and Anne Scargill, Women Against Pit Closures organised a mass movement of the families and supporters of striking miners, who often went up against the police on picket lines with the men.
In fact, far from forcing their men back to work, the Women Against Pit Closures movement has been estimated to have prolonged the strike by at least four months through its fundraising and campaigning [Peter Lazenby, Morning Star, February 29 2024].
The international support was also massive. Money poured in from trade unionists in Australia, where miners and seafarers carried out impressive solidarity action. The Kent area of the NUM had long cultivated links with miners in northern France, who not only imposed a ban on coal shipments to Britain but also tipped coal that was waiting to be loaded into the harbours and employed methods used by the French Resistance to hole coal freighters under the waterline as they tried to leave port [Seumas Milne, The Secret War Against the Miners, 1994, p.294].
The strike echoed round the world. Lay president of the carpenters’ union Phil Davies told me that when he went on a trade union delegation to Egypt, the carpenters in Cairo just wanted to know about the miners’ strike and Arthur Scargill.
Soviet Support
The question of support from the Soviet Union was more problematic. In 1926, miners in the Soviet Union had raised a million pounds for the strike. The TUC, under threat from “red scare” tactics refused to accept it. The Soviet trade unionists then sent it directly to the miners’ union, which gratefully accepted it.
In mid-1984, Andrei Gromyko, the USSR’s long-serving foreign secretary, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then second in command of the Soviet communist party, had signed a document authorising the transfer of a million roubles collected by Soviet miners and other trade unionists to the miners in Britain. [Milne, p.250 ff]
For various reasons, it never arrived until the strike had almost ended, when it was transferred to an international solidarity fund run by the International Miners’ Organisation in Dublin.
Gorbachev was at the time on a trip to Britain, where he met Margaret Thatcher, who declared: “I can do business with this man.” In his public appearances in Britain he never once mentioned the miners’ strike.
The deliveries of Polish coal to Britain were even more difficult. In 1983, Scargill had described Solidarnosc, the dissident trade union founded in the Gdansk shipyards, as an “anti-socialist organisation”, something which now seems indisputable. There was no sign of solidarity from Polish miners or other Polish trade unionists.
When the NUM sent a delegation to the Polish embassy in London, the ambassador explained: “We have contracts to fulfil with British companies.” Scargill retorted: “You have a far more important contract with the international working class.”
To put it in context, the Polish government of Jaruzelski was under constant pressure from Western banks to repay its debts and faced sullen resistance from wide sections of its own population. [Milne, p.297]
Of course, the most frequently raised question whenever the question of the miners’ strike comes up, and throughout the dispute itself, was the question of a national ballot. The fact is that in January 1981, 85 per cent of the membership had voted for a national strike if any pit was threatened with closure on economic grounds.
The Nottinghamshire area, where coal was easiest to mine and which was loudest in its calls for a national ballot, had ignored a previous national ballot in 1977 that rejected incentive schemes, and had gone on to lead the acceptance of such schemes area by area.
The NUM leadership argued that when 80 per cent of miners were out on strike, why was there a need for a ballot? And NUM general secretary Peter Heathfield commented that a national ballot would be “a veto to prevent people in other areas defending their jobs” [Milne, p.19-20].
In the event, most miners in Nottinghamshire, as they had done in 1926, carried on working and went on to found the now defunct and disgraced Union of Democratic Mineworkers.
Police Riot
Police in anti-riot gear escorting picketers away from their position near the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham
From the beginning, the miners faced a massive, brutal and coordinated policing campaign. Kent miners travelling to support pickets elsewhere in the country were turned back and told they would be arrested if they crossed the county line.
The biggest police riot, however, took place at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, now known as the Battle of Orgreave, on June 18 1984. Over 7,000 police faced a similar number of miners’ pickets outside the plant. Famously, on the early evening news the BBC reversed its footage to show the pickets attacking the police first, suggesting that the police were only responding to the violence when, in reality, any violence from the pickets was only in response to the brutal police attacks.
There was an almost medieval approach by the police, launching mounted charges against the pickets in the most violent physical confrontation in our post-war history.
Many miners were badly injured and 39 were charged. But the trial in 1985 collapsed and the miners sued the police for assault, wrongful arrest, malicious prosecution and false imprisonment. In 1991, the South Yorkshire police paid out half a million pounds in damages to the 39 miners. [Milne, p.24]
The End
In early 1985 the strike ended. The government was determined that the miners should go back without an agreement. There was no room for compromise: it was win or lose. But as Norman Tebbit, a hard-right member of the Thatcher government, put it: “It was a close-run thing.”
The miners at most pits marched back together, with banners flying and often behind brass bands. Of course, it did not end when the strike was over: the NCB victimised any miner who had been arrested even for the most trivial offence, and the Justice for Mineworkers campaign continued for at least a year after the strike.
The effect on the mining communities was devastating. Whole towns and villages were hollowed out overnight. Work down the mine had been dangerous — but at least it offered a job, solidarity and a community. The reason for the extreme solidarity of the miners was simply that when you work down a pit, your life and safety depends on those comrades working beside you. Now that is gone.
Today those towns and pit villages have become the victims of rampant drug addiction, and the only jobs to be found are insecure ones such as night security work or in the gig economy.
The government achieved its objective: deprived of its most militant organisation, the union movement suffered a setback that lasted decades.
But in the last two years, with rail strikes, nurses’ strikes and junior doctors’ strikes, often ending in victory, the unions have shown that they are back. The Unite union, successor to the engineering union, has recorded hundreds of victories for its members in recent years, often without even needing to go on strike.
The 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike will be marked by events up and down the country. One of them will be in Durham, where veterans of Women Against Pit Closures will be joined by their sisters from the United States, Germany, France and the Netherlands [Heather Wood, Morning Star, Saturday 2 March].
Kent Notes
In 1984 there were three pits in Kent: Snowdown, Tilmanstone and Betteshanger. In the 1960s there had been a fourth at Chislet, but the coal board claimed it had to close that because it could not find enough workers to dig the coal.
A year or so before the strike, Snowdown colliery was threatened with closure, but the miners, who knew their pit better than the managers, proved to the NCB that there was another seam of coal that could be mined, so they forced it to stay open.
The miners often came from other mining areas such Scotland, Yorkshire or south Wales, so they originally had funny accents, but their sons and daughters were Kentish born and bred.
Jack Collins’ son told me that the lads from Snowdown had organised themselves in the A Team and the B Team and were in competition to see who could get arrested first, because they knew that if the police arrested them they would have to feed them — and, of course, food was scarce during the strike. They would sit in the back of the police van singing: “We hope it’s chips, it’s chips,” a TV advert at the time to the tune of Que Sera Sera.
The miners often lived in isolated communities on purpose-built council estates, but during the strike, many shops kept serving them and providing credit. As Margaret of Kent Women Against Pit Closures told me after the strike: “Deal has done well out of the miners.”
About:
Dave Westacott is a former journalist and translator living in Vienna.
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