In last week’s BBC documentary Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story, some of the history was inevitably told by those who were only coming of age in 1984. One of those was Lisa McKenzie, the daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Nottinghamshire miners, who turned 16 on the first day of the strike. Among other memories, McKenzie, now 55, recalled with a grin the time when a group calling themselves the Cambridge University Feminist Players had got in touch, back then, and wanted to come and do a play for the women of the pit village, in a show of solidarity.
When the students arrived they insisted that only women could watch their performance. “None of the women liked that, and none of the men liked it either,” McKenzie recalled. The play itself, she said, was “every bit as bad as you could imagine: all avant garde and flounce.” As a finale, the student actors turned their backs to the audience and when they turned around their faces were blackened with coal dust. They held hands and announced: “One day all sisters will unite – and work side-by-side down the pits with their men!” McKenzie was open-mouthed recalling this, as her home-permed self had been open-mouthed first time around. “What that showed us,” she said, 40 years on, “is that they just didn’t understand us at all.”
That persistent truth hasn’t, of course, stopped writers and film-makers and artists and poets, not many of them sons or daughters of miners, from trying to tell the story of mining and ex-mining communities ever since. The BBC documentary, and the three-part Channel 4 series that preceded it last month, Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain, are the latest expressions of what has become a national ritual, an alternative remembrance day, marking the dispute, decade by decade, when “Britain changed for ever”.
The passage of time seems only to add poignancy to those acts of homage, to the stations of the cross at Easington and Ollerton and Orgreave. This time around the cameras dwelt on the faces of old men whose whole working life might have been spent below ground, but which instead had been spent in daylight, scratching around for piecemeal jobs, or benefits, or structure and certainty, in towns and villages that had been stripped – gradually and then suddenly – of their original purpose.
The fascination with documenting those lives, wanting to walk in miners’ boots, has a long history. George Orwell set the pattern when he was dispatched from his day job at a Hampstead bookshop in 1936 by his publisher Victor Gollancz to live among the miners of Lancashire and Yorkshire for the book that became The Road to Wigan Pier. The Old Etonian prepared by scuffing his brogues and dirtying his jacket and trying to rough up his accent. His book dramatised, in part, all the ingrained ironies of that quest: “In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal miners working,” he wrote, drily. “It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. It is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.”
The miners he met were, equally, in no doubt of their relative status. Orwell may have had received pronunciation, but they had authenticity: “It is only in the North that life is ‘real’ life,” Orwell was invited to understand, and “that the industrial work done in the North is the only ‘real’ work, that the North is inhabited by ‘real’ people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites.”
The interviewees in the two recent documentaries seemed pretty sure of that distinction nearly 90 years on (and you could, too, hear an echo of Orwell’s southern insecurities in the occasional reedy-voiced off-screen questions of the programme-makers). What had been lost, the ex-miners implied, when the pits were shut down, was not so much a way of life as that whole confidence in what was real and what was fake. The mine at Shirebrook, Derbyshire, where the Channel 4 series focused, had been replaced by a vast Sports Direct warehouse. As Lisa McKenzie concluded: “The pit was life, it was everything. We might not have had much money, but we were honest folk. Love and safety and security: 1984 to 1985 removed all of that.”
That abiding faith was the motivating force of the strike from the beginning. Ken Loach’s 1984 film Which Side Are You On? set the gritty romance of those threatened communities in stone. His camera captured not only the frontlines of the picket, but the poets and balladeers of the struggle playing benefits in pubs and clubs. “Tears too are now redundant,” one such pit-poet concluded. “Who am I to ask them why this pit must live, this pit must die?” another man inquired. Loach spliced those lyrical moments with the running battles of picketing miners: scenes of cars turned back on motorways blockaded by newly militarised police; the arms of broad shouldered pitmen twisted up their backs as they are bundled into paddy wagons; the police cavalry charges at Orgreave.
Watching those latter sequences again now, some images seem to merge with memories of Jeremy Deller’s 2001 reconstruction of the same events for an art project. Deller, the Turner prize winner, who was at school in Dulwich, south London at the time of the strike itself, used re-enactment societies and ex-miners for his film to emphasise, lest we forget, that this recent history had been our civil war and our Agincourt, all in one.
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The latest films and documentaries on the strike, like those that went before, are sometimes tempted to portray those clashes as part of a straightforward class war – workers against the capitalist state – but they were, on the ground, equally internecine conflicts, pit against pit. Reading back through the first draft of history in the Observer, those latter fault lines were apparent from the very beginning.
On 11 March 1984, the Observer reported the initial walk out at Cortonwood pit in Yorkshire, under the heading “Miners Deeply Split” above a story about the refusal of the NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, to grant members a national ballot “on the basis that there were grave doubts as to whether the required 55% vote in favour of strike action could be achieved”. Those doubts never went away over the following 12 months, not least in the mind of Scargill himself, who attempted to assume national consensus in the union without that mandate.
The following week, the paper reported from Thoresby colliery in Nottinghamshire, which had been targeted by flying pickets from Yorkshire, seeking to persuade or intimidate the Notts miners into walking out. One working miner railed at how “Scargill… is turning miner against miner. Every man must enjoy the democratic right to vote on whether he should go on strike or not. Scargill wants to use us as cannon fodder to bring down this government. I tell you if he were to turn up here, we’d string him up from the nearest lamp-post.”
At nearby Ollerton, in street battles, one young Yorkshireman died. “Yorkshire pickets with football scarves around their necks taunted the Notts men with charges of cowardice,” the paper reported. “The Yorkshiremen accused the Nottinghamshire moderates of not being ‘real men’, of hiding behind their women, of failing to stand up when the crunch came. The chanting had all the savage edge of a football crowd on the rampage.”
It is seductive, knowing how things turned out, to only view that history in black and white, comrades against strikebreakers. Looking back over depictions of the strike year by year is to watch voices for compromise quietly erased in favour of that simpler binary. One figure whose stance appears less and less in anniversary documentaries is Neil Kinnock, Labour leader at the time of the strike, born into a South Wales mining community, and engaged in 1984 in a battle for the future of his party with the hard left Militant group. In Marching to the Fault Line, Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s peerless account of the secret political manoeuvring of the strike, Kinnock emerges as a rare voice of reason. At the launch of that book, on the 25th anniversary of the strike in 2009, Kinnock doubled down on his opinion that “the suicidal vanity of Arthur Scargill” had made the catastrophic defeat of the strike inevitable. “A ballot would have been won for the strike,” Kinnock insisted. “And what it would have done is guarantee unity right across the mining labour force.”
Scargill, he suggested, preyed on the strength of self-sacrifice in the community in order to “feed himself the political illusion that as long as the miners were united they had the right to destabilise and overthrow the democratically elected government. The miners didn’t deserve him, they deserved much, much better. My view is Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill deserved each other. But no one else did.”
That narrative, far more widespread at the time than the history now tends to believe, was no doubt the reason why Margaret Thatcher could look in the mirror and tell herself she was defending democracy when she was using covert and draconian strategies to provoke and break the strike. Forty years on, two seconds of footage of Thatcher in any of the latest documentaries, repeating her determination to defeat “the enemy within”, or to defend liberty with battalions of riot police, should still come with a trigger warning to anyone who sat through those broadcasts in real time. The patronising grate of the voice, the impervious certainty, the hair (mirrored by Scargill’s bouffant) still have the effect of a thousand nails down a blackboard.
For these reasons – and despite her landslide electoral successes either side of 1984-5 – Mrs T has been the cold-hearted villain of just about all popular depictions of those events ever since. It was never enough for the most vocal striking miners to want the prime minister defeated, they wanted their tormentor safely dispatched underground, to be sure she had gone. Mark Herman’s 1996 film Brassed Off, about the Grimethorpe Colliery Band playing on while their pit faced closure, established that sentiment: “What’s [God] doing?” Stephen Tomkinson’s character asks at one point, “He can take John Lennon. He can take those three young lads down at Ainsley Pit. He’s even thinking of taking my old man. And Margaret bloody Thatcher lives! What’s He sodding playing at, eh?”
For 20 years, retrospective fantasies along those lines were applauded every night on the London stage in the musical version of Lee Hall’s play Billy Elliot, set during the strike. Elton John’s song from that show, Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher (“we all celebrate today because it’s one day closer to your death”), was even sung on the night the former prime minister eventually died. “I was on holiday when she snuffed it,” Hall subsequently recalled. “Somehow the producers had tracked me down. They were asking permission to cut the ‘Thatcher’s dead’ song out of ‘respect’. I refused… The cast stopped the show and put it to an audience vote. Only three people voted against playing it and they walked out – the other 1,500 people sang along. Democracy in action.”
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The most thoughtful unpicking of all that highly charged history was set out in James Graham’s fabulous 2022 BBC series Sherwood (a drama that prefigured the dystopia of The Way, the three-parter by Graham, Michael Sheen and the documentary-maker Adam Curtis). When Sherwood came out I was sent on a faintly Wigan Pier mission up to the former pit village of Annesley Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire, where the drama was set, and where Graham had grown up, to ask ex-miners what they made of it. It remains a sobering experience to walk around those villages where the winding gear of the closed pit has become a heritage attraction; for one thing there is a sense of time having stopped; for another the high street and the faces both betray the marks of that longstanding dereliction.
The primary inspiration for the fiction of Sherwood was the real-life murder of Keith Frogson, former trade unionist, who was killed with a crossbow on the 20th anniversary of the miners’ strike in 2004. The fissures of resentment that tragedy reopened remained raw 20 years on. One afternoon I sat talking to ex-colleagues of Frogson, one after the other, in front rooms that featured mantelpieces full of pit memorabilia, plates and badges and mugs. That evening, I received phone calls from each of those men saying that they wanted to withdraw their co-operation with my article. Their former NUM leader had been in touch, though none of them had worked in a mine for 30 years. The collective feeling was they’d had enough of “London media” coming up to try to understand; no one would step out of line, old habits dying hard.
Among the people who would speak was David Amos, a NUM official who had kept working during the strike and had subsequently written a PhD dissertation about that history. “Once Scargill came,” Amos told me, “the NUM was quite Orwellian. We said: ‘Are you asking us what to do or are you telling us?’ And they said: ‘We’re telling you.’ Notts miners had a different tradition to that.”
Amos was still ostracised by many of the striking men he had grown up with and worked alongside, though the number was slowly dwindling. “It’s just played out by a few people these days,” he said. “It’s like ageing Jedi Knights battling it out and everyone else is wondering what the bloody hell’s going on. Apparently there was a survey on Radio Nottingham last week that said most people under 30 didn’t even know what the word ‘scab’ meant.”
The final word in Graham’s Sherwood series was given to the widow of the murdered man, who suggested that the division between working people that took root during the strike was exactly what the Thatcher government had always planned. “A former mining town?” she asked a pub full of villagers. “How the hell are we to move on when we talk about ourselves in terms of what we aren’t any more? We’ve had 40 years of this. You get one bloody life and we are spending it hating. Aren’t you all tired? I am. So fucking tired…”
One of the reasons that many mining families can’t move on from the events that brutally ended their imagined future 40 years ago is that, as Scargill predicted and perhaps precipitated, nothing has ever properly replaced that future. Another is that the backstory is endlessly rehearsed as a warmer contrast to the bleak present. Robert Gildea, emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford, last year published an oral history of the strike, Backbone of the Nation, that collected lengthy evidence from 148 interviewees. Many of their stories have long hardened into gospel; Gildea found that in their retelling they inexorably shaped the lives of children and grandchildren born after the strike ended and the pits closed. In some cases the knowledge of this unseen past appeared to prompt addiction and depression; elsewhere Gildea identified a group of miners’ children he came to think of as “redeemers”. “Like the others, they experienced the deprivation and pain of the strike and its defeat, and the devastation of its aftermath. But – exceptionally and consciously – they worked in later life to alleviate the ills suffered by the communities in which they had been brought up” – they became teachers, doctors, social workers, trying to knit the old social fabric back together.
Ken Loach’s film The Old Oak, which came out at the end of last year, looked for similar threads of connection. Now 87, the film-maker said at the time of his film’s release that it would be his last production, and that it was fitting to return to the strike, since that was the event in his lifetime that most determined our precarious “gig economy” present. His film tells the story of TJ, an ex-miner in a run-down Durham town, who tries to integrate a family of Syrian refugees, who have been given a terraced house among the old miners’ back to backs. His old pit colleagues, who have only watched their community fray and decay, instead use the incomers as scapegoats for all their frustrations. TJ runs a pub, the Old Oak, the back room of which, with its miners’ banners and its photographs of the strike, has been locked up for 20 years. It becomes the battleground for another stand-off – between solidarity with destitute foreigners, and a bitter bigotry that stands in place of long-lost community.
Watching that film reminded me of the long ago 2019 election. I was up in Tony Blair’s former constituency of Sedgefield, in Fishburn Working Men’s Club. Downstairs, in the party room, there was a battle-torn miners’ banner in a glass case bearing the face of Keir Hardie; the banner is still brought out each year to head the Durham miners’ parade. A few times, recently, I was told, that room had only been packed out to hear Nigel Farage speak. The walls of the main bar were decorated with paintings of the former Fishburn colliery which once employed nearly every family in the village and, in pride of place, a tableau of the “pits closed by the Tories”, each with its symbolic badge of arms.
Underneath this memorial, on the night after the election, old miners and regulars at the club for 40 and 50 years explained to me, one after the other, how they had voted for Boris Johnson rather than Jeremy Corbyn at that election. “Corbyn doesn’t understand us here,” they insisted. It was a reminder that the battles of 1984 had been well and truly lost. Defending the community had come to seem something more desperate altogether.
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Partly for that reason, the miners’ strike remains a storyline that keeps on giving. Over the past week a couple of new books have arrived on my desk. One is a thoughtful and lyrical novel by Andrew McMillan, born in south Yorkshire in 1988, in the shadow of those events. His book, Pity, is structured around the gaps between past and present; haunting memories of tragedy and hardship in generations of mining men and their sons, and academic “field workers” who try and fail to excavate them.
The other is a book of poems by the Doncaster-born and Leeds-based poet Sarah Wimbush. That book, launched at the National Coal Mining Museum, is called simply Strike, and is inspired entirely by images of the conflict, a graphic emotional shorthand that all of us of a certain age know well: helmeted riot policemen in Victorian backstreets, miners’ wives marching under bedsheet banners, teenagers “riddling” bits of coal off slag heaps. The book is prefaced by a poem, Markham Main, about some of the men that the BBC might have mined for stories:
“Afternoons they meet up/ on street corners/ like old youths planning revolution…” Wimbush writes. “After school they take the grand-kids/ to the Pit Top Playground, look forward/ to the night shift at Ikea. Together.”
You are left to wonder a bit about that last word – the thing that was fought for, and perhaps the thing that was lost.
