On 6 March 1984, I found myself smack-bang in the middle of the largest industrial dispute in post-war history. As the son of a fifth-generation miner whose bedroom window looked out onto Pye Hill Pit in Selston – the remote Nottinghamshire mining village I called home – I couldn’t help but be caught up in the miners’ strike. And over its 363 days, I watched with bemused anger as a series of nods, winks, slights of hand and outright lies were fashioned into a hard and fast history.
So much of what Selston stood for was lost in the strike and its malicious aftermath
On one side we had the National Union of Mineworkers’ (NUM) principled president Arthur Scargill and the striking miners, fighting to save British mining. On the other side, Nottinghamshire’s moneygrubbing scabs, intent on murdering Old King Coal – aided by Margaret Thatcher and the rozzers. Admittedly, the media didn’t spell it out quite so plainly, but there were enough headlines and emotion-heavy images to make sure we all got the message. ‘THATCHER PUTS THE BOOT IN.’ ‘COAL NOT DOLE.’ All those bands – New Order, Style Council, even Wham! – playing striking miners’ benefit gigs. Endless news footage of food banks and men warming their hands around rusty oil barrel braziers.
We were being read a simple bedtime story: goodies vs. baddies. And that story became gospel. Look at almost anything written about the strike over the last 40 years; no grey, just black and white. Watch any of last year’s 40th anniversary documentaries; all those former striking miners gulping through their tears and insisting that, ‘Thatcher an’ t’ Notts miners killed t’ pits. Wenn t’ union sezz yuh cumm aht, yuh cumm aht’. The BBC recently ran a story about Bruce Springsteen donating $20,000 to the families of striking miners in 1985. ‘My parents were working-class people and I watched them struggle their whole lives,’ he explained. ‘I’d been reading about it [the strike] in the newspapers and so it was just something that felt it would be a good thing to do.’ Even The Boss had it in for the Nottinghamshire miners!
Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. might be a fine album, Bruce, but mining was in trouble way before the strike. And none of it had anything to do with Nottinghamshire, Arthur Scargill, Margaret Thatcher or the walkout at Yorkshire’s Cortonwood Colliery, the strike’s trigger point. From a solid figure of 750,000 in the 1950s, the number of men employed by British mines had fallen to 250,000 by the early 70s. There were other factors, too, like the dwindling post-war need for coal and the introduction of mechanisation – just over 5 per cent of coal output was mechanised in the 1950s, rising to over 90 per cent in the 1970s. Over 250 pits had closed during Harold Wilson’s two terms in office – compared with Thatcher’s 115 – and even the left’s favourite MP Tony Benn had been arguing for the closure of uneconomical pits in the early 70s.
Dad and his mates might not have donated $20,000, but they still felt sorry for the families surviving on food bank handouts. They felt sorry for the communities that couldn’t survive without coal; Selston was one of them. But our sympathy was tempered by the bricks thrown through front room windows and dog mess shoved through letter boxes. Tempered, too, by the bloodstain on the pavement where a Nottinghamshire miner’s wife was attacked as she walked her kids to school. Tempered by the death of David Wilkie, a Mid Glamorgan taxi driver who was taking a non-striking miner to work when two striking miners dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto his car. Wilkie’s fiancée gave birth to their fourth child just six weeks later.
I was beaten up by striking miners even though I wasn’t a miner – working or otherwise. I’d been all set to start as a fitter at nearby Bentinck Colliery in 1982, but with closures on the horizon, apprenticeships were on hold and I took a job at a local engineering firm. Riding to work one morning, I was stopped by a bunch of men who spotted my gloves – distinctive, yellow National Coal Board gloves that Dad had nicked from work. Assuming I was on the wrong side of history, they trashed my motorbike. And me.
All the Nottinghamshire miners – along with men from Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Scotland, North Wales and Lancashire – wanted was a ballot to decide their future. Yes, they supported the union’s overtime ban announced in October 1983 but a decision on national strike action had to be taken by the men, not simply ordered by the union president. Unfortunately for Arthur Scargill, the men knew that change was inevitable and pits would close – indeed, many miners over 50 were already keen to leave the industry. The men were given three national ballots for strike action during 1982-83 and each time they voted ‘No’. And if they’d gone to a ballot in 1984, Scargill knew what the result would be. So, he simply bypassed the ‘working class people’ who’d struggled ‘their whole lives’; the vote was not taken by the men… but by the top brass. That’s not a union, that’s an army – a dictatorship, a fiefdom. It’s what would happen if Donald Trump was president of the NUM.
When I became a very late first-time father in 2020 – aged 55 and a journalist for more than 30 years – I thought about the story I would tell my son. About me and him, who he was and where he came from. That’s when I started writing a book about Selston, coal and our family. About my dad, who died a few short years after retirement, his lungs stuffed with 40 years’ worth of coal dust. About distant relatives, some as young as five years old, who had worked and were killed underground. About the 1970s Saturday nights at the Tin Hat, our local working men’s club, where spruced-up mining families would drink Mackeson, whisky ‘n’ pep and cherryade, dream of the 10 quid bingo jackpot and try to forget last week’s pitfall. About a handsome, unsophisticated landscape that became a welcome home for wheat fields, headstocks, Peak District horizons and prefab council estates. About how coal’s exacting 700-year reign over Selston had somehow convinced my blind mother she could see and allowed imaginative schoolboys to conquer gravity.
Unfortunately, so much of what Selston stood for – so much of the magic – was lost in the strike and its malicious aftermath. It has simply become another deceitful Nottinghamshire mining village, hauled out for a dose of contempt and humiliation every time a strike anniversary rolls around. So what if child poverty in Selston and the surrounding villages sits at around 30 per cent and slightly more than that for working-age economic inactivity. We broke the strike! We deserve it!
Let’s just imagine that, instead of the strike, the Nottinghamshire miners won the argument and a national ballot had taken place. Arthur Scargill, having lost, retreated to his grace-and-favour flat in London’s Barbican, leaving a united NUM to fashion a smaller but still viable British mining industry. Maybe. Possibly. Looking back, it probably wouldn’t have worked, but it would have been a far more dignified legacy than the poisonous tripe we’ve ended up with.
Yes, somebody did cheat the country and British mining in 1984, but contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t Selston, it wasn’t my dad, his mates or Nottinghamshire. Does anyone remember the motto that adorned those NUM banners flittering in Cortonwood’s summer breeze? ‘The past we inherit, the future we build.’
This is your future, Arthur… unfortunately, Selston still has to live in it.
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