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It’s getting late so I drive north out of Nottingham, through the suburban sprawl of Sherwood Rise and Arnold, into the rolling farmland around Papplewick, on through leafy, wealthy Ravenshead with its Byronic ruins, and back to the ‘once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town’, as local literary celeb D.H. Lawrence characterised Mansfield in his infamous dirty book Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence made this pronouncement eighty-odd years ago and, though it’s still a disheartening place, Mansfield is no longer a colliery town. Thereby hangs a tale, and perhaps a key to unlocking the character of Mansfield folk, and of Midlanders more generally.
In common with the rest of the country, most of the collieries in the Mansfield area closed in the wake of the miners’ strike of 1984–85. The fabled industrial dispute has often been portrayed as a good-versus-evil struggle pitting ordinary working people, mostly in the North, against an uncomprehending and vengeful government, entirely in the South. Thus, when Channel 4 commissioned an artist (from London) to create a work commemorating the strike, it was an event in South Yorkshire – ‘The Battle of Orgreave’, a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant – that the artist in question, Jeremy Deller, chose to focus on. ‘On 18 June 1984 I was watching the evening news and saw footage of a picket at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in which thousands of men were chased up a field by mounted police,’ Deller has written. ‘It seemed a civil war between the North and the South of the country was taking place in all but name.’ That last sentence is quite wrong – the strike affected the whole of the UK – but it fits nicely with the mythology of the North/South divide so it’s unlikely to raise many eyebrows. But were events in Yorkshire and the North, and the stand-off between police and striking miners, the only or even the main ‘story’ of the strike? If they were, it’s hard to understand Mansfield’s role in it, or why chants of ‘scab’ – meaning someone who refuses to join a strike – ring out from the terraces whenever Mansfield Town Football Club plays against its South Yorkshire soccer rivals.
The 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