Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  It was very quickly too late for either side to admit such a mistake, and the memo has remained secret until now. It concluded: ‘This is one we cannot “back off”, and I would suggest that the matter be put back to Area for further discussion within the review Procedure as required.’

  Cortonwood was the spark that ignited the strike. But it started the strike only in the sense that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 started the First World War. European politics and the rhetoric of their leaders caused the war, and after Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher had been squaring up to each other for months, the strike only needed a spark. This is, as we shall see, just one of many ways in which ‘the great strike for jobs’ resembled the First World War.

  For the 839 miners who worked at Cortonwood, Hayes’ announcement came as a shock and felt like a betrayal. Every indication until that morning was that the NCB planned to keep the pit open. Several months earlier eighty men had been transferred there from Elsecar pit and promised a secure future for at least five years. Just a year previously, George Hayes had told the NUM and NACODS (the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers, the small union representing the managers in the mines) that the pit would remain open until the last coalface ran out in 1989. During the summer the NCB had spent £1m to improve the washery at the colliery and installed a new generating plant at a cost of £100,000; by Christmas it completed a £40,000 modernization of the pithead baths.

  Hayes’ meeting was with the Yorkshire NUM President, Jack Taylor, and General Secretary Owen Briscoe, as well as NACODS President Ken Sampey, at the NCB offices near Manver colliery. There he gave them the bad news he thought he had been authorized to give. He said that South Yorkshire had been told to cut output by 500,000 tonnes a year – and Cortonwood provided 280,000 tonnes. He argued that as it had to close in five years, it was better to do it now so young men could find new jobs elsewhere. That was an argument which the union leaders knew was going to sound hollow to the eighty men who had recently transferred there because they were told that Cortonwood had a secure future.

  Jenny Evans’s husband worked at Cortonwood, and she knew there was no other source of employment for her village of Brampton Blerlow. ‘I thought, that can’t be right, there must be some mistake,’ she said twenty years later. ‘When it had sunk in we realized we had no choice but to fight. I believed totally in the strike.’ It was the start of a year of hardship for the Evans family, and thousands of other families.1

  This was the first pit ordered to close by the NCB without the approval of the NUM, so it was more than a local tragedy: it was a national challenge.

  Just four days after Hayes’ announcement, on the following Sunday, 4 March, at a meeting of the Cortonwood NUM branch at Brampton parish hall, 500 miners voted to fight the closure. The next day 300 of them picketed the NUM Yorkshire offices in Barnsley where the Yorkshire area council was meeting. In a splendid panelled room in the period building, with a wooden desk for each delegate, the delegate for Cortonwood, Mick Carter, told the area council about being called into the manager’s office to be told that the pit was to close in five weeks, and he asked for support from the union. He pointed out that in 1981 the Yorkshire miners had decided they would take strike action to prevent any pit in Yorkshire being closed on grounds other than proven seam exhaustion.

  ‘So what could we do?’ says Ken Capstick, a Yorkshire executive member who still works for the NUM today and is close to Arthur Scargill, as he has always been. ‘We had a ballot decision which was something like 80 per cent or more in favour [to strike to prevent pit closures], in Yorkshire, and we had a delegate in the council chamber asking us what we’re going to do because his pit is going to close. So we voted unanimously to take strike action and we embarked on a strike in Yorkshire.’

  Capstick adds this, twenty-five years on: ‘If I could go right back to 1984 and I was in that council chamber and I was watching Mick Carter making his speech, what would I do, knowing what I know now? I’d vote for strike action – even knowing everything I know that happened – because it was right. It was right. That’s what I believe. Because it was right and I believe in it and I’d still do the same again. That represents a victory of some kind. It’s got to do. I can’t see how it can’t. Do you follow my logic or not?’

  After the meeting Jack Taylor announced that the Yorkshire executive had called an all-out stoppage of the area’s 56,000 miners from 9 March. The strike had begun.

  The Yorkshire NUM council had acted without taking a ballot, a decision that would come back to haunt them. The question of ballots was to divide the miners’ union for the next twelve months and bring it more grief than almost anything else. To add to their troubles, it was the worst possible time to start a strike, from the NUM’s point of view. There was the whole summer to get through before the shortage of coal was going to bite. The NCB may have been in a mess, having triggered the strike more or less by accident, but the NUM was in no better shape, for at least some of the delegates must have known perfectly well that they really needed to find an excuse to hold off until autumn, and call a strike when winter was approaching.

  Still, they were sure they had no choice. ‘It was like the gauntlet being thrown down by the government.’ With Yorkshire’s man Arthur Scargill now installed as national President, they felt sure of national backing. Neither Scargill nor Thatcher could ignore anything that looked like a gauntlet being thrown down.

  Just three days after the Yorkshire area council had called a strike over Cortonwood, the NUM National Executive, meeting at the union’s head office in Sheffield on 8 March, made strikes in Yorkshire and Scotland official – which meant that no NUM member who cared about his friends or his neighbours would go into work there and risk being labelled a ‘scab’ – and called for support for them from the rest of the country.

  The strike vote at the NUM executive was overwhelming, but it was not unanimous. The executive voted by 21 to 3 for the action, the three objectors being right-wing members calling for a national strike ballot. The division over whether to have a ballot grew with every passing day, and became bitter and toxic. Afterwards, one of the three who voted for a national ballot, Trevor Bell, who had stood against Scargill for President in 1981 and represented white-collar workers on the NUM executive, wondered how the once powerful right wing had been so decisively defeated. Perhaps, he thought, some right-wingers believed local strikes might not affect their more moderate areas.

  There was, however, a serious constitutional problem. The strike was called under Rule 41 of the NUM rule book, which said that local strikes can be made official by the National Executive without a ballot. But Rule 43 said that a national strike can only be called if there is a ballot. Was this national or local? The right wing argued that this was turning into a national strike and required a ballot – and that in any case, whatever the rule book said, they needed a ballot to get a united and effective strike. Many on the left, like Kent miners’ leader Jack Collins, argued against a ballot on the grounds that it meant one man having the right to vote another man out of work.

  Right from the start, this division threatened to explode into violent confrontation. Early in the strike, Trevor Bell spoke at Sheffield City Hall and advocated a national ballot. He said that, if the union wanted the support of people like the Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, it had to prove that the strike had been called democratically. ‘That didn’t go down well with a lot of them,’ he says.

  As he left the meeting, a policeman quietly asked Bell to accompany him through a side door. Outside, ‘there were three policemen and an inspector waiting, and they said, “Where’s your car?” and I said, “It’s in the multi-storey car park down near the NUM office.” And they said, “We just think we ought to take you to your car.” And they took me to my car and I went towards it with my key in my hand and the inspector said, “Wait,” took the key and looked under the car and he opened the car. He opened the ca
r door and then said, “All right, Mr Bell, you can go.”’ It was, he was told, the result of information the police had received.2

  The left would certainly reply that this was either the police being mischievous or bogus threats made by agents provocateurs. Given the way the strike swiftly began being fought, this is at least as plausible an explanation as that real threats were made on Bell’s life by striking miners. Spies and agents provocateurs are an inevitable feature of war.

  Whatever the truth, after that meeting, NCB industrial relations chief Ned Smith asked for the registration number of Bell’s car. ‘I didn’t know why he was bothered,’ says Bell. ‘But then I noticed that as I went down the motorway, there’d be a police motorcyclist behind me until I turned off to go into Sheffield.’

  Following the 8 March executive decision, Yorkshire miners from Doncaster began to picket Nottinghamshire pits, in order to get the vast and productive Nottinghamshire coalfield out on strike. They travelled to Harworth, the most northerly of the Nottinghamshire collieries. The Nottinghamshire miners had not been called out on strike, and the Yorkshire region had agreed to keep pickets out of Nottinghamshire until the Notts area council strike ballot, which was to take place four days later.

  The Nottinghamshire executive was recommending a ‘yes’ vote and feared that pickets before the ballot would only alienate their members and make a ‘yes’ vote harder to obtain. Notts General Secretary Henry Richardson said the pickets ‘set the men against the strike’. He said prophetically: ‘Calling us scabs will not help. If Notts are scabs before we start, Notts will become scabs.’3 So the union asked the pickets to go home – but some of them kept coming back to Nottinghamshire, in defiance of the union. The Yorkshire area council sanctioned the flying pickets, but the Nottinghamshire leaders still wanted them to stay away.4 Here were the seeds of great trouble and bitterness in the future, not only in Nottinghamshire but in neighbouring Derbyshire and other areas too.

  On 9 March the miners of Durham and Kent, two of the more militant coalfields in the country, agreed to support the strike. But the Nottinghamshire leaders were still calling for a pithead ballot. Positions were starting to harden, with Nottinghamshire leading one side and Yorkshire the other.

  By Monday, 12 March, the national strike was taking shape, but even then only half the 184,000 miners were on strike. The strike was solid, or almost solid, in Yorkshire, Kent, South Wales and Scotland, while mining villages in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire and parts of the North West refused to join in the action.

  How could they be brought into the strike? If giving them a ballot was ruled out, there was only one way to get them in: to make use of the loyalty to their union that was second nature in all mining communities. If you sent large numbers of men to picket the mines where work was still going on, surely miners would be ashamed to cross the picket line. That was how it had always worked. ‘Scab’ was still the most offensive thing you could say to a miner. If proof were needed, surely the crucial picketing of Saltley in 1972 provided it.

  So miners started to travel from Yorkshire, South Wales, Scotland and Kent to the areas where support was thin or non-existent, to try to persuade working miners to join the strike.

  Scargill and those round him seem to have thought that Nottinghamshire would come out, and that, if a push was needed, the flying pickets would provide it. Today Ken Capstick admits that perhaps they should have anticipated the problem, because of the history of the Nottinghamshire NUM. The spectre of Spencerism, he now thinks, was still alive and well in the Nottinghamshire leadership, and that was what caused the trouble.

  ‘I knew very early on in the strike – I’m talking about the first week or two – that we had a problem because there was some pits that clearly were not going to come out on strike,’ says Capstick. ‘Normally when miners go to picket a pit they come out on strike with you. They might disagree with you – there might be arguments, but those arguments usually take place whilst you are on strike. Normally my experience has been that when you go, they come out on strike and they’ll disagree with you at the meetings that are held.’

  But Capstick – as good a guide as we have to Scargill’s thinking at the start of the strike – believes that ‘the die had been cast somehow. We’d sent the pickets into Nottinghamshire and into Lancashire and there had been resistance to it, there were problems there that were difficult to turn around.’

  The government and the NCB may have been caught out by the timing, but they had prepared well, and knew just what they were going to do about it. Their strategy depended absolutely on the one thing Capstick did not count on: miners crossing picket lines to go to work. The NUM was to be surprised at the speed and ruthlessness with which the NCB acted.

  A special meeting was convened at the Edwinstowe headquarters of the North Notts Mining Board by area director J.E. Wood to plan and co-ordinate action against the pickets. The meeting was to be the first of the daily briefings held until the strike ended a year later. The military precision at local and national level to deal with picketing made the NUM look positively amateurish.

  Initially, the North Notts management received a rebuff from Nottinghamshire Constabulary. Minutes of the first meeting on 13 March record the then Assistant Chief Constable telling the local board that it could not intervene against the pickets. The minutes note: ‘The area director had spoken to the Assistant Chief Constable (Notts). He was told, “Unless there has been proven violence it was a matter for the Board to take action through the civil courts.”’

  The moment NCB headquarters at Hobart House was informed of this, MacGregor decided to seek an injunction from the High Court to stop Yorkshire miners picketing outside their area. He sent his lawyers up to Nottinghamshire that evening. There was no hesitation, no indecision: plans had been laid for just this contingency. Lawyers and NCB officials worked through the night preparing affidavits and at six the next morning colliery managers were summoned to Edwinstowe to sign them. By that evening they were in London so they could be used in the High Court to gain a speedy injunction. The minutes recall managers ‘swore an oath on holy writ’.5

  The NCB had their injunction by 14 March, just six days after the NUM executive had declared the strike official and two weeks after the announcement that Cortonwood was to close. The junior brief was Charlie Falconer, the future Lord Chancellor and already a close friend of Tony Blair. Falconer was later to play a much bigger role in the dispute, and to make a significant contribution to the miners’ defeat.

  This injunction set the scene for the bitter confrontations which made the miners’ strike the most violent industrial dispute Britain has ever seen – for how could such an injunction ever be enforced, except by deploying the police as though it were an army, and sending it in to stop the miners by force?

  The next day, 15 March, with pickets coming from Yorkshire and a legal threat to their union, Nottinghamshire leaders called out their members on strike, before they had held an area ballot. Their own leaders and those of the NCB had forced their hand. It was a decision they stumbled into; it was not part of a plan.

  The contrast between the efficiency, ruthlessness and determination of the NCB and the amateurishness of the NUM leadership was shown by events over the same days in Barnsley. Eric Illsley, then a young Yorkshire NUM official and now Labour MP for Barnsley Central, remembers Yorkshire NUM officials retrieving a huge 6 ft x 4 ft map from the attic of their Barnsley HQ – a map that had last been used by Scargill during the 1974 miners’ strike. It showed the location of every pit and power station in the UK and was the manual for organizing the flying pickets that were so successful in that strike.

  Unfortunately, things had changed since 1974. The map was ten years out of date and some of the power stations had closed. But Yorkshire pickets relied on it to organize action, with the result that pickets spent hours standing outside closed pits and power stations wondering why it was deathly quiet. Illsley recalls: ‘Many a tim
e I can remember a call in the dead of night from some pickets in Wales or somewhere else – saying, “We’ve got here but there’s nought but broken windows.”’ The NUM updated their map as the strike progressed.

  The NUM headquarters’ picture of how the strike was going was haphazard and vague; the NCB’s was precise and organized. Twice a day, industrial relations director Ned Smith produced for his colleagues an exact description of how things were in every region: precise numbers of miners working and amounts of coal produced. He had been doing it throughout the overtime ban, and simply carried on when the strike started.

  Those around Arthur Scargill seemed at first to be able to compensate for the union’s administrative failings by their belief in victory. Divided and poorly organized the miners might be, especially compared with the employers, but they were brimming with optimism and confidence. The government, despite its preparations and its brave public stance, was not confident at all.

  Many people, including most trade union leaders, thought Scargill had been outmanoeuvred into calling a strike in March, and he would struggle to sustain the strike all through the summer before it started to bite in the cold days of winter when a lot of fuel would be needed. Privately, ministers knew that Cortonwood was not a clever piece of outmanoeuvring but a mistake, and that taking on Scargill was going to be an expensive and difficult business.

  None knew better than Peter Gregson, then head of the economic secretariat at the Cabinet Office, who chaired MISC57, the secret Cabinet Committee set up in 1981 to prepare for strike. He was to become a key figure, one of the few people during the strike to whom the Prime Minister listened. On 13 March, the day after the strike went national, Gregson sent a secret memo6 to Mrs Thatcher to prepare her for a meeting with Ian MacGregor the next day.