by David Hencke
Despite this North Notts was losing coal orders, with supplies to Northern Ireland being the first hit. On Monday, 26 March, a terse note in the North Notts Mining Board’s records reads: ‘orders lost to Poland and other foreign powers.’
As the police stepped up their action, so did the pickets. A lorry blockade of the M1, inspired by similar blockades in France, took place in South Yorkshire on 27 March, and picketing of other pits intensified. The police had some effect because only 171 pickets got through to North Notts, surrounded by 546 police.
On that day, Ned Smith’s report to his colleagues included the information that in Staffordshire, four men were ‘sitting in’ on the surface at Hem Heath colliery, demanding to see an NUM official other than those at their pit, so they could present their demand for a ballot. And, the same day, it had a bit of a gloat. ‘Picketing at Cadley Hill much lighter,’ Smith reported. ‘Only 150 pickets, many of whom arrived too late for the afternoon shift, having been made to leave their buses and walk from Coalville (11 miles).’14
The next day pickets and police at Cresswell colliery were evenly matched, the strikers having found ways to get to Nottinghamshire through Derbyshire. Reaction from the North Notts Mining Board executive was swift and efficient. A request went to Derbyshire police for roadblocks and the next day they were in place.
In the meantime the role of the rest of the trade union movement was being tested. The right-wing-led power workers’ union made it clear it would not support the miners, by advising its members that they could cross NUM picket lines. But the leaders of the more left-wing rail and transport unions, and even the moderate steel union, were prepared on 29 March to agree to a blockade of coal, though Bill Sirs, leader of the ISTC, later warned Scargill: ‘I am not here to see the steel industry crucified on someone else’s altar.’
The reason the unions were so divided was, again, that the NUM had taken a decision not to hold a ballot of all miners. As Geoffrey Goodman points out: ‘The . . . problem with the tactics employed by the NUM was that those unions who most actively wanted to give support to the miners – the NUR, ASLEF [the two rail unions], the National Union of Seamen, TGWU and NUPE [National Union of Public Employees] – invariably found that their own members were at best lukewarm in support of the NUM. The rank-and-file reaction among other unions was that they wanted to see full support for the strike from all NUM members before they committed their support.’15 Instead they saw, by 27 March, a divided union: leaders in the eight areas which had voted in ballots against the strike were telling their members to work normally, while the areas with the biggest support, in Yorkshire, South Wales and Kent, were determined to press their comrades to stop working.
The irony, as shown by a National Opinion Poll published on 31 March, is that Scargill might well have got a majority for a national strike. It revealed that 51 per cent of miners would vote for a strike with 34 per cent opposing the action. But this was never tested because by the end of March events had moved on too far, and neither side could be seen to be backing down. The absence of a ballot was, however, a crucial factor in the battle for public opinion and for support from other trade unions.
Another factor was the NUM’s failure to make a proper play for public opinion. One thing the government and the NCB did have, and the NUM did not, was a clear understanding that public opinion was going to matter dreadfully. Crucial to this would be the industrial correspondents of the major Fleet Street papers and the major broadcasters.
Both sides seemed to have started out thinking that the industrial and labour correspondents were their enemy. Peter Walker told us: ‘The problem if you are a politician involved in an industrial dispute is that you have to deal with the industrial relations correspondents who are close to the unions.’ But NUM press officer Nell Myers wrote immediately after the dispute: ‘The industrial correspondents, along with broadcasting technicians, are basically our enemies’ front-line troops.’16
At one level it is perhaps a professional tribute to the industrial correspondents. But things are more complicated than that. Walker was nearer the truth than Myers. Groups of specialist journalists often take on something of the outward character of the people they report on: religious correspondents are often ardent churchgoers, royal correspondents are frequently tweedy and a tad snobbish, and so on. In the 1980s the industrial correspondents tended unconsciously to ape trade union officials, drinking hard and talking tough. They liked the company of union officials, whom they considered important people, and whose words and actions they always reported, which is why unions were so high-profile.
After the miners’ strike, trade unions declined, as we shall see, quickly and sharply, and the industrial correspondents declined with them. A Fleet Street elite in 1984, within a decade they became an endangered species, and the unions miss them dreadfully, for union affairs are now covered, when they are covered at all, by business reporters, who are much less sympathetic. The decline of the industrial and labour correspondents has both mirrored and helped cause the decline of the unions themselves.
Myers was quite wrong about the industrial correspondents. There was a great deal of sympathy among them for the miners, which Myers could have tapped, if only she had thought it worthwhile. One of them, The Times’s Paul Routledge, quietly gave £5,000 towards the miners’ cause while he was reporting the strike – something his employers would have found most disturbing, if they had known about it.
Routledge had, in fact, offered to leave The Times when Scargill became NUM President, to edit The Miner in place of Bob Houston. At that time – it turned to bitterness later on – Scargill and Routledge were close. Routledge would have been an asset to Scargill, and might also have acted as a bridge between Scargill and the industrial correspondents. But the message he got back was that Scargill did not want someone from Fleet Street. The idea of employing Routledge was well outside Scargill’s comfort zone. Routledge would certainly have taken the view that he knew more about editing magazines than did the national President, which is not a view that would have commended itself to Scargill.
The only paper that is thought to have had some preferential treatment was Newsline, the tiny-circulation publication produced by the WRP. Theirs were the only reporters who sometimes got behind the picket lines. But even Newsline people were not safe. ‘A group of pickets thought I was from the Tory press,’ remembers Peter Arkell, at that time a Newsline photographer. ‘They were very threatening, it was very frightening.’ They demanded he hand over his film and, wisely, he did so.
But he says he gave the names of those who threatened him to the strike committee, and they said they had no record of pickets with those names. ‘So perhaps they were agents provocateurs.’ Perhaps they were. In war, you never know for certain.
If even Arkell was not safe behind the picket lines, you can be certain that the BBC’s Nicholas Jones would not have been. ‘That was the last time any union thought it could win without the media,’ wrote Jones. ‘Never again will a union fighting a strike seek to alienate the journalists assigned to the story. A few years later, when firefighters were on strike, journalists joined them by the brazier behind the picket line, and we were able to see a disciplined union making its case.’17
Ms Myers and her boss were not short of colleagues from other unions to beg her to change her stance towards the industrial correspondents. Since Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979, trade unions had belatedly realized that industrial muscle was not enough: they needed public opinion on their side. They started doing what companies had done for years, adopting professional public relations techniques and hiring media officers. But, since Scargill’s election, the NUM had put this process in reverse.
Under Joe Gormley, The Miner was edited by Bob Houston, a large, noisy but able and experienced Scottish journalist who also helped Gormley with media relations. Houston was particularly close to his fellow hard-drinking Scot Lawrence Daly. When Scargill became President, he and Houston seem
to have taken one look at each other and decided the relationship would not work. Houston was too much of a journalist, and not enough of a Scargillite.
As press officer Scargill appointed Houston’s secretary, Nell Myers, who knew less about journalism than Houston and, according to Nicholas Jones, ‘worshipped the ground Scargill stood on’. Scargill’s conception of the job can be judged from the fact that she combined it with being his personal assistant.
Myers was the daughter of American communists who kept the faith with great courage when communism was illegal in the USA. She had been in the American Communist Party in the early and mid sixties, and joined the CPGB when she came to England. Thin and tense, in those days she wore a permanently fierce expression.
Myers refused to talk to journalists, whom she clearly loathed. She hardly ever returned their telephone calls. She sent out NUM policy papers with no embargo. That might sound like a small technical matter, but any journalist or press officer knew that it meant they would probably get no coverage, because journalists tend to assume that such documents are either out of date or have already been published or broadcast elsewhere.18
Her one guiding principle was utter and uncritical loyalty to Scargill. Seumas Milne of the Guardian, probably the only journalist whom Scargill trusts, told us that if the NUM president was looking for someone to do the job of a traditional trade union press officer, Nell was a bad appointment. Scargill, however, wasn’t looking for that, he was looking for something different. But no one has been able to tell us what it was that Scargill was looking for.
Myers wrote after the strike: ‘We discovered a long time ago than no amount of “access” for industrial correspondents from trade union officials stands a chance against similar briefings between respective employers.’19 So, while Peter Walker thought the industrial correspondents were the enemy and went out of his way to win them over, Myers and Scargill thought they were the enemy and saw no point in doing anything at all to court them.
Yet at the same time Scargill was obsessed by the media and his image in it. Nicholas Jones has provided a remarkable description of his style as the strike began. Scargill, he writes, was responsible for issuing press statements, writing almost all of them himself, and then presided at every news conference. Myers had to get his guidance before dealing with even the simplest query, and other staff were told to direct all queries to Myers, who lived in London and often worked from home, away from the NUM’s Sheffield headquarters. The NUM switchboard operator was instructed to log all calls and say who the caller was asking for, thus ensuring that no one could step out of line and help a journalist.
Jones writes: ‘Mr Scargill enjoyed relying on his own judgement when making statements to the press. His skill as a communicator seemed entirely self-taught, acquired through observation; he was held in awe by his staff, many of whom he had selected or recommended for appointment following the union’s move to Sheffield.’ At press conferences, ‘before the journalists crowded in to hear Mr Scargill, some members of his staff would try to reserve seats for themselves, later looking on with obvious admiration at the way the President handled those reporters who asked difficult questions.’20
Scargill was playing to an audience of appreciative staff, and what went down well with them was not always the most useful thing to say to the press.
None of this stopped him from telling a miners’ rally in the Jubilee Gardens, when the strike was three months’ old: ‘Throughout this dispute, day after day, television, radio and the press have consistently put over the views of the coal board and government even when they have been exposed of being guilty of duplicity and guilty of telling lies . . . This bunch of piranha fish will always go on supporting Mrs Thatcher.’ (Cheers.)
But the way in which Scargill chose to handle the media should not disguise the fact that he had a point. There really was a media campain of lies and distortions waged against him and the miners. When he made that speech, he had just seen a picture in the Sun of himself at a rally, raising his arm in greeting. The picture was grabbed at just the right moment to present it as though it were a Nazi salute, under the headline MINE FUHRER. It was true that the miners’ case never got a fair hearing, and only a part of the brutally unfair coverage they got can be put down to the ineptness of their media relations. Some of the coverage was twisted by snobbery and class hatred. Take this, from one Frank Musgrove in the Sunday Times of 12 August:
There has been a massive haemorrhage of talent from the mining communities . . . which have drained away the most enterprising men . . . It is the diluted human residues that remain, especially in Yorkshire and Durham . . . Five years in the E-stream of a comprehensive school is an excellent training in sheer bloody-mindedness.
The trouble was that Scargill so effectively poisoned his activists’ minds against journalists – all journalists without discrimination – that no journalist was safe on the pickets’ side of the lines. ‘Reporters were simply not welcome in the pit villages,’ writes Nicholas Jones, a reporter whose instincts were with the miners.
To edit The Miner instead of Bob Houston, Scargill brought Maurice Jones from the Yorkshire Miner, and, says Nicholas Jones, ‘the paper was entirely controlled by Scargill. No editorial judgements were made by Maurice Jones.’21 Jones and Myers vied for the President’s ear. Jones disliked his boss’s growing reliance on Myers, resented the fact that she was asked to produce an issue of The Miner while he was away, objected to Scargill making her deputy editor of the paper, and according to Seumas Milne even became convinced she was a CIA plant.22
By the end of March 1984, after just three weeks of industrial action, every important aspect of the strike had emerged. The NCB had taken the public relations initiative, and never lost it. The divisions inside the union – which were eventually to lead to the creation of the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers – were already there, and grew with each passing week. So did the emphasis in the media, particularly on TV, on the violent nature of the picketing and the growing hatred between strikers and working miners, and between pickets and police.
The proactive role of the police, which came to dominate the dispute as thousands of officers were drafted into Nottinghamshire from all over the country, and the paramilitary nature of their actions could be seen in their efforts to stop pickets getting within 100 miles of their destination.
The determination of the government to break the strike, with the help of the security services and the police, was already evident. And the legal battle that would end with the sequestration of the NUM’s accounts was already taking embryonic form, in the alacrity with which the NCB under Ian MacGregor went to the courts to stop the pickets.
The start of the strike may have been an accident, but it did not catch the government unprepared. MacGregor was clear from the start about two things, and they were to prove the only two things that mattered. First, ‘the key to the whole strike was Nottinghamshire and its 31,000 miners. If we could keep this vast and prosperous coalfield going, then I was convinced, however long it took, we could succeed.’ So far the NUM had rather played into his hands, with its refusal to hold a ballot or even to court public opinion. The second was that, if he was to keep Nottinghamshire open, he needed tough policing to counter the picketing. Understated British-style policing was no good to him. He was, he told Thatcher on 14 March, ‘wishing I had a bunch of good untidy American cops out there.’23 American cops get stuck in, especially with striking trade unionists. He told her that, to get Nottinghamshire, he needed aggressive policing. She gave it to him. He used it ruthlessly to deliver victory, and the first and bloodiest battlefield on which he used it was Orgreave in Yorkshire.
CHAPTER 4
THE BATTLE OF ORGREAVE
1 APRIL TO 21 JUNE
The issue of whether to hold a national ballot had lost none of its power to divide the miners and their natural supporters in other unions. While Scargill was sure flying pickets would bring miners out – and was soon to pu
t this to its ultimate test in the pitched battles between miners and police that became known as the Battle of Orgreave – Labour leader Neil Kinnock contacted him and begged him to change his mind and agree to a ballot. The two spoke on the telephone on 9 April, and Kinnock had a transcript made of the conversation because he did not trust the miners’ leader.
Kinnock came from a mining family and a mining community. An emotional man with a strong sense of family and community, he was distressed to see internecine warfare among the miners – and of course the absence of a ballot was a dreadful political millstone round his neck as well.
Scargill said the Tories were panicking, but Kinnock did not see it like that: ‘Well, what I think they want most – and this is how cynical they are – what they want most here is no ballot, and they think there is enormous political profit for them if they can use the taunt of no ballot. And they are not going into the nuances or the rectitude of the NUM constitution, that’s my feeling. I don’t think it’s the product of any nervousness they’ve got, I think it’s much more to do with political profit they think they can secure.’
Kinnock added: ‘We want the national ballot. . . Now I’ve said to everyone that only you can take that decision – the NEC of the NUM, that is – and I’ve resisted all the taunts, all the pressure about national ballot this, national ballot that.’
He said his South Wales miners were worried: ‘They are guys now who have been absolutely to the forefront but they are now extremely – well, not querulous, that’s not fair to them – but they are bewildered and they are wondering what kind of strategy they can depend on and how long they can last out.’ He said he feared Scargill was splitting the union.1
Failing to achieve anything with Scargill, Kinnock went public the next day, calling for a ballot in careful words designed to ensure that he could not be accused of attacking the miners. He said he feared a division in the NUM ‘which could be cataclysmic’.
