by David Hencke
‘We are now negotiating,’ Scargill told Clements. The Board had even told him ‘that they would not talk with non-accredited miners’ representatives’, meaning the leaders of breakaway groups in Nottinghamshire. Scargill saw this as a clear statement that the Board was not going to exploit the union’s divisions in Nottinghamshire, and that it would provide no aid or comfort to people who formed breakaway organizations from the NUM.
Clements realized this must be rubbish. Of course the board was going to exploit the divisions in Nottinghamshire. MacGregor and Thatcher had fomented that division precisely so that they could exploit it. Clements put the best light he could on it, writing to Kinnock: ‘Scargill’s enthusiasm for the Board’s statement on this subject does indicate that he realizes the weakest link in his negotiating position.’20
Whether Scargill was trying to fool Kinnock or succeeding in fooling himself, we will probably never know. Either way, within a week the optimism was gone. On 7 June, a week after his talk with Clements, he and McGahey addressed a meeting of the national and regional officials of the TGWU. Scargill, says someone who was there, ‘treated us to one of his rants and said: “I’m not asking you for support, I’m demanding it.”’ McGahey, more emollient throughout, asked for money: ‘Money isn’t everything, but when you haven’t got any it’s useful.’
By then Scargill and MacGregor seem to have jettisoned jaw-jaw for war-war, and the next decision taken by the generals was a crucial one. There was to be a pitched battle.
MacGregor and Scargill both wanted the pitched battle, but it was MacGregor who chose the battlefield. MacGregor wanted it a long way away from Nottinghamshire, where the real action was taking place. For him the main aim was to get Scargill’s forces out of that county. He chose the Orgreave coke works, just south of Sheffield.
The Battle of Orgreave, as it would be known, has become a heroic defeat in miners’ mythology. But to MacGregor it was nothing but a vast, and successful, diversionary tactic. MacGregor cared little what happened at Orgreave. But if he could have miners tied up with battling the police in irrelevant Orgreave, they would not be travelling south to picket in vital Nottinghamshire. Afterwards he gloated: ‘All you had to do was make it known that you were going to get men back at a particular pit and all the pickets from that area would disappear from Nottingham or the other areas to cope with it.’ Orgreave was, ‘of all these efforts to divert Arthur Scargill’s firepower, the most spectacular and the most successful . . . We were quite encouraged that [Scargill] thought it so important and did everything we could to help him continue to think so, but the truth was it mattered hardly a jot to us – beyond the fact that it kept him away from Nottingham.’21
There was another reason to redirect the battle to Orgreave. Its terrain favoured the police. It was not like Saltley, scene of Scargill’s mythic victory, a city site, hemmed in by streets. Orgreave is in open country. No intelligent general on the miners’ side would have chosen Orgreave for his battlefield.
At the start of the strike, pickets were not troubling much about Orgreave. Even after train drivers refused to take Orgreave’s coke to the British Steel Corporation’s works in Scunthorpe, forty miles away, at the start of May, and it had to go by lorry, there was just a small six-strong picket at Orgreave, and they did not prevent the British Steel employees who worked there from going into work. They talked peacefully to the lorry drivers, and at first even used the cokemen’s canteen and lavatories, until these were locked and private security men hired to deny them access.22
The police drew more pickets to Orgreave by more or less putting a cordon round Nottinghamshire to prevent pickets’ coaches getting into the county, and leaving the routes from the Nottinghamshire borders to Orgreave relatively clear. A Yorkshire striking miner who was arrested at Orgreave provides an unconscious hint of what was going on. Although he did not realize how little Orgreave mattered, he did see that Nottinghamshire mattered more, and that was where he really wanted to be that day. But it was getting harder and harder to get into the county, past the police roadblocks. ‘We had to go further and further south on side roads before turning back up towards the Nottinghamshire coalfields, approaching them from the south, a direction from which we were not expected to come.’ At last it became impossible to get to Nottinghamshire. ‘We set off as normal for Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire, with Orgreave as the fallback point if we weren’t able to get through. Roadblocks were everywhere and by 7.30 a.m. we were at Orgreave having failed to get into Nottinghamshire.’23 Orgreave became the fallback destination for pickets who could not get into Nottinghamshire.
Kevan Hunt, the NCB’s deputy director of industrial relations, telephoned Scargill and said: ‘Arthur, we need more tonnage out of Orgreave.’ Would Scargill help him relieve this pressure point by allowing more coke from the plant?24 Scargill at once called for a huge blockade to stop coke being sent by lorry. Both sides prepared for a pitched battle.
The three-week-long battle began early on 29 May. Pickets in Yorkshire were told to be there at 7.45 a.m., and well over 1,000 of them arrived, to find themselves facing mounted police and Alsatians. Thirty-five lorries, protected by wire mesh, arrived at Orgreave to load up and were met by a barrage of bottles, stones and broken fencing. Mounted police, supported by officers wearing riot gear and carrying shields, moved in; there were eighty-two arrests and 132 people were injured. A succession of baton charges were made against the pickets. Police on horseback laid about them with truncheons, and dogs were turned on the pickets.
The Home Office estimated that 6,000 pickets turned up facing 2,500 police. The coke lorries got through. Not that MacGregor cared much, but Scargill did. ‘We did it at Grunwick and we can do it here,’ he said afterwards, and called on his members and ‘the whole trade union movement’ to ‘come here in their thousands in order that we can make aware to everybody that we’re not prepared to see this kind of brutality inflicted against working men and women . . . What you have now in South Yorkshire is an actual police state tantamount to something you are used to seeing in Chile or Bolivia.’
Scargill promised to be back the next day, and the next. He called up every picket he could muster to this front line. Nonetheless, numbers declined, and most days after that pickets were outnumbered by police. Home Office figures confirm that the men were losing heart, with 3,000 pickets showing up on 30 May, and only 2,000 the following day. They came, they fought, they inflicted injuries and they were themselves injured. On 30 May Scargill himself was arrested at Orgreave and charged with obstruction as he led a column of pickets towards the plant.
Three days later The Miner offered its first full analysis of Orgreave, as always at once furiously angry and relentlessly upbeat. The splash headline was: BRITAIN’S MINERS ARE ON THE ROAD TO A CRUSHING VICTORY. Much of the front page was taken up with a picture of police horses over the caption: ‘Mounted madmen deliberately trying to trample miners at British Steel’s Orgreave plant. Coke is being shifted to Scunthorpe in defiance of an agreement with the Yorkshire NUM. A little known fact is that Ian MacGregor still remains on the board of British Steel.’
A double-page spread of shocking Orgreave pictures, many of them taken by pickets, was accompanied by a plea for more such pictures:
‘The police are greatly concerned at the gathering photographic evidence of their brutality and have developed a new tactic. They yell “camera” to alert their colleagues engaged in violence. It is of the utmost importance that as many cameras as possible are taken on picket lines and arrangements made to get the film away safely.’ This was not at all easy, because police had taken to seizing cameras and exposing the film.25
By these means, a couple of weeks later on 15 June, The Miner was able to show that troops were being used on the picket line. It printed a picture, taken by Yorkshire miner Tony Lowe, of a police van being driven by a man in soldier’s uniform, with Lowe’s dramatic story: ‘The Sergeant yelled at police nearby, “Nick that bastard
. . . get the camera” . . . Tony, knowing that the film would be lost if he were caught, dodged between two vans as the police gave chase. It gained him a few precious seconds to wind the film on. He carried on running, got among a group of other miners and threw the film to one, shouting to him to guard it with his life. With the police breathing down his neck he told the other miners to surround him as he feverishly put another film in his camera. A fight between one of the miners and a chasing policeman gave Tony a few more seconds before the police got to him. In full view of the public and at least four NUM witnesses, the police demanded the camera, opened the back and exposed the film to the light. Only now they will be aware they got the wrong film.’26
Being a peaceable picket did you no good. ‘A big lad came along and told us to stop bricking [throwing bricks],’ said one picket. ‘He stood in front of the cops so that if we chucked any more bricks we’d hit him. Suddenly the wall of riot shields opened up and he was dragged in. We could see him on the ground with boots and truncheons going into him.’27
None of this hit the newspapers at the time – partly from bias, but partly because Scargill’s explicit policy was to treat all journalists as enemies, and he had made sure they were not safe among the pickets. For self-protection, journalists congregated behind the police lines.
But it was generally true that newspapers covered violence against the police relentlessly, and ignored the many well-attested instances of police violence. Hence, as a Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF) booklet reported during the strike, only one of Britain’s seventeen national newspapers printed the photograph of a young woman being attacked with a truncheon by a mounted policeman at Orgreave.
The CPBF booklet also described how a Derbyshire miner’s car was set on fire and the word ‘Revenge’ spray-painted on his house. Quickly Fleet Street’s finest rushed to the scene, thinking that Peter Neilan was a working miner being targeted by strikers. But he was a striking miner, and one of those arrested was a working miner. Never has a press pack dissolved so quickly. ‘Everyone seemed terribly disappointed,’said Mr Neilan.28
At Orgreave the BBC, whether deliberately or not, gave the entirely false impression that police did no more than respond to violence from the miners. On 18 June, the Nine O’Clock News screened film showing mounted police charging a large group of striking miners, and a group of miners throwing stones at police. But according to left-wing journalist Simon Pirani, ‘by reversing the order, and showing the stone-throwing first, the editors of the programme gave the impression that the police charge had been provoked by violence from the mineworkers’ side. This was the reverse of the truth.’ The BBC claimed it was ‘a mistake made in the haste of putting the news together’. Nicholas Jones, the BBC’s then industrial correspondent, who has shown he is willing to challenge his old employers if he thinks they are wrong, insists: ‘There was no BBC conspiracy to show the mineworkers in the worst possible light. If . . . shots of baton-wielding police and picket line strikers were in the wrong order, I am convinced it was an entirely innocent mistake.’29
The government set the stage for the final Battle of Orgreave. A secret letter (one of six numbered copies) sent to Andrew Turnbull, Thatcher’s private secretary, on 5 June showed a strategy had been agreed between Leon Brittan, Norman Tebbit and Peter Walker with Ian MacGregor and Bob Haslam, the Chairman of British Steel.30
A memo from Michael Reidy, private secretary to Peter Walker, said that the combined efforts of the police and the British Steel workforce in keeping Orgreave open ‘represented a considerable triumph in the face of mass picketing and intimidation’. Nonetheless, stocks were declining, and that fact would have to be treated with care and discretion, to stop the NUM claiming it as a victory. How could this best be done? With a slow rundown at 2,000 tonnes a week, or by transferring the rest of the 17,000 tonnes to Scunthorpe steelworks as fast as possible?
A slow rundown was ruled out because ‘this would expose the Orgreave workforce to prolonged picketing and intimidation.’Anyway, the coke was needed now. Supplies of the right blend to fire Scunthorpe steelworks would run out significantly on 18 June and production was unlikely to be restarted, so imports would have to fill the gap after that. That meant a rapid transfer. Reidy said that British Steel must immediately write to the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire to tell him of plans to empty the Orgreave site. The scene was set for the full-scale Battle of Orgreave.
The chosen day was 18 June, the day when the miners finally and decisively lost the Battle of Orgreave. More than 4,000 police, with twenty-four dog handlers and forty-two mounted police, battled for ten hours with a similar number of pickets. The police knew that the NUM was going to pull out all the stops that day, bringing thousands of miners from as far away as Scotland, Kent and South Wales. By 9 a.m. the streets of Sheffield were blocked by an estimated 10,000 men walking to Orgreave.
There were ninety-three arrests and hundreds of people (there is no agreed figure) were injured, including Scargill himself. Quite how it happened, no one knows. One miner who was near said he saw some policemen giving the miners’ President ‘a good leathering’ and Scargill claimed he was knocked down by a policeman. Police chiefs, unsurprisingly, saw a completely different incident in which Scargill tripped and banged his head on a railway sleeper. Scargill was badly concussed, had injuries on his arms and body and spent a night in hospital, but was back in action the next day.
Around him, there were dreadful scenes. Picket Bernard Jackson remembers how it started. After the usual push against the police lines, which had happened every day as the lorries left, ‘the long riot shields parted and out rode fourteen mounted police straight into the pickets. As they did, police in the line beat on their riot shields with truncheons, creating a wall of noise which was meant to intimidate and frighten. It was more than simply a noise, it was a declaration that we were facing an army which had declared war on us.’
More and more cavalry charges followed. ‘It made no difference if pickets stood still, raised their hands or ran away; truncheons were used on arms and legs, trunks and shoulders, and particularly on heads and faces. Men lay around unconscious or semi-conscious with vicious wounds on their bodies, more often than not with bloody gashes on the backs of their heads . . . When you’ve got half a ton of horse being ridden at you, you don’t hang about.’
Police claimed that half-bricks, spikes, ball bearings and pieces of wood with spikes driven through them were used as missiles.
Jackson’s account of his arrest, which to most people who were there sounds not only credible but normal, is that he saw police in riot gear running towards him as he was standing by a wall and not even attempting to speak to the lorry drivers. He says that an arm grabbed him round the neck from behind and he was smashed in the face with a riot shield. The policeman then put both arms round Jackson’s neck, took his truncheon in both hands, and squeezed.
‘Get bloody off, what’s wrong with thee?’ shouted Jackson, and the reply came from somewhere close to his ear: ‘Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll break your fucking neck.’ The policeman dragged the miner through the field, every so often giving the truncheon round his neck a pull and shouting abuse into his ear. As they passed through the cordon, other policeman lashed out at him with their truncheons, and he heard shouts of ‘Bastard miner’ and ‘Fucking Yorkie miner’.
Jackson spent a week in the grim Armley prison in Leeds and was charged with rioting. A year later he was acquitted of the charge. His verdict was this: ‘We weren’t victims of an industrial dispute, we were prisoners of war.’31
Reporter Malcolm Pithers described in the Guardian what he saw:
The frustration on both sides spilled over into sickening scenes of miners being batoned and of police being attacked with bricks, slivers of glass as well as the containers of fuel. Although the police lines eventually held, officers did react violently. Truncheons were drawn and used on individuals by snatch squads.
The day produ
ced unreal, pitiful scenes. Cars were rolled downhill towards policemen and ignited to make a flaming barricade.
At one point I heard a policeman yell at a photographer to take photographs of a hero. He was pointing to a mounted police officer whose arm was bleeding badly. An ambulanceman was holding the wound to stem the flow of blood. It was equally sickening to hear policemen clapping and cheering as a picket, bleeding heavily from a head wound, was helped into an ambulance . . .
The barrage of rocks, bricks, and glass was kept up for hours. For most of this time policemen stood with riot shields to fend off the missiles. Charges were also made against the pickets with policemen lashing out with truncheons.32
Tony Clement, South Yorkshire’s Assistant Chief Constable, put the trouble down to Scargill personally. He told reporters that the pickets only became violent when their President was there.33 Clement may or may not have been right, but it is clearly true that the police lost control of themselves and behaved with violence of a sort which we like to think only happens in countries without Britain’s liberal democratic traditions. MacGregor’s wish for ‘a bunch of good untidy American cops’ seemed to have been fulfilled.
Ken Capstick, then an NUM branch delegate and now the editor of The Miner, remembers: ‘It is frightening, a horse bearing down on you with a policeman on top and six to ten of them coming at you. You run. I remember running up that hill like mad. We got to the top of the field and turned but they were still coming so we went on into the village. We were charged into the supermarket but the horses couldn’t get in or they would have. Remember police went into people’s houses when they opened their doors to give shelter to the miners.’
