Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  Willis had had enough of Scargill. He was feeling not personal pique but the impatience that a professional union negotiator feels for a man he considers a shallow populist. The professional knows that in some circumstances he has two choices: to do the business for his members, or to obtain their applause with an easy speech. What Willis thought in his heart was that the miners’ President had chosen the latter.

  Neil Kinnock issued a statement in support of Willis. ‘Norman Willis gave strong, truthful advice last night. When he restated the TUC’s support for the miners and the mining communities, and when he condemned picket-line violence, he spoke for millions of trade unionists.’

  The night Willis went to Aberavon, print union leader Bill Keys spoke at a miners’ meeting in Birmingham with Stan Orme. Later that night, Keys and Orme dined together in Birmingham and discussed Orme’s revised plan for a settlement. Both of them thought it might just be good enough. Keys reported the discussion to Willis, and Orme to Kinnock.

  Orme understood that Keys was now the key player on the TUC side. One of the consequences of Willis replacing Murray was that Keys, without anyone actually saying so, moved from being simply the unofficial liaison between the left wing of the General Council and the miners’ leaders to having a vital secret role to play on behalf of the TUC itself. He was co-opted onto the special committee of General Council members dealing with the miners’ strike. Keys was a very sensible choice, because as a left-winger he had a better chance than anyone else of keeping the miners’ confidence, while as a negotiator he was knowledgeable, well-connected, pragmatic and adroit. ‘It seems that the miners are dividing the General Council into Goodies and Baddies,’ he wrote in his diary. But, supreme realist that he was, Keys was quite happy to use his status as one of the Goodies, as long as it lasted, to try to get a settlement. He thought the drift back to work was now unstoppable, and something had to be done to avert utter defeat. ‘It’s the beginning of the end,’ he wrote, and ‘unless a third party can make a breakthrough all will be lost, whether it be next month or next year.’ When the TUC’s special committee on the dispute met Mick McGahey and Peter Heathfield on 27 November, ‘we went around in circles,’ according to Keys.

  By the start of December, Keys’ last-ditch peace initiative was starting to take shape. Willis asked Keys to come to Congress House to see him. ‘He [Willis] is very much down in the dumps,’ wrote Keys in his diary that evening. ‘Norman tells me that he has spoken with Arthur, Peter, Mick, who all have different attitudes, but that Arthur while appearing worried gives the appearance of wishing to fight to the last miner...’

  John Monks has told us what Willis was thinking at the time. ‘Norman just wanted it settled. Trade unionism was more likely to lose than gain. Extrication was the name of the game. And that suited Norman’s personality.’ As for Keys, ‘he took the left line but he was always trying to find solutions, he was on the phone all the time.’ If those two couldn’t find a way out, no one could. But Keys was starting to despair. He thought the miners had been out for far too long, and the cracks were showing. And he thought that no one except Arthur Scargill any longer believed that the miners could win on their own.

  Keys would remain actively and energetically involved right up to the end, desperately trying to get a settlement, despite his own failing health. The day after he saw Willis, he saw his doctor, who told him to retire, quickly. Willis, who did not know of Keys’ health troubles, asked him to cancel a planned visit to Russia later in the month, so as to be available to help with the crisis, and Keys duly cancelled it.1

  As winter approached, the strike was visibly collapsing, as the on-off peace talks drained the morale from the striking miners and their hardship became every day a little worse. The NCB moved fast to exploit this, decreeing that men who went back to work could earn a considerable amount in back pay and a special Christmas bonus – a matter of no small importance to men already deeply in debt and foreseeing a bleak Christmas for their children. Nottinghamshire was at work, and men were even returning to work in South Wales and Yorkshire. On 8 November the first man had gone back at Cortonwood, the mine where it all started, and over the next few weeks he was followed by more. Scargill routinely denied that it was happening, but it was.

  The electricians voted by a large majority not to take action to support the miners. ‘This must be worth a peerage to [union leader Eric] Hammond,’ Bill Keys commented sourly in his diary. Another miners’ delegate conference on 5 November had voted to continue with the strike and made a series of demands of the TUC, and two days later Scargill, McGahey and Heathfield were in Congress House at a meeting of the TUC’s Finance and General Purposes Committee, where Scargill agreed there had been a ‘slight’ drift back to work.

  On 20 November, the TUC’s two most important left-wing union leaders, Bill Keys and the train drivers’ leader Ray Buckton, with a few other left-wing general secretaries, met Scargill, McGahey and Heathfield in London. They told the miners’ leaders that the dispute was running into the sands and the miners should ask for TUC help to sort it out. Scargill said the TUC should stay out.

  After another formal TUC General Council meeting a week later, Keys and other General Council left-wingers went for a quiet drink with Mick McGahey. McGahey was careful, but Keys noted: ‘My own opinion from the talk was that Mick is far from satisfied with the way the dispute is being handled, but does not feel himself in a strong enough position to challenge Arthur.’2

  McGahey of course continued to make the correct public noises. Just a fortnight before, he had told a rally of Scottish miners in Usher Hall, Edinburgh: ‘No one, but no one is going to settle this dispute except the National Union of Mineworkers. If the TUC want to do anything, then they can activate the decision of the Brighton Congress fully. No scab coal. No crossing picket lines. No use of oil. Stop industry.’3 But that, as we shall see, is not what he was really thinking.

  It was an acutely difficult position for Keys. He was reporting to the special committee of General Council members, on which more right-wing union leaders like David Basnett wanted to take control of the dispute away from the miners. At the same time he was trying to keep the confidence of the miners’ National Executive and their President, who were constantly expecting a 1926-style sellout. The folk memory of 1926 was the main thing that enabled Scargill to keep hostility to the TUC at fever pitch. And while doing all that, Keys had to make the most discreet enquiries possible to find out who in government he might talk to secretly.

  Meanwhile the official TUC machine ground on. On 5 December the miners’ liaison group of general secretaries, the ‘TUC seven’, met Energy Secretary Peter Walker. MacGregor was furious about the meeting, to which he was not invited. He thought it would delay the setting up of a rival union in Nottinghamshire, which by then the NCB was actively working to create. His Nottinghamshire friends would ask‘what was the point of sticking their necks out if there was about to be a sellout to Scargill.’4 Walker, of course, always thought it was MacGregor who could not be trusted not to ‘sell out’ to Scargill.

  Walker, according to Keys’ diary, told the TUC seven that it was Scargill who had chosen to go to war, a war he could not win. Coal stocks were high even though the winter was well under way. Miners were drifting back to work. All the same, Walker said he was prepared to move, so long as nothing was agreed that could be presented as a victory for Scargill. ‘He stated that he was prepared to move,’ continued Keys. But ‘they were not prepared for Scargill to claim victory.’ It was the old, old problem. Two days later the TUC group spent no less than seven hours with Scargill, McGahey and Heathfield. ‘I could not but get tired of Arthur continuing to lecture us, fighting 1926 all over again,’ wrote Keys. ‘Does he not wish to grasp what is at risk?’ Nothing was achieved.

  ‘Mick [McGahey] obviously wanted to talk privately,’ Keys wrote, ‘but was not afforded the opportunity. Shall have to pick up on this. Had dinner with Norman afterwards. He praised me, but I am no
t at all certain we are going to find an answer this way.’ A few days later two key players in the South Wales miners – Keys never revealed who they were – approached him quietly and urged him to see if he could find a way out with dignity. They were appalled at their President’s actions, they told him.

  There had to be another way, and Keys, who had spent a lifetime doing deals, was the best person the unions possessed to find it. Stealthily, he started making enquiries of his extensive and unlikely contacts in the Thatcher circle. It was David Young who told him that his best bet was Willie Whitelaw, which was fortunate because Keys had known Whitelaw for years and they trusted each other. All three - Keys, Whitelaw and Young – were on the Manpower Services Commission, where they worked closely together.

  Nervously – he would have been bitterly condemned throughout the trade union movement if his mission had been known, and would have lost any influence he might have - Keys made his way to the House of Lords for a meeting in a private room with Whitelaw. He told no one but Willis, and Whitelaw told only Thatcher.

  The meeting got off to a good start: Whitelaw had ready a silver container filled with what he knew was Bill Keys’ favourite wine, a Chablis. That first meeting was very general. Whitelaw said the strike had caused economic problems for the government, and that there was scope for a deal, but it could not be one which allowed Scargill to claim victory. ‘You mean, victory for Scargill – not the miners?’ asked Keys, and Whitelaw agreed.

  Keys wanted to know whether the Prime Minister knew about the meeting. She did, said Whitelaw. ‘Margaret said, find a way out of this.’ Whitelaw added that they were happy to talk secretly to Keys because he had the confidence of those on the right and the left.

  Keys left feeling encouraged. His main worry was how long this window of opportunity would remain open, given the speed with which miners were now going back to work. Very soon the government would have no motive to give him anything at all, not even enough to save the NUM’s face.

  Naturally, at the special committee’s next meeting with Walker the following day, Walker took a much harder line. But Keys knew better than anyone that what is said in formal negotiations often matters less than what is said in private, unminuted, non-attributable meetings – especially when he was having secret talks with someone who he knew had the Prime Minister’s ear. And when Mick McGahey took an opportunity, after a meeting of the ‘friendly’ union leaders – Keys, Buckton, the rest of the left whom the miners considered their friends – to whisper that he would like a quiet word with Keys some time, Keys thought he saw a ray of hope.

  He promised to get in touch, and telephoned McGahey at home on 2 January.5 As we shall see in the next chapter, McGahey did indeed share his fears, and the Keys initiative became the only chance of a settlement with dignity that might have avoided the destruction of the miners’ union.

  Meanwhile Neil Kinnock was having his own tribulations with the NUM President. He had been asked to go to the Aberavon meeting where a noose was lowered over Willis’s head, and had declined. Or, rather, he had received, via the Labour Party General Secretary, what amounted to a summons from Scargill to attend five miners’ rallies in the first half of November, culminating with the one in Aberavon. He had replied to Scargill that he was already fully committed on those dates. So instead, he said, the Labour Party itself would arrange a rally at which Kinnock would speak, and at which Scargill would also be invited to speak - but as the Labour Party’s guest, rather than the other way round.

  Kinnock told us: ‘I could not afford to be seen at Scargill’s beck and call. If he rationally wanted the official moral support of the Labour Party he would have said, “Let us plan a few meetings together”... I had nothing against putting the case for coal but I couldn’t afford to appear on his platform and the only way to do it was for him to appear on our platform. The one thing I regret is not being in South Wales with Norman Willis. If I’d known what was to happen I’d have been there.’

  The meeting was arranged for 30 November in Stoke on Trent, and Scargill wrote pointedly to Kinnock: ‘I have rearranged my diary in order to attend.’6

  The anger Kinnock felt at Scargill did not extend to striking miners, with whom he felt a close and painful affinity. Kinnock not only came from a South Wales mining family and represented a mining constituency, but from the start of the dispute he and his wife Glenys had sent regular cheques to support Welsh miners’ families. At first they went to the Welsh NUM headquarters, but quickly the Kinnocks realized that money that went to the NUM was not safe from sequestrators, and they cut out the middleman: they sent much of their money to Dot Phillips of the Newbridge Women’s Support Group in Kinnock’s constituency, and they stayed in touch with her. They also sent money to another support group, and to a few people they knew personally who were in difficulties.

  They made all the recipients promise to keep it secret, and it has never been made public until now. ‘I don’t want publicity by the way,’ Kinnock wrote to Dot Phillips. ‘In our family you always help out anyone on strike as a matter of course without the chest beating that some of the middle classes are given to!!! Keep smiling, Neil.’7 Great affection grew up on both sides. Kinnock calls Dot Phillips ‘a tiny woman with an angel’s face and sparkling eyes, but put her on a platform anywhere in the country and ask her to tell the case on behalf of the mining community and she’ll melt everybody. Without affectation, she’d just say it like it was.’ She wrote to him:

  We thought it was great of Glenys, Maureen [Willis, wife of Norman] and yourself to come along to the children’s party. We would also like to thank Glenys and Maureen for their donations, I know you said you don’t want thanks but it was very much appreciated. The promise of further support from you was also a wonderful boost for us ... Today we fed over 100 men. They had corn beef pie, peas and potatoes or sausage peas and chips. After so many weeks people are finding things very hard and so the numbers will grow. There is no talk of going back though: morale is still very high. Neil I hope it is not taking a liberty to say that I feel I have known both you and Glenys a very long time and that you are valued friends.8

  This sort of help was desperately needed. The Social Security Act 1980, one of the Thatcher government’s first acts, had removed the right to welfare benefits from strikers. Benefits were therefore only available for‘dependants’: wives (not cohabitees) and children. Single people and people with no children had no entitlement to money. To make it worse, the regulations assumed that strikers were getting some strike pay from their union, and money was accordingly deducted from the amount given to wives and children, even though the NUM was in no position to pay strike pay. The combined effect was to cause actual destitution in miners’ families. Many people believed that the legislation was part of the Thatcher government’s preparations for the strike – a way of ensuring that when the strike came, the miners could be starved back to work.

  Women’s groups like the one run by Dot Phillips distributed some of the food given by well-wishers from the UK and overseas and organized for the men to be fed. Many families could not have lasted without them. People were losing their homes. As winter approached they were to be seen collecting coal from slag heaps and digging potatoes from farmers’ fields.

  These women’s groups received no funds from the NUM. Instead, the NUM made money available to the branches to support picketing and ease hardship. The Yorkshire area provided each women’s group with £120 as a start-up grant, but nothing else. Often, the first action of a local women’s group coming together was to hold a jumble sale.

  As well as distributing food, they helped to protect miners and their families from the police. In Doncaster women threatened to picket the home of any miner threatened with disconnection, and made the gas and electricity boards back down. Pontefract women persuaded the local council to increase the school uniform grant for miners’ children.9 Jean Stead reports women pickets seeing a man on the ground vomiting as he was beaten by police and dragg
ed across the road. They ran across and managed to stop the beating. Then they covered the man up and sent for an ambulance.10

  Sometimes soup kitchens also became centres for strike organization, because they were the first places that men came to when returning from picket duty. ‘With less than half the active pickets attending union meetings, the kitchen became an important place for the pickets to meet and discuss. As one striker said: “Coming here you learn more about the strike than you do at most union meetings. This is the place we get most of our information about what’s going on.”’11

  There were occasional boundary disputes between soup kitchens. A kitchen run to feed North Gawber families was being used by a majority of Woolley branch miners. When the women asked for funds from Woolley, they were told to turn the Woolley men away.12

  Women were sometimes in evidence on the picket line – Anne Scargill’s stories in an earlier chapter are not untypical - but less so than might have been expected, for a very basic reason. When men picketed they got paid – a tiny amount, but important to men near the breadline. Women did not, and this was a real disincentive when money was so short.

  Neil Kinnock’s secret activities did not stop at providing money for miners’ families. If Arthur Scargill could have seen the correspondence Kinnock had in October 1984 with his old friend Philip Weekes, the NCB’s South Wales area director, all his suspicions of the Labour leader’s treachery would have been confirmed. Weekes wrote about the need to continue to supply coal to the Llanwern steelworks, marking his letter ‘Strictly personal’. He described the rather cosy relationship he had, and continued to have during the strike, with the South Wales NUM leaders: Emlyn Williams, President, known locally as Swannie, or Em Swan, because his father kept a pub called The Swan; George Rees, General Secretary, a former Communist whom Kinnock describes as ‘sensible and respected’; and Terry Thomas, Vice-President. The relationship was maintained over discreet lunches described by Weekes as ‘rather boozy’.