State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In the ‘flying pickets’ that he had helped to pioneer during the Yorkshire miners’ unofficial strike in 1969, he had the ideal tactical weapon. Instead of staying outside their own pits, miners had been sent off around the country in cars, minibuses and coaches: ‘a rapid mobile picket’, in Scargill’s words, ‘all directed onto pre-determined targets, with five, six, seven hundred miners at a time’. In 1969, the flying pickets had worked well; and now, dispatched to docks, coke depots and power stations, they would prove an unstoppable weapon.46

  Even though the miners had used unofficial flying pickets in 1970, the government seemed completely unprepared for their reappearance two years later. But Scargill was in his element. As the driving force in the Barnsley Area Strike Committee, he sent flying pickets to ports and power stations across the east of England, to Bedford, Ipswich and Great Yarmouth. In Yorkshire, by his own account, he ran an elaborate, almost military enterprise from a dedicated Operations Room, with a map showing the area’s six ports, nineteen power stations, seventy coalmines and four steelworks, a logbook keeping track of his men from hour to hour, and four coach companies on permanent standby, with minibuses ready to ferry his men up to the gates. Other miners insisted that this was typical Scargill exaggeration, and that the pickets were a lot less organized than he claimed. But what ultimately mattered was the result, and of that there was no doubt. Slowly but surely, the pickets began to choke the life out of Britain’s power network. Within two weeks, an estimated 40,000 miners were picketing 500 establishments for twenty- four hours a day, cutting off the supplies not just of coal, but of the oil and hydrogen essential to the operation of power stations, even the food for their workers’ canteens. On the murky waters of the Thames, miners borrowed a power launch to picket Battersea Power Station, turning back coal and oil supplies that came by water. And where there were no pickets, sympathetic workers in other industries – who were under orders not to cross the picket line – managed to provide them. The Times told the story of a goods-train driver carrying oil supplies who refused to leave his yard because there were pickets on the line. His managers could see no pickets, so the driver rang the railwaymen’s union and asked for help. They passed the message to the NUM, and within a short time two flying pickets had appeared on a railway bridge, unfurling a blanket with the painted slogan ‘OFFICIAL NUM PICKET’. Relieved, the driver stayed exactly where he was.47

  By the end of January, Heath was facing a more serious challenge than he could possibly have imagined. It was not just a question of the dramatic resistance of thousands of flying pickets, or even of the increasingly violent tone of some confrontations. At the Coal Board’s regional headquarters in Doncaster, female clerical staff were kicked, punched and spat upon as they crossed the picket line to work; at Keadby Power Station, a lorry accidentally ran over and killed a tipsy miner. The real problem was the pickets’ growing pressure on the power stations, to which the government seemed to have no answer. To be fair to Heath, both he and his Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, were absorbed by the terrible slaughter in Northern Ireland, which reached a new low in January 1972 with Bloody Sunday and its aftermath. What that meant, however, was that even as the NUM’s pickets choked off supplies to the power stations, there were still no restrictions on the use of coal and electricity. And with the Central Electricity Generating Board reporting that it was ‘in a state of siege’ thanks to the ‘unrelenting blockade’, the news suddenly got much worse for the government. As the last weekend of January approached, weather forecasters announced that a cold snap was coming. General Winter had come to the NUM’s aid. On Sunday, the CEGB cut voltage across the entire national grid and shut down three power stations completely. ‘There are warnings of power cuts because of these filthy mining strikes,’ Kenneth Williams noted gloomily a day later. ‘Oh! what a scourge and a blight is the English working man! What a dishonest, lazy bastard! Only exceeded by the Welsh and the Scots.’48

  It was at this moment that the focus moved to an obscure suburb on the eastern side of Birmingham, a decaying industrial area of red-brick terraced streets, dilapidated pubs, dirty canals and cracked factory windows. It was here, in Saltley, that the West Midlands Gas Board maintained its coke depot, a gigantic black mountain from which dust blew into nearby homes and gardens on windy days. Usually, 400 lorries a day called at the depot, but, thanks to the strike, demand had escalated hugely. After such a mild winter, the mountain had risen to an estimated 100,000 tons of coke, and by the end of January Saltley was receiving as many as 700 lorries a day, ferrying coke everywhere from Wales and Cornwall to Lancashire and Yorkshire. There were so many trucks that Birmingham’s commuter traffic began to feel the strain, and on 3 February the Birmingham Evening Mail ran a story on the mile-long lines of articulated lorries, headlined ‘The Long, Long Queue to Load with Coke’. By five that evening, the Staffordshire NUM had organized pickets outside the depot, but they proved notably ineffective: the next day only one in 100 drivers acknowledged their entreaties to turn back, and almost 600 lorries left the depot laden with coke. On the next day, Saturday, 5 February, a further 200 Staffordshire pickets arrived at Saltley, as well as fifty policemen, and there were reports of isolated scuffles between the two groups. But still the stream of lorries continued, virtually unhindered by the pickets. ‘If the lorries wish to go in,’ a police spokesman said, ‘we have given instructions that the entrance must be cleared.’ The Staffordshire NUM chief, however, had other ideas. ‘If necessary,’ he told the Evening Mail, ‘I will bring down 300 pickets from Yorkshire to stop this exploitation at the miners’ expense.’49

  It was, of course, Arthur Scargill who answered the call. By Saturday evening, he had already agreed to send 400 Barnsley pickets in coaches to Saltley, while he drove down in his car a few hours later, arriving at three in the morning. As luck would have it, Scargill had a useful friend in the area – Frank Watters, who had recently moved from Yorkshire to Birmingham to become the Communist Party’s district secretary – and they arranged for the South Yorkshire pickets to stay in the Star social club, which was part of the local Communist Party headquarters, with the promise of Salvation Army blankets and free pints at the bar. By dawn on Sunday, Scargill and several hundred men were at the Saltley gates. ‘I have never seen anything like it in my life,’ he said later. ‘This was no coke-depot in the accepted sense. It was like an Eldorado of coke. There were a thousand lorries a day going in and you can imagine the reaction of our boys, fresh from the successes in East Anglia, fresh from the successes in Yorkshire.’50

  That first day Scargill and his men scored a notable victory, forcing the Saltley management to close the gates before the morning was out. At least, that is how they remembered it. Later, a report for the local Gas Board’s successor, British Gas, noted that the depot had not been open on Sunday at all, while Scargill and the Barnsley men had actually arrived on Monday morning, a day later than they claimed. What really happened at Saltley, in fact, is almost impossible to determine, since it is so clouded by romantic legends, claims and counterclaims. In a sense, though, the details are irrelevant. What is certain is that by the time the depot reopened on Monday, 7 February, there were perhaps 1,000 pickets – some say 2,000 – who managed, by pushing and shoving, banging and shouting, clinging onto the sides of the trucks and throwing themselves down into the road, to stop more than about fifty lorries being loaded. One account nicely captures the scene: the police in two thin lines, their arms linked, their helmets glinting in the weak winter sun; ‘the miners, men of a certain age with old-fashioned haircuts, massing either side of the police corridor like a restive seventies football crowd’; and in the background a gaggle of left-wing newspaper sellers, sympathetic students, curious children and fascinated reporters. Presiding over the entire scene like a ringmaster was Scargill, who had planted himself on the roof of a grimy public toilet, loudhailer in hand, wrapped inside a thick donkey jacket with trade union badges and a less than fetching baseball cap. As
if from nowhere, this junior strike delegate from Barnsley had turned himself into a latter-day medieval baron, marshalling his troops against the forces of the state. But not all the Midlands men were taken with the newcomer. ‘Here’s another bloody union man out to make a name for himself,’ one thought – and he was not far wrong.51

  As early as Monday evening, the Birmingham Evening Mail had coined the phrase ‘the Battle of Saltley’ to described what was going on a mile to the east of the city centre. The issue was not so much violence between the pickets and the police – in fact, despite the wild scrums that surrounded the arrival and departure of lorries, relations between the two were quite good, with cigarettes often shared in quiet moments – but violence between the miners and the lorry drivers. Most of the drivers were self-employed, owned just one lorry, and depended on regular deliveries to pay their mortgages and feed their families; crucially, very few belonged to a union. They were desperate to get through; the miners were equally desperate to stop them. ‘Bottles, bricks and stones’ flew through the air each time a lorry appeared; according to the Evening Mail, one driver was ‘almost dragged from his cab’ before he fought off his assailants with, rather worryingly, an iron bar. ‘Bottles, stones, fruit and meat pies were thrown during the fighting,’ agreed The Times, the pies having been provided by the TGWU. In fact, there was less violence than at many First Division football matches: in six days, 76 people were arrested (among them 61 miners, 3 drivers and, predictably, one academic) and 30 injured. But as the journalist Andy Beckett points out, with the news every evening bringing fresh pictures of jeering, screaming pickets and apparently uncontrollable violence, it was no wonder that the public came to see Saltley as a decisive engagement in the class war.52

  On Tuesday evening, Scargill made an emotional appeal to Birmingham’s engineering workers to make one last push that would close Saltley for good. ‘We don’t want your pound notes,’ he told a local meeting of the AUEW. ‘Will you go down in history as the working class in Birmingham who stood by while the miners were battered or will you become immortal? I do not ask you – I demand that you come out on strike.’ Two days later, the TGWU and AUEW called one-day sympathy strikes, and at ten o’clock on Thursday, 10 February, Scargill had his answer. ‘Over this hill came a banner,’ he later recalled, ‘and I’ve never seen in my life so many people following a banner. As far as the eye could see it was just a mass of people marching towards Saltley. There was a huge roar from the other side of the hill, they were coming the other way. They were coming from five approaches to Saltley … And our lads were jumping up in the air with emotion – a fantastic situation.’

  In the recollections of those who were there, the last hour of the Saltley siege has become a romantic moment to set alongside any from the pages of British history. The regional secretary of the TGWU, Alan Law, remembered seeing a column of marchers ‘headed by the small figure of a Scottish piper, his kilt swirling, the plaintive tune in the air over the heads of the thousands of madly cheering Birmingham workers who by now were shouting and singing, filling the air with wild delight.’ His account continues in gloriously overblown style:

  Through the pickets and through the ranks of police, who parted for him like the Red Sea parted for those other marchers so many centuries ago – on he strode, followed immediately behind by his bodyguard of Scotsmen proudly smiling as they acknowledged the cheers.

  And behind them came the column of his mates, through the police cordon, into the centre of the masses, their banners held high – more and still more of them until the whole area was full of working people standing shoulder to shoulder – surely there was no room left for more?

  But the police lines parted again, and into the arena stepped the crowning glory – a single line of girls and women, their faces wreathed in smiles, taking up their places on the inner ring of pickets, waving to the cheers and claps of their menfolk, and fully conscious of the admiring glances of our friends on the picket line, whose mood seemed to have changed overnight.

  What price a baton charge now?

  This may sound a bit melodramatic, although Scargill, too, remembered the police being struck dumb by a ‘delegation of girls’ in ‘bright white dresses’. In any case, Law’s account certainly captures the messianic mood as 10,000 local factory workers poured into the Saltley hollow. And at a quarter to ten, with the crowd bellowing ‘Close the gates! Close the gates!’ the Chief Constable, Sir Derrick Capper, bowed to the inevitable. In a slightly bathetic climax, a Gas Board employee in a shabby grey overcoat materialized as if from nowhere, rather like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn, produced a key and locked the heavy iron gates. Law recalled that ‘at that moment the sun broke through the clouds and shone on the 10,000 workers as they stood cheering and singing and on full-grown Yorkshire miners openly weeping’. And on top of his public toilet, Scargill was beside himself with joy. ‘This will go down in trade union history,’ he told the crowd through a borrowed police loudhailer. ‘It will also go down in history as the Battle of Saltley Gate. The working people have united in a mass stand.’ It was, he said later, ‘the greatest day of my life’.53

  At that very moment the Cabinet was meeting in Downing Street to discuss the progress of the strike. Jim Prior later remembered Maudling – who had promised that Saltley would not be closed – being handed a note with the bad news, which he dramatically read out to his colleagues. Indeed the minutes bear this out, recording that it was ‘a victory for violence against the lawful activities of the Gas Board and the coal merchants’, and ‘disturbing evidence of the ease with which, by assembling large crowds, militants can flout the law with impunity’. At the very least, it was a moment rich in symbolism – both for the trade unions, for whom it represented a peak of collective solidarity and a victory over the forces of the state, and for the Conservative middle classes, who were horrified by what they perceived as the irresistible power of the mob. From February 1972 onwards, Saltley occupied a central place in right-wing mythology: not only did it fuel the growing middle-class panic of the mid-1970s, but, as Paul Routledge points out, it convinced a generation of Conservatives that they had to destroy the unions’ right to secondary picketing, and created a climate that made Thatcherism possible. And for Scargill, of course, it was a turning point. It was thanks to Saltley that ‘King Arthur’ was born. He had begun the strike as an obscure regional union official; he ended it a tribune of the working classes, a national celebrity invited onto Question Time, Any Questions and Parkinson and hailed by Harper’s and Queen as one of Britain’s leaders of the future, alongside the young William Waldegrave, Patricia Hewitt and Jack Straw.54

  Yet if Saltley was a victory, it was a purely symbolic one. Most of the coke, after all, had already gone, and Tory diehards who criticized the government for not keeping the gates open at all costs were missing the point. Symbolism apart, it made no difference to the government, the power stations or the course of the strike whether the Saltley gates were open or closed. Ironically, it would have been better for Heath to order them closed straight away, so as to deny the miners a confrontation and a propaganda victory. (In the event, of course, the decision was left to the police, not the politicians.) In any case, what really mattered was something that occupied far more of the Cabinet’s time during that meeting on 10 February: the cold weather and the siege of the power stations. Just the day before, a Council of State, presided over by the Queen Mother in her daughter’s absence abroad, had declared a state of emergency and imposed restrictions on shop lighting, floodlights and advertising. Desperate to end the strike, Carr told the Coal Board to raise their offer to 12 per cent, but the miners turned it down. Already the authorities had announced a programme of severe power cuts, with a third of the country losing power for four hours every day. Now, even before Maudling had been given the famous note, John Davies grimly reported that the situation was hopeless. With coal stocks immobilized, many power stations would run out of fuel by the end of the following week. Soon,
the generating boards would be down to just 25 per cent of their usual supply, which would ‘bring much industry to a standstill and cause large numbers of workers to be laid off’ – and this at a time when unemployment was already well above a million. It now looked likely that not only would troops be patrolling the streets of Belfast, they would be guarding power stations and trying to maintain public order in a world without electricity. As Willie Whitelaw later put it, ‘we looked absolutely into the abyss’.55

  Within the corridors of power there was now a mood of abject panic. That afternoon, Carr bowed to the inevitable, announcing that the government had convened a court of inquiry on the miners’ pay, with none other than Lord Wilberforce in the chair. As Heath’s biographer John Campbell remarks, that the government had turned to the very man whose generosity to the power workers had disappointed them a year earlier was extremely suggestive: it was ‘the clearest possible signal that they wanted only to see the strike ended as quickly as possible’. The press, conveniently forgetting their predictions of the miners’ certain defeat, were in no doubt. ‘We have now reached a situation which is more dangerous than that of any industrial dispute since the war,’ said The Times the next day, judging that ‘if the Court of Enquiry cannot find acceptable terms the prospect is appalling’. Many normally level-headed officials agreed: at the Treasury, Brendan Sewill heard civil servants anxiously wondering whether the government would have to ‘activate the nuclear underground shelters and the centres of regional government, because there’ll be no electricity and there’ll be riots in the streets. The sewage will overflow and there’ll be epidemics.’ As Heath’s aide Douglas Hurd mordantly recorded, the government was ‘now wandering vainly over [the] battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time.’56