Personal is Political
Here's highly personal, yet very political, take on the miners' strike by Richard Wilson who is a writer and producer on the hit BBC TV programme Have I Got News For You.
A sad tale in many ways, but the strike led to many broken lives and the thought of a family being 'victimised' because their father had become a manager is the kind of knuckle-dragging trade unionism that always filled me with despair.
Close-knit? No, it was the pits
Thirty years after Scargill’s strike, the son of a colliery boss recalls their mining town as a place not of solidarity but of violence, theft and greed
Richard Wilson - The Sunday Times
(News Group Newspapers Ltd)
The great miners’ strike of 1984 that began 30 years ago this week had several catchphrases — I can still hear Arthur Scargill’s repeated insistence that “we have the cheapest deep-mined coal in Europe”. But one of the most commonly heard is that Margaret Thatcher set out to crush the miners in a class war, destroying thousands of close-knit mining communities in the process.
It is true, the communities were close-knit — if you fitted in. But my own experience is that some of those pit villages, even in the good times, were hostile, nasty places where people were quite capable of waging class war long before Thatcher came along.
The great miners’ strike of 1984 that began 30 years ago this week had several catchphrases — I can still hear Arthur Scargill’s repeated insistence that “we have the cheapest deep-mined coal in Europe”. But one of the most commonly heard is that Margaret Thatcher set out to crush the miners in a class war, destroying thousands of close-knit mining communities in the process.
It is true, the communities were close-knit — if you fitted in. But my own experience is that some of those pit villages, even in the good times, were hostile, nasty places where people were quite capable of waging class war long before Thatcher came along.
Wilson grew up in Grimethorpe (Christopher Furlong)
One such place was Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire. As I used to say when I told people where I was from — it’s a lot worse than it sounds. I was born a few miles down the road from Grimethorpe and arrived there as a toddler in the early 1960s, when my dad became manager of Grimethorpe colliery. Yes, the one with the brass band.
All pit villages had pit houses, mostly terraced for the miners and bigger ones for more senior staff. We occupied the house that the Coal Board provided for the boss, one of the three large houses in the village. The others were the vicar’s house and the one next door to us, for the deputy manager, which had been left vacant for too long — the locals tore it down brick by brick.
Not many people had the guts to move into “management” housing in Grimethorpe because that marked you out as “one of them”. If you wanted a quiet life in this village, it was important not to be “one of them”. But my dad was manager of Grimethorpe colliery and Grimethorpe was where he needed to be. What’s more, he felt he was entitled to live in the manager’s house; he had given most of his life, not to mention one of his fingers, to the coal industry.
All pit villages had pit houses, mostly terraced for the miners and bigger ones for more senior staff. We occupied the house that the Coal Board provided for the boss, one of the three large houses in the village. The others were the vicar’s house and the one next door to us, for the deputy manager, which had been left vacant for too long — the locals tore it down brick by brick.
Not many people had the guts to move into “management” housing in Grimethorpe because that marked you out as “one of them”. If you wanted a quiet life in this village, it was important not to be “one of them”. But my dad was manager of Grimethorpe colliery and Grimethorpe was where he needed to be. What’s more, he felt he was entitled to live in the manager’s house; he had given most of his life, not to mention one of his fingers, to the coal industry.
Richard Wilson’s father’s pit closed in 1993, despite a series of protests (Steve Eason)As a promising pupil at Blyth Grammar School in Northumberland, my father hoped to avoid the traditional career underground but he was forced to leave at 14 and, in his words, was sold into slavery. His family of eight siblings and a father wounded on the Somme needed him to work down the pit.
He gave it up to join the Fleet Air Arm in 1940 and, when he came back to civilian life after seven years’ service, started at the bottom again as a face worker; qualifying as a mining engineer through night school and working his way up to colliery manager in 1962.
Grimethorpe colliery was notorious for low production and absenteeism; my father turned it around. In the raw, brutal world of coal mining, he resolved confrontations above and below ground with fist fights, often sparked by someone swearing at him. He hated bad language or “pit talk” and would challenge anyone who used it in his presence to take it back. Because he had worked his way up from the bottom he couldn’t understand why anyone else would not try to do the same.
He gave it up to join the Fleet Air Arm in 1940 and, when he came back to civilian life after seven years’ service, started at the bottom again as a face worker; qualifying as a mining engineer through night school and working his way up to colliery manager in 1962.
Grimethorpe colliery was notorious for low production and absenteeism; my father turned it around. In the raw, brutal world of coal mining, he resolved confrontations above and below ground with fist fights, often sparked by someone swearing at him. He hated bad language or “pit talk” and would challenge anyone who used it in his presence to take it back. Because he had worked his way up from the bottom he couldn’t understand why anyone else would not try to do the same.
Richard Wilson, in red with his father and brothers (Richard Wilson)No doubt this approach made him tough to work for. It certainly meant that, as the miners began to rack up hefty pay rises in the 1970s and kick against productivity-related pay deals in the 1980s, Dad became more alarmed. He knew that earning a wage packet stuffed with 120 quid a week (in 1980!) regardless of how much coal you were digging out was a recipe for disaster.
When the prospect of another big strike loomed in March 1984, even as a feckless student, I shared my dad’s view of the miners as the wreckers of their industry, through a bone-headed refusal to modernise. Many pits had become uneconomic because, although there was still plenty of coal, the miners had been paid too much to dig it up. Scargill said there were 70 pits on the National Coal Board’s hitlist. My father knew there were 120.
I didn’t need him to tell me how we, as a family, were regarded in the close-knit, friendly mining community of Grimethorpe. The barbed wire and broken glass that topped the walls of our garden made it clear. We were hated by many people in the village. As a child I learnt not to get too close to the walls or windows as a half-brick would occasionally come sailing over, lobbed in hope of hitting a living target — me or the dog. I vividly remember, aged nine, an airgun pellet cracking a window pane, seconds after I’d been standing on the windowsill.
Remember, these things were happening in the late 1960s and early 1970s — the good times, when miners’ wages were gathering pace and the “job for life” was an unchallenged notion.
Miners’ kids wouldn’t play with us. It wasn’t their fault: everyone was influenced by their father. They were probably influenced by my father too, and his bone-crushing management style. We hardly ever left the compound that our house was, and we went to school miles away; we played with each other, my three brothers, my mother and me.
My only regular contact with local kids was spotting them trying to scramble over the barricades to nick stuff — coal, potatoes, petrol, a cricket bat, bikes, a flag, conkers, you name it. Yes, we had a big garden with an apple tree and we grew our own vegetables, but it wasn’t as if we’d inherited any of it.
It seems to me there was a kind of moral code that some people lived by that stated not only must you not get ideas above your station, but anyone else who did must be dragged down. The class envy that existed between the rest of the village and us was exactly the sort of thing that destroyed the working class’s own defences and motivated someone such as Thatcher to crush them.
As we grew older, my brothers and I began to venture out beyond the barbed wire. My eldest brother, Phil, went to Butlin’s in 1969 and came back as a suedehead, complete with boiler suit and Dr Martens, and then left for Leicester University.
My brother Mark, even more adventurously, decided to brave the working men’s clubs of South Yorkshire as a troubadour — playing a semi-acoustic guitar and singing the songs of Elvis and Frank Sinatra under the stage name of Billy Shearer: there was no way he could perform at Grimethorpe working men’s club as the manager’s son.
Bravest of all, my brother Mike left school and started working at the pit, in the stores of South Kirkby colliery a few miles away, until the miners’ strike of 1984 stopped him. He never went back to work.
By the time the strike began, Dad was working at the Coal Board’s area headquarters, also in Grimethorpe. He drove his car past the pickets every day of the strike until he retired six months later. And before it ended, I fled to London to work in advertising, the archetypal Thatcherite business. In advertising circles, as at university, my status as a refugee from a pit village gave me an air of zoological curiosity.
When the prospect of another big strike loomed in March 1984, even as a feckless student, I shared my dad’s view of the miners as the wreckers of their industry, through a bone-headed refusal to modernise. Many pits had become uneconomic because, although there was still plenty of coal, the miners had been paid too much to dig it up. Scargill said there were 70 pits on the National Coal Board’s hitlist. My father knew there were 120.
I didn’t need him to tell me how we, as a family, were regarded in the close-knit, friendly mining community of Grimethorpe. The barbed wire and broken glass that topped the walls of our garden made it clear. We were hated by many people in the village. As a child I learnt not to get too close to the walls or windows as a half-brick would occasionally come sailing over, lobbed in hope of hitting a living target — me or the dog. I vividly remember, aged nine, an airgun pellet cracking a window pane, seconds after I’d been standing on the windowsill.
Remember, these things were happening in the late 1960s and early 1970s — the good times, when miners’ wages were gathering pace and the “job for life” was an unchallenged notion.
Miners’ kids wouldn’t play with us. It wasn’t their fault: everyone was influenced by their father. They were probably influenced by my father too, and his bone-crushing management style. We hardly ever left the compound that our house was, and we went to school miles away; we played with each other, my three brothers, my mother and me.
My only regular contact with local kids was spotting them trying to scramble over the barricades to nick stuff — coal, potatoes, petrol, a cricket bat, bikes, a flag, conkers, you name it. Yes, we had a big garden with an apple tree and we grew our own vegetables, but it wasn’t as if we’d inherited any of it.
It seems to me there was a kind of moral code that some people lived by that stated not only must you not get ideas above your station, but anyone else who did must be dragged down. The class envy that existed between the rest of the village and us was exactly the sort of thing that destroyed the working class’s own defences and motivated someone such as Thatcher to crush them.
As we grew older, my brothers and I began to venture out beyond the barbed wire. My eldest brother, Phil, went to Butlin’s in 1969 and came back as a suedehead, complete with boiler suit and Dr Martens, and then left for Leicester University.
My brother Mark, even more adventurously, decided to brave the working men’s clubs of South Yorkshire as a troubadour — playing a semi-acoustic guitar and singing the songs of Elvis and Frank Sinatra under the stage name of Billy Shearer: there was no way he could perform at Grimethorpe working men’s club as the manager’s son.
Bravest of all, my brother Mike left school and started working at the pit, in the stores of South Kirkby colliery a few miles away, until the miners’ strike of 1984 stopped him. He never went back to work.
By the time the strike began, Dad was working at the Coal Board’s area headquarters, also in Grimethorpe. He drove his car past the pickets every day of the strike until he retired six months later. And before it ended, I fled to London to work in advertising, the archetypal Thatcherite business. In advertising circles, as at university, my status as a refugee from a pit village gave me an air of zoological curiosity.
Many miners accused Margaret Thatcher of a deliberate campaign to crush them (Jon Super)I had escaped to London, my brothers Phil and Mark to other parts of the country, but my brother Mike did not escape. He loved his job at the South Kirkby colliery stores and the strike left him stranded. He worried that he wouldn’t have anything to go back to if the pit closed but equally he was afraid of the growing anger in the village — he rarely went out alone. He developed a thrombosis in his leg, which the local hospital could not control. The treatment caused his blood to thin and he died of a brain haemorrhage on September 8, 1984. He went into hospital the day my dad retired after almost 50 years in the coal industry.
I’d been in London only a week and came back for the funeral. As my brother’s coffin was being carried out of our house to the hearse, about half a dozen local youths, members of the close-knit community of Grimethorpe, climbed onto the garden wall to jeer at us.
Mike was buried in Grimethorpe cemetery, surrounded by other miners and their sons, overlooking the slag heaps. Although my parents moved away soon afterwards, 20 years later my father joined him, overlooking what were, by then, green fields. He was back in Grimethorpe, where he needed to be.
I don’t want to claim that, because of what happened to us, the people of Grimethorpe, or any other mining village that was devastated by the strike, deserved what happened to them. Thousands were unfairly and cruelly treated by the government and the police. But another catchphrase from this period belonged to Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
In my experience, there was my family and there was Grimethorpe.
Richard Wilson is a writer and producer on Have I Got News for You
I’d been in London only a week and came back for the funeral. As my brother’s coffin was being carried out of our house to the hearse, about half a dozen local youths, members of the close-knit community of Grimethorpe, climbed onto the garden wall to jeer at us.
Mike was buried in Grimethorpe cemetery, surrounded by other miners and their sons, overlooking the slag heaps. Although my parents moved away soon afterwards, 20 years later my father joined him, overlooking what were, by then, green fields. He was back in Grimethorpe, where he needed to be.
I don’t want to claim that, because of what happened to us, the people of Grimethorpe, or any other mining village that was devastated by the strike, deserved what happened to them. Thousands were unfairly and cruelly treated by the government and the police. But another catchphrase from this period belonged to Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
In my experience, there was my family and there was Grimethorpe.
Richard Wilson is a writer and producer on Have I Got News for You
