IRON OR:

A dirty business: In March 1984, the Coal Board decided to close down Britain's mining industry. Within a month, 153 pits had been shut and the country was plunged into the most bitter industrial dispute in living memory. Twenty years on, Chris Burkham revisits South Yorkshire to hear how life has changed for the strikers who fought for 'Coal not dole' (Chris Burkham, February 1, 2004, The Observer)

'They respect me,' Mick Cushworth, now in his final year studying archaeology at the University of Hallam in Sheffield, says of his lecturers, 'because I know how to dig.' Twenty years ago it was precisely because Cushworth knew how to dig that respect was the last thing he earnt. In fact, he wasn't earning anything. He was a member of what Margaret Thatcher termed 'The Enemy Within', he was the fifth column chipping away at a society in thrall to free enterprise, he was a miner and a member of the National Union of Mineworkers. And he was on strike.

Cushworth was among the first miners to strike when, in March 1984, it was announced that the Cortonwood pit in the South Yorkshire village of Brampton Bierlow, where he worked, was to close - just two days after they had been told that the high-quality seam of silkstone coal they mined had another five years' life and three weeks after 80 miners had been transferred there. Within a month, only 21 of the Coal Board's 174 pits were still operating, as miners across the country picketed against a 5.2 per cent pay offer and a programme of pit closures.

Twenty years ago, in April 1984, Brampton was awash with police and media. The Miners' Welfare and Social Club was the Strike Control Centre from where Channel 4 broadcast live - and TV crews from Holland, France and Germany sent back reports. In the two decades since the strike there has been very little news from this part of Yorkshire. When Ian McGregor, Margaret Thatcher and the Coal Board squared up to Arthur Scargill, Mick McGahey and the NUM, this part of Britain was seldom out of the news. There were pitched battles between pickets and police, vox pops to gauge how strong support was. Every miner and miner's wife was buttonholed for a quote, whether at the picket line at the top of Pit Lane or outside the parish hall, where food parcels were being distributed to men whose families had to survive on £11.75 a week from the strike fund. (In the hall a notice was pinned to the wall: 'Beware! A vulture is going round the estates of Brampton offering a few quid for watches, bracelets, rings, etc.' Next to this, in a bolder hand: 'Beware! A vulture is going round the coalfields offering a few quid for your jobs.')

On the picket line at the entrance to the colliery, conversation was boisterous, forthright, virulently anti-Thatcher and pro-union. 'As far as I'm concerned,' commented the then NUM branch official Mick Carter, 'if we lose this, every trade unionist - and if you're not a trade unionist then you can bugger off now - might as well tear their card up. It won't be worth anything.'

The colliery is, of course, now long gone - blown up, razed to the ground, and the mineshafts capped. Drive into the village and where the 'last stand' took place there are large gates, held together by a rusting chain and padlock. Arranged in front of the gates are blocks of concrete similar to the anti-terrorist blocks outside the Houses of Parliament or the American Embassy in London. Beyond the gate is an untended tarmac track, covered in moss and weeds.

Though Paul Volcker still gets most of the credit (and deserves much), Ronald Reagan's breaking of the PATCO strike and Margaret Thatcher's of the miners' had a powerful effect in the struggle to reign in inflation. If trade unionism unquestionably brought improvements in working conditions in its early days, by the 70s it had become little more than a vehicle for driving up wages and thereby prices in a seemingly unending death spiral.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2004 9:32 AM