Miners dig up their strike memories

Dennis Skinner put his finger on it. The left wing Labour MP visited Selby near the end of 1984, to urge local miners to carry on with the bitter nine-month-old dispute. His message: "We are in a war".

"We are fighting for the right to work," he told the miners, "and there is nothing more honourable than that."

Skinner's claim that it was a fight the miners could win was to prove wrong. Already, by the end of November, the drift back to work by thousands of young men - men with families to feed and mortgages to pay - had begun. Soon, with the promise of a £1,400 Christmas pay bonanza, the drift had turned into a surge.

Skinner was right, however, when he described the strike as a war: an ideological war with, at stake, the kind of country Britain was to become - one in which communities and jobs (no matter how economically inefficient) were what mattered; or one in which it was all about the economy.

Wilf Jackson was 37 with an 11-year-old daughter back then.

He and his colleagues at Rothwell mine near Wakefield had already voted to close the pit, which was on its last legs, and he was all set to move to the new Selby coalfield, where the first coal had been brought up the year before and the coal board was promising 'jobs for life'.

However, when the call came to go on strike he did not hesitate.

"We were on strike against pit closures," he says.

"They were putting lots of people out of work, just so they could import coal, which was a stupid idea, I thought."

Twenty years on does he think the same?

"I don't know," the 57-year-old, who lives with his wife Doreen in Brayton, says honestly. "We were fighting for our jobs, and I think we were right. Everything Arthur Scargill said was true."

But he now thinks the miner's leader went about it the wrong way.

"I think if he had just put it to a national ballot, he would have got the vote, and we would have been a lot better off.

"Pit deputies would have joined us, and Nottinghamshire would have joined us. They were just crying out for another ballot. If there had been one, we would have won."

Nevertheless, spirits at the start of the strike in early March 1984 were high. Wilf says the picket lines at Selby were friendly, miners and police got on well - the police even used to bring the picketing miners cups of tea - and nobody had any idea that the strike would go on so long. "We used to say it would be three months at most," says Wilf.

It wasn't long before the strike claimed its first victim, however.

On March 15, 24-year-old miner David Gareth Jones from the Pontefract area was killed on the picket lines at Ollerton, Nottinghamshire.

Closer to home, hardship began to bite in Selby where some families with young children were living on £16 a week state benefits.

"Miners are walking around Selby with long faces and hunched-up shoulders," the coalfield chaplain the Rev Gwynne Richardson said at the time. "I am sure that the men would prefer not to be on strike but they feel there is a principle at stake."

Power workers at Selby's coal-fired power stations found themselves being picketed - and, comically, pop group The Flying Pickets joined the real flying pickets at Drax to deliver beer and sandwiches.

On May 29, however, the dispute took an ugly turn, when thousands of pickets became involved in a running battle with police outside a South Yorkshire coking plant.

Orgreave changed everything.

In the first day of clashes alone, 30 people were hurt and 63 arrested. "It was an absolute nightmare," says Mark Seabrooke, a striking Nottinghamshire miner who, since the dispute, has worked at Stillingfleet. "It frightened me to death." (See panel, right)

The media images of hate-filled faces, of donkey-jacketed miners at war with police in riot gear, changed the whole atmosphere of the dispute.

Wilf Jackson, who wasn't at Orgreave, recalls how police tactics changed even in North Yorkshire.

Police from London were drafted in, armed with riot shields.

"They used to come marching towards us banging their shields," he recalls. "You could hear them coming over the horizon, banging their shields. It was quite frightening."

On June 15, violence flared for the first time at a Selby pit. Contract workers at the North Selby mine, near Escrick, were kept out by a sit-in of 200 men. Police tried to remove them and, in the ensuing clash, three van-loads of miners were arrested.

The most dramatic event was yet to come. On July 6, Selby was besieged. About 1,000 miners effectively sealed the town off by blockading the toll bridge over the Ouse.

The siege lasted two and a half hours, until police began to mass at the Barlby side of the bridge.

The same day, violent clashes followed at Whitemoor, with 13 injured as miners stoned police in riot gear.

The length of the dispute was taking its toll. By August 1984 the cracks had begun to show as the first few rebel miners returned to work.

One miner, Brian Green, braved hundreds of pickets to clock on at Gascoigne Wood. It was months before the strike would be over - but the writing was on the wall.

The slow drift back to work was to cause lasting resentments in the years to come. Ken Rowley, who had already started work at Wistow mine before the dispute, was one of 100-or-so miners at the pit who stayed out the full 12 months.

When they finally marched back, heads held high, a special medal was struck for each of them by the Wistow NUM branch. Its inscription: "Loyal To The End".

The strike-breakers who had gone back early were known as BBCs, Ken says - Back Before Christmas. "It is never forgotten," he says.

Wilf Jackson, who like Mark and Ken Rowley stayed out to the end, agrees the atmosphere down the pits has never been the same since.

But he prefers to remember the comradeship of the strike - the food parcels, the support from the Salvation Army, even the friendships struck up with local police.

He still has a video-tape of a Calendar TV newsreel from Christmas 1984. It shows miners and police in fancy dress partying together on the picket line.

"It wasn't all trouble and hassle," Wilf says.

"I'm proud of what we did."

The Battle Of Orgreave

Mark Seabrooke and his Nottinghamshire colleagues were among the first flying pickets at Orgreave.

At first it was a peaceful demonstration - and Mark believes if it had stayed that way, the miners could have shut the coking plant.

Then more pickets arrived and began throwing stones. It was the excuse the police needed. "They charged us with batons and horses," says Mark. "It was an absolute nightmare. It frightened me to death."

Wistow miner Ken Rowley insists it was the police who started the trouble, and that news footage was cleverly altered to make it look as though miners were to blame.

Whoever started it, it was a terrifying experience, he says. "The police were beating their shields on their batons, and there were that many there."

Kevin Meloy, 44-year-old chairman of the Yorkshire NUM, was 24 at the time of the strike.

He accepts there was violence from both sides at Orgreave. "When you are young men and you get the adrenaline flowing..." he says. "It was a pitched battle. They the police were young men too, and they will have had the same feelings as us." When he saw what happened on the TV later, it scared him.

"There were people running through the streets and horses charging them down," he says. "I was thinking, 'how did I get away from that?'" He has no regrets, however. "It was a strange time. We were at war. We were fighting to keep our jobs and our communities together."

The Siege Of Selby

On July 6, 1,000 miners sealed off Selby by blocking the toll bridge over the Ouse. No one could get in or out of the town for two and a half hours.

The blockade was peaceful - although outside the Evening Press offices in Gowthorpe a van carrying contractors to one of the Selby mines was overturned. Later, during clashes at Whitemoor mine, ten police officers and three pickets were hurt.

Ken Rowley was among the miners at the Selby blockade. His face twitches into a grin at the memory.

"It only needed half a dozen cars and the whole of North Yorkshire stopped," he says.

Feeding The Family

Wilf Jackson admits he was lucky. Having sold his home in West Yorkshire before the strike, he and his family had a little money to tide them over, even after they moved to their new home at Brayton in June.

Other families were less fortunate - as the strike dragged on it led to divorce, lost homes and real hardship.

The community of miners pulled together, however. Miner's wife Ann Richards, from Sherburn-in-Elmet, was chairperson of the local miners' wives support group.

Recalling the strike in 1994, she said: "It was an absolutely marvellous time. The camaraderie and the support which everybody showed was amazing and it helped us all get through it."

The support group met once a week to organise activities for miners' children and raise funds for food parcels. "We had volunteers who went out to raise money for the parcels to places such as Rowntrees in York, standing outside for donations," said Mrs Richards. "We got a lot of abuse, but we also collected a lot of money."

Legacy Of The Strike

Ken Rowley says when he became a miner in 1961 there were about 700,000 miners in the UK. By the end of this year, he estimates that number will be down to about 5,000.

It was a fight worth fighting, insists Mark Seabrooke. "Somebody had to stand up and be counted.

"You can see what is going off with the manufacturing industry now. It has gone completely kaput, the whole kit and caboodle. It was a case of the miners were first, who's next?

"What are we now? Just a service country and we told you so 20 years ago."

Updated: 10:22 Tuesday, February 17, 2004