The dominating images and expressions of the 1984–85 miners’ strike are now thoroughly embedded in both common and academic memory: the confrontation at Orgreave with its charging mounted police; the dramatic arrest of Scargill at the same location; the marches with banners at the end of the strike and the television shots of a smirking Thatcher and Ian McGregor.
Miners’ Strike
Alongside these images, there are numerous phrases: Thatcher’s infamous “enemy within” and the echoing shouts of “scab” and the cries of “here we go …” from pickets and activists on the sharp end of the confrontation.
As a committed and politically aware young striking miner and NUM member at the time, these emblems are an indelible part of my recollections. The strike was on every level a confrontation.
Yet, at the same time, alongside these other images, expressions and symbols come back to me expressing solidarity, care, communality, mutual recognition, and comradeship. My direct experience of these, apart from my own home, rest mainly on Kellingley strike centre, our collective strike ‘home’ where, after arrest or detour, delay and distraction, we inevitably returned.
There are many symbols and images of what could be termed ‘strike remembrance’ that are integral to the strike centres and welfare locations. I want to describe three.
Kellingley Miners’ Social Club
The first is obvious enough, and this is the image and memory of social solidarity that became visible and, as the strike went on, took on a dense political nature. It was not merely that at Kellingley strike centre families and individual miners came together to eat, discuss, assist, and support each other. All that was a necessary and predictable function of the strike centres in general.
At Kellingley and at other strike centres, however, partly but not exclusively due to the efforts of politically educated branch officials and members, the actions and efforts of mining community action produced a form of political awareness that, in my view, cannot be taught via political speech, pamphlet or direct political instruction.
The Thatcherite ideology of antisocial individualism was directly contradicted by the care, help and mutual recognition and communal action generated from within the strike centres and that was my experience at Kellingley. The necessity of this kind of solidarity in a society dominated by private accumulation and cultural isolation cannot be overstated.
Supported by trade union structures and working-class organisation, the fact that the people around you genuinely care if your child has a Christmas present or a birthday gift, or if the bailiffs are threatening you, makes a very strong and lasting political difference.
Solidarity and social acceptance
The second point follows from the first. At Kellingley we had many visits from radical political groups. Many of these smaller groups soon came to appreciate the necessity of the deeper strands of solidarity and day-to-day care and help that they encountered at the strike centre. They soon saw that a hungry striking miner recognises the political significance of the offer of a plate of decent food over a pamphlet about hungry striking miners. There was interesting and politically useful humour in these encounters.
Thirdly, the strike centre at Kellingley not only attracted committed political groups, but also people who were habitually regarded as partial social outcasts. For me, this strand of strike remembrance raises questions of social acceptance and recognition, and touches upon different forms of solidarity. Tramps, vagabonds, homeless people, acute alcoholics, and others would occasionally come in and simply hang around looking for a meal and some company.
These peoplewere not only eventuallytolerated, but greeted, recognised, and sometimes helped. I have come to believe now that this turn towards mutual recognition of people habitually regarded as social failures, was based on a fundamental recognition of basic humanity; that when all else has been stripped away by force or circumstance; when job, status, home, and possessions are lost, all that is left is the last meagre hope of human contact. As Victor Hugo quoted in Les Misérables, ‘what is there to do in the abyss if one does not converse?’
Remembering the Miners’ Strike
The 1984-85 strike taught many lessons. Certainly, the lessons to be drawn from the memory of confrontation are deep and necessary. Yet, when the anniversaries come around the necessity of learning the lessons of political confrontation should not obscure the wider significance of those other lessons from the welfares and strike centres. The inner nature of the strike centre provided a nourishment more than simply food. The lessons of care, solidarity, hope, humour, and the nourishing of the essential bareness of our basic humanity were there too.
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David Miller was a coalface worker at Kellingley for ten years, from 1979 until 1989, and was on strike for the duration. Both his father Davey and grandfather Jimmy were Kellingley NUM branch secretaries. He is now senior lecturer in the Department of English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Article first published in Media North: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North). For more from Media North, and to subscribe to their newsletter, visit their website.
