‘We were outnumbered, out-armed and outdone’
W
hen Norman Strike was a coal miner, his surname was apposite. In 1983, at the age of 32, Strike stood for election as a union official at his mine, Westoe colliery in South Tyneside. He lost by seven votes: “I said it was because nobody wanted to vote for a Strike.” A year later, on June 18 1984 – 32 years ago this weekend – Strike reached the top of a hill above the Orgreave coking works near Rotherham in South Yorkshire. It was just after 8am on a hot, sunny day and he was in a group of miners who had come by coach from Westoe to picket. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by its controversial president Arthur Scargill, had called a national strike three months before to resist a programme of pit closures backed by Margaret Thatcher’s government. From his vantage point, Strike gazed down on a scene of battle. He heard a loud roar as hundreds of miners ran up a field towards him, chased by mounted police. Beyond them, he saw lines of police in riot gear, and behind them the plant itself, a sprawling, smoking complex at which fuel was refined from coal. Strike had been reading Germinal,
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‘We were outnumbered, out-armed and outdone’ Norman Strike Former miner
Emile Zola’s novel about a miners’ strike in 19thcentury France, as part of an Open University course, and he remembers that a passage from it came vividly to mind: “This pit, piled up in the bottom of a hollow with its squat brick buildings, raising its chimney like a threatening horn, seemed to him to have the evil air of a gluttonous beast, crouching there to devour the earth.” The day culminated in a pitched fight in the village of Orgreave, with a car set on fire, miners throwing bricks and stones, and mounted police cantering along a village street beating miners and others with batons. There were more than 120 official casualties, including broken bones, cuts from bricks and truncheon blows. Ninety-three miners were arrested and 55 were later charged with riot, then a common law offence for which the maximum sentence was life imprisonment. Orgreave was a pivotal moment in the strike, which lasted until March 1985 before being called off as many miners crossed picket lines to return to work. By the end of June 18 1984, it was clear picketing would not halt coke production at Orgreave and thus close the steelworks at Scunthorpe that relied on it. Scargill was injured and taken to hospital, with one of his key aims defeated. “Until then, I was optimistic that we could win but the writing was on the wall after that,” says Strike. “We were outnumbered, out-armed and outdone.” The winners were the National Coal Board and Thatcher, who wanted to impose the government’s will over nationalised industries, and stop unions blocking closures or shrinkage. With the defeat of the NUM, and later of the print workers in the 1986 Wapping dispute, the government had the upper hand. Thatcher’s ability to reform the economy and unleash the rationalisation of loss-making industries – and deregulation of the City of London in 1986 – was ensured at Orgreave. History is written by the victors, and the narrative of Orgreave is that the police had to battle to contain violent picketing. But after 32 years, the losers may be about to rewrite it. Pressure on home secretary Theresa May to set up an inquiry increased when an inquest jury found in April that South Yorkshire police, the force in charge at Orgreave, contributed to the deaths of 96 Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough in 1989. Officers then tried to hide their blunders by blaming fans. Barbara Jackson, a former NCB employee who took part in the strike, leads the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, a pressure group of former miners and allies formed four years ago. “Thatcher won industrially but she did not win culturally or emotionally,” she says. “It has not made people love what happened. For a lot of them, it was a shock to see a government could treat its own people like that.” It is another sunny day as I ascend to the spot where Strike stood in 1984. The landscape is hugely changed. The coking plant was demolished after its closure in 1990 and the field is steadily being covered. “Welcome to Renaissance,” reads one sign advertising “a fantastic range of three and four bedroom houses”, selling for up to £320,000. An industrial park sits nearby, with a manufacturing research centre run by Sheffield University, two wind turbines and a new Rolls-Royce engine blade plant. The past is buried and the new town on the site of the battle has been christened “Waverley”. Kevin Horne, a former miner arrested that day and charged with unlawful assembly, although the charge was later dropped, walks beside me. ▶ ft.com/magazine june 18/19 2016
