Nevertheless, that the confrontations could not safely go unpoliced was evident as early as 15 March with the first fatality of the dispute, when a flying picket was
struck by a brick during scuffles between working and striking miners in Nottinghamshire, though it was never discovered from which side the deadly projectile had been thrown. By the time the
strike entered its second month, one thousand miners had been arrested. The NUM’s strategy was not confined to trying to shut down the remaining operating pits, for it also sought to sever
the means by which the stockpiled coal could be supplied to power plants and steelworks. The aim was to engineer national economic collapse in order to ensure the surrender of the NCB and the
government. At the strike’s commencement, the NUM had agreed to allow steelworks to be supplied with the minimum level of coke necessary to stop irreparable damage being done to their blast
furnaces, while still seeking to make them inoperable as producers of steel during the lifetime of the strike. Mothballing the steel industry particularly strained relations between the
miners’ union and that of the steel workers, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC), which refused to respond to Scargill’s call to join the strike. Without coke to fuel the
foundries, job lay-offs at British Steel were inevitable and the ISTC’s leader, Bill Sirs, concluded that being abused as a ‘scab’ was preferable to shrivelling the size of his
own union membership. Scargill was contemptuous of Sirs’s lack of syndicalist fraternity, believing that such self-centredness demonstrated only how the working class could never triumph over
the boss class unless it stuck together.
Indeed, it was Scargill’s efforts to stop supplies reaching the steel plants that caused the single worst violent incident in a British industrial dispute since the war.
13
The scene of the battle was the Orgreave coke works south of Sheffield. Hoping to repeat his 1972 triumph at Saltley, Scargill declared an all-out blockade
of the plant on 29 May in an attempt to prevent its products being transferred forty miles down the road to the British Steel works at Scunthorpe. The first day saw serious disorder as 2,500 police
officers, using truncheons, riot shields and horses, moved in to prevent 6,000 flying pickets from blocking the exits from the plant. The police operation was successful in so far as it allowed the
initial convoy of thirty-five lorries, their windscreens protected with wire mesh against the projectiles hurled at them, to drive the coke safely from Orgreave to Scunthorpe. The failure to
disrupt the supply prompted Scargill to call for a redoubling of the besiegers’ efforts, calling on ‘the whole trade union movement’ to descend on Orgreave, and to condemn the law
and order operation as comparable to ‘an actual police state tantamount to something you are used to seeing in Chile or Bolivia’.
14
On
30 May, while attempting to marshal his pickets for another salvo, Scargill was arrested and charged with obstruction. Over the following days,
the scuffles became less
ferocious until what proved to be the all-out assault of 18 June.
A battle between Ancient Britons and Romans, a scene from the English civil war, the Peterloo massacre . . . there was a choice of historical analogies for the passionate, if disorganized,
throng of pickets, mostly topless or in T-shirts, who threw themselves upon the lines of smartly uniformed police officers at Orgreave, on the same hot summer day on which – in another
England – the Queen’s landau trundled along in front of the cheering ranks of top hats at Royal Ascot. At Orgreave, the reception for the horses was rather different, with the pickets
– as if at Agincourt – driving a line of angled stakes into the ground to repel the anticipated cavalry charge. As battle commenced, it was the pickets who had the momentum. Their 6,500
men, outnumbering their opponents by nearly two to one, surged forward in an effort to swamp the police lines deployed to protect the approaches to the coke works. Under the pressure, one of the
police lines buckled and appeared to be on the brink of being overwhelmed. Three times, mounted reinforcements were sent in to drive the onslaught back. As one picket observed: ‘The long riot
shields parted and out rode fourteen mounted police straight into the pickets. As they did, police in the line beat on their riot shields with truncheons, creating a wall of noise which was meant
to intimidate and frighten. It was more than simply a noise, it was a declaration that we were facing an army which had declared war on us.’
15
With the pickets’ initial assault wilting under the ferocity of the counter-attack – ‘When you’ve got half a ton of horse being ridden at you, you don’t hang
about’
16
– hand-to-hand fighting broke out, before lulling and then flaring up again. The engagement was being fought in open
countryside, which suited those who could gallop better than those who could run. To avoid being outflanked on the grassy expanse of common ground, Scargill’s infantry fell back to a stronger
defensive position along the dry moat of a steep railway embankment, forded only by a narrow bridge. As the police pushed on towards this redoubt, they came under a hail of projectiles – not
only bricks, bottles and jagged glass but also iron bars which were used as javelins to spear them. The battle for the railway bridge lasted nearly two hours before the position was taken. Among
those injured as the officers stormed across was Scargill who, caught close to the thick of the fighting, received a gash to the back of his head. He claimed the injury was caused by a blow from a
riot shield; the police maintained that during the pushing and shoving he slipped off the top of the embankment and banged his head on a railway sleeper below. Either way, the sight of him being
led away to an ambulance to receive treatment was greeted by police cheers.
17
The blow to the strikers’ cause was greater. While the siege
of Orgreave was not lifted until 21 July, the encounter had long since been decisively won by the forces
trying to keep open supplies to Britain’s steel industry.
Despite the boast of the
Socialist Worker
placards held aloft by the pickets, they would not repeat the famous victory at Saltley. Strategically, Scargill had blundered, drawing more and
more of his manpower into a battle on terrain of his opponents’ choosing. For the forlorn effort to bring the Orgreave coke works to a halt had diverted thousands of flying pickets away from
the main theatre of operations – the Nottinghamshire collieries supplying the coal upon which the government’s ability to endure depended.
In any case, Orgreave was not the steel industry’s only supplier of coke. Imports also provided a lifeline. To show solidarity with the miners, the leadership of the country’s
biggest union, the TGWU, called a national dock strike on 9 July. The action risked paralysing the ports and, with it, the country’s international trade (digging for the Channel Tunnel did
not start until 1988 and it was 1994 before the link opened). The response, however, was disappointing. Liverpool and Southampton docks were shut, but the others remained open because the dockers
proved unenthusiastic about risking their own livelihoods – or, at the very least, the survival of the restrictive practices of the National Dock Labour Scheme – merely for the sake of
the miners. Having failed in its objectives, the dock strike was suspended on 20 July, only to flare up again in mid-August when TGWU members refused to unload imported coke brought into the
Hunterston ore terminal on the Firth of Clyde. The coke was intended for the Ravenscraig steelworks on the outskirts of Motherwell. One of the world’s largest hot-strip steel mills,
Ravenscraig’s mighty furnaces risked irreversible damage if deprived of the coke to fuel them for long, and the prospect of taking action on behalf of the miners at the cost of sabotaging one
of Scotland’s most important heavy industries placed the Labour movement in a quandary. When British Steel turned to non-TGWU members to unload the coke at Hunterston, in clear contravention
of the terms of the National Dock Labour Scheme, the TGWU called a strike, only to have to abort it for lack of support. Had trade unionists not been divided and Britain’s ports been
successfully paralysed, the trade and industry secretary, Norman Tebbit, was in no doubt that the Cabinet would have been forced to surrender to the miners.
18
This was far from being the only moment when the strike might have speedily moved from deadlock to resolution. The perception that neither MacGregor nor Scargill was interested in any result
short of the unconditional surrender of the other masked several clear opportunities to settle the dispute on terms that, while falling short of Scargill’s insistence that the pit closure
plan must be scrapped, did involve strategic compromises by management. The first round of substantive talks between the two sides, on 23 May, broke down because Scargill regarded
‘exhaustion’ as the only grounds
for closing a pit, whereas MacGregor deemed ‘uneconomic’ to be sufficient; but the gulf between these two words
narrowed during further talks in mid-July and in particular on 9 September, when MacGregor appeared to be prepared to keep open loss-making collieries that might still be ‘beneficially
developed’. Taken at face value, this was a significant climbdown by the NCB, since ‘beneficially developed’ could potentially embrace all but the most exhausted pits. The
NCB’s offer of 13 September also involved a 5.2 per cent pay rise and up to £800 million of increased investment in the surviving collieries. Miners from closing pits would be eligible
for job transfers to the surviving pits if they did not want to take voluntary redundancy. For Scargill, however, ‘beneficially developed’ was still not good enough. In despair, one
trade unionist close to the talks, John Lyons, the general secretary of the Engineers’ and Managers’ Association, believed that the miners’ had been offered ‘95 per cent of
what they were after’, only for Scargill to walk away.
19
Within days, it seemed his stubbornness might pay off. On 28 September, a decision to strike by members of the small NACODS union – the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies
and Shotfirers, who were responsible for underground pit safety – briefly posed a direct threat to those mines that were still working, since the presence of the supervisors was a
precondition of their remit to operate. The NCB’s failure to appease this small but vital group of specialists enraged the prime minister. ‘The management of the NCB could indeed have
brought the government down,’ she later claimed, still fuming, ‘the future of the government at that moment was in their hands.’
20
Acting speedily, she brought pressure to bear on MacGregor to ensure the NACODS members’ terms for remaining at work were met. Given the stakes involved, it was a
small price to pay. Had Scargill seized this moment to announce that the NUM was willing to settle for similar terms, the miners’ strike might have concluded with a deal that amounted to a
partial victory for the NUM. But the president was not for turning.
Scargill appeared to believe his own rhetoric that, as summer drew on towards autumn, time was on his side. The electricity generating stations would not need the greatest supplies during the
warmest months (and from this perspective, launching a strike in March rather than September had hardly been opportune), and it would be during the colder months ahead when the government and its
dwindling stockpiles would come under the greatest pressure. In order to appease those miners still working, coal-fired power stations were not using imported coal, and in Whitehall conflicting
reports were being received as to exactly how long the stand-off could continue before the power supply faltered. The question for the NUM was how long the pit villages could stick out the fight
without proper wage-earners.
Farmers and allotment owners awoke to discover their root crops had been dug up in the night. Desperate men were seen climbing slag heaps to
scavenge for coal, a dangerous activity which resulted in the deaths of three teenagers. Yet, despite evident signs of hardship, a reporter from
The Times
found that the mood in the South
Yorkshire pit village of Rossington remained buoyant at the end of the first one hundred days of the strike. Not one of the 1,500 employed at the nearby mine had returned to work, despite families
‘surviving on bread, potatoes and a community spirit revived by prolonged austerity’. Most had mortgages.
21
In Rossington, as
elsewhere, extended families, charities and the union helped provide the basic necessities. Soup kitchens were opened and the number of children eligible for free school meals multiplied. Local
shopkeepers, aware that the closure of the colliery would mean the end of significant disposable cash in the village, took a long-term view when it came to offering discounts to customers
struggling to afford the price on the label. Like the overwhelming majority of the country’s 174 pits, Rossington was not earmarked for closure (it survived, in a reduced form, until 2007)
and its display of solidarity with those that did face the axe actually risked being counterproductive. Accumulations of coal dust caused by the pit lying idle for months created a risk of
spontaneous combustion, resulting in one of the faces having to be cemented off, leaving behind equipment worth £2 million and a large coal seam which could never be retrieved.
22
The longer the strike endured, the more dangerous the idle coal seams became and the first closures to follow the strike’s end were of pits that had
become unsafe.
Beset by such worries, the resilience of the strike-supporting communities was remarkable. Nevertheless, there was also a less attractive side to this pulling together, manifested by the
intimidation meted out to those who broke ranks. This took various forms, from violent assaults on miners who indicated their intention to return to work, verbal threats to their wives and
children, refusal to serve them in shops and pubs (or ‘blacking’ of those businesses that did serve them), to social ostracization, not just for the moment but for as long as they
remained in the area. To be labelled a ‘scab’ in a small community was to be cast out as a pariah. The decision of the NUM’s national executive on 11 July to set up a star chamber
to discipline miners whose actions it classified ‘detrimental to the interest of the union’ did nothing to heal the divisions and was, from the NUM’s perspective, self-defeating,
for it helped spur the creation of the rival Nottinghamshire-based Union of Democratic Mineworkers, ending forever the closed shop monopoly the NUM had enjoyed as the nationwide representative of
miners’ interests.