In late 1984, shortly after having arrived at Chiswick I volunteered to go on aid to help to police the miner’s strike. It was the time of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher verses Arthur Scargil, the leader of the T.U.C., as Thatcher was determined to reign in the power of the unions that had in 1974 caused the downfall of Edward Heath’s government. The battlefield was the UK’s coalmines and Thatcher had been prepared for the fight having had many of the mines already stockpile 6 months worth of coal in the event of strikes. A number of miners didn’t want to go on strike as they realized that it would most probably be the last nail in their mining coffin. In fact the strike was subsequently decreed to be illegal by the High Court as the union members had not been balloted on whether they wanted to strike or not? We were tasked with protecting the miners against the ‘flying pickets’ who were mostly from the more militant Yorkshire mines, and they would be bussed into a particular mine that they wanted to target in order to demonstrate at, often violently and us officers, that had been sent to protect the Nottinghamshire coal mines, were housed in a disused and sparse army camp with the barracks aligned with double metal bunk beds and a small locker per bunk bed. Once intelligence had been received about which Nottinghamshire coal mines were about to be visited by the ‘flying pickets’, we had to quickly get on the bus and be transported to that mine to form a police line to stand inbetween the pickets and the miners as they went to work at the mine.
My 3 memories of that period, which doesn’t include the large amount of overtime payments that we received for policing the miner’s strike, for as I remember we were on paper ‘on duty’ 24 hours and many officers claimed to have paid off their mortgauges from the overtime that they earn’t whilst policing the miner’s strike, and I did my few days and was happy to get back to ‘normality’. The first memory was the experience of going down to the coal face to watch the miners dig out the coal and it was something I’ll never forget and was perhaps more poignant for me as my family were from Swansea with a long history of coal mining in the area. It might have been at Ollerton Colliery, where there had been many violent scuffles with the ‘flying pickets’, where we were given a brief visit down to the coal face and before getting into the cage lift to descend to the mine face, we had to give a numbered round brass token to the gate keeper and after we came back up he would return it and so knew that we weren’t still down the mine. Down on the mine face it was hot and cramped with large noisy machinery drilling out the coal face operated by black dust faced coal miners, most working in their vests having discarded their illuminous orange jackets because of the heat. I only experienced their working environment for a short while and soon like most other mines, because it was cheaper to import coal from abroad then to dig it out of the uk’s coal mines, the coal mine would close down. One of the reasons that most of Nottinghamshire’s miners prefered not to strike was that they were better paid than most of the other surrounding counties miners and they soon became aware that social security payments wouldn’t be paid in full to miner’s family’s under Thatchers regime, but a few Nottnghamshire miners did join the strike and were to also be found on the picket lines shouting ‘Scab, scab, scab’ at their former work colleages! We as on-duty police officers were barred from entering local pubs, and most pubs in the surrounding locality of the mines had their wholly striking miner’s customers, and others their wholly non-striking miner’s customers and never would the two meet.
My 2nd memory was with a couple of other policemen visiting a miner’s cottage, I think it was a striking miner’s cottage when the lady of the house appeared in a grubby dressing gown, and every 2nd word was an ‘F’ word, not that I could understand what she was saying because of her heavy accent and she then spat a big green piece of phlegm into the embers of the open coal fire’s hearth, and funnily enough I didn’t fancy the cup of tea that she offered to make me.
My 3rd memory was when being driven to a coal mine to prepare for the ‘flying pickets’ to arrive, and taking a detour to drive past the grocery store in Grantham, Lincolnshire where Margaret Thatcher had been born, we might even have been on our way to police a mine in Lincolnshire then, I don’t remember.
In the end Thatcher achieved her goals, and the miners voted to return to work in time to receive their 1984 Christmas bonuses, many of the uk’s mines were subsequently closed causing mass unemployment in those coalmining communities and the power of the trade union’s was greatly diluted so that they could no longer topple a government.
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