Authors: Richard Benson
Hickleton pit yard sits in the lap of the spoil heap, like a hamlet at the foot of a black mountain. Concrete and iron girder headgears tower over the brick offices, sheds and piles of equipment like watchtowers, looking down on the boys in their black blazers as they follow the colliery training officer into the canteen. Here there are long rows of Formica-topped tables with room for hundreds of men. The training officer directs the boys and their teachers to a reserved row, introduces himself as Mr Eldon, and gives a lecture about prospects in the coal industry. Mr Eldon is youngish and friendly, and when he sits down to talk he takes off his suit jacket, and perches side-saddle on a table. It’s a modernised industry with a big future in Yorkshire, he says, and the old stories they will have heard don’t apply in today’s mines. Hickleton is just about fully mechanised. Computers will be coming in, and there are all sorts of training courses and welfare benefits.
Before they go to look around the yard, the boys are sent up to the canteen counter where serving women give each of them a pint of milk, and a golden-brown NCB pork pie served on a white melamine plate. Then Mr Eldon gives them a tour of various buildings, and explains the work that is done in each. Some of the boys are dismayed to find that they’re not being shown the real action, and ask if they can go underground.
‘Er, not today, no.’
‘But what’s t’ point of coming to look round a pit and not going down it?’
‘We’ve some leaflets about working underground,’ says Mr Clark, staring at the boy asking the question. ‘Let’s get finished out here, and then we’ll go back to the canteen for a chat.’
Back inside the canteen a table has been piled with NCB pamphlets, and some lads are hoping there’ll be more pork pies. At another table boys can sign up for a job for after they leave school at Whitsuntide. They form a queue. Gary joins it, and adds his name to the list.
*
When Gary turns up for his first day at Hickleton Main the recruitment officer rejects him because he has had tuberculosis.
The next day Gary cycles around asking for work at building sites, workshops and farms until he gets a job with a building company that is installing bathrooms in council houses. He gives most of his wages to his mam and the rest goes on clothes, records, sci-fi and history books and, occasionally, beer. Tall for his age, he finds it easy to get served in pubs, and he finds that he likes being among older men who will talk to him about the Army and the war, or the history of the Dearne villages. He wonders how old he will need to be before he can have a drink with his grandad.
On New Year’s Eve 1971, Gary, Kenny and their friend Les go out to celebrate in the packed and roaring-hot pubs of Goldthorpe. In some, Slade, T-Rex and Rod Stewart are on the jukebox; in others, organists and singers perform standards against the din. By ten o’clock the crowds are dense and unyielding and lads not from Goldthorpe are likely to get themselves punched if they push too hard at the bar. When Gary knocks a stranger’s arm, slopping the man’s beer onto his clothes and the floor, the boys catch the man’s malevolent stares, drain their glasses and escape, at Gary’s suggestion, to the Unity Club.
The Unity is a squat, single-storey building on a tidy street on the edge of the village. It used to be the Catholic Club, but in the late sixties the committee dropped the religious membership requirement and adopted the new name, although no one dared to remove the large brass crucifix on the bar-room wall. The change brought in a different crowd and allowed for the employment on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights of an electric organist and drummer: Jack Sharpe and his friend Juggler Hollingworth.
Tonight, standing in a corner at the back of the concert room with Les and Kenny, Gary peers through the cigarette smoke at his grandad and Jack seated on the low stage, playing standards and songs from musicals. Backed by swags of old Christmas decorations and faded mustard drapes pinned with tinsel, the two musicians look trim in their suits and striped shirts and ties, both of their faces flushed from the heat of the crowded bodies on the small dance floor and at the tables. Harry’s suit jacket hangs on a peg at the side of the stage.
‘That’s my grandad playing t’ drums,’ says Gary. This was the reason he had suggested the Unity; he had wanted to see Harry playing, and he had wanted Kenny and Les to see him too.
‘Is that t’ Juggler then?’ says Les. ‘He could do with some new material. A bit of Black Sabbath!’
Les and Kenny talk about music, and the lasses dancing, but Gary listens to the drums: the thuds of the bass, the crisp snare rattles, the hissing hi-hat. Once, Harry had set up his kit in the front room and let Gary have a go, and it had been harder than it looked. ‘No music written down for t’ drummer, Gary,’ he had said. ‘Tha’s to feel t’ rhythm, and to lead.’
Feel the rhythm and lead: how do you learn to do that?
The club grows hotter, the crowd louder, and the cigarette smog barely moves. Harry and Jack break for a drink. Gary has lost sight of his grandad and has slipped into the conversation about lasses, when he feels a hand on his shoulder. ‘Ayup, Grandad!’ says Gary, trying to hide his beer glass.
‘Never mind ayup,’ says Harry. ‘Finish them drinks now and get thysens off home.’
It isn’t quite the welcome Gary had hoped for. ‘Why?’
‘I’m going to teach thee summat now. See yon bell up there?’ he points behind the bar. ‘When that rings for t’ New Year, they’ll all be kissing each other .
.
.’
‘We’re not bothered about that!’
‘Aye, we might get a kiss!’ says Kenny, and he and Les laugh and look to Harry to see if he’s laughing too.
‘It’s after t’ kissing tha’s to watch. After t’ kissing they’ll all be fighting.’
‘How do you know that?’ says Les.
‘Trust me,’ he says. ‘Now get home. I mean it, Gary. I want you out before midnight.’
He turns and pushes back to the bar. The boys drink their pints and at quarter to twelve ease their way through the crowd, stopping in the foyer to look back. The bell strikes and people cheer and throw streamers, and Harry and Jack kick into ‘
Auld Lang Syne’
. The crowd folds in on itself, hugging and handshaking and shoulder-clasping; couples cuddle and hold lingering kisses. Suddenly there is a little surge and an eddy of bodies and then scuffling noises come towards the exit.
The three boys, tipsy and laughing, push through the doors into the cold night air and run down the road and back towards the busier streets. Stars shine above them and the pavement glitters with frost. On the main road solitary revellers stagger and reel, while some folk embrace and others argue. Flushed with beer and worldly wisdom, Gary runs with his friends through the sparkling darkness towards home and adulthood and 1972.
*
Around this time Margaret becomes close to a Goldthorpe man she meets when her workmates take her out for a drink in Thurnscoe. Nine years her junior, Colin Greengrass is an unassuming companion and wary of commitments after an antagonistic and financially ruinous divorce. He and Margaret establish their friendship in a low gear, testing themselves with each other before they risk confidences, and then begin a cautious courtship.
With David and Gary he is plain: none of them wants a substitute-father relationship, so he will be a friend and seek no authority. He fosters David’s new interest in fishing, and shares with Gary local history and mining stories. Colin works underground at Highgate pit and his father, who had also worked there, was of the same generation as Walter Parkin. He had been in the 1926 strike, and the experience left him cynical and dispirited for the rest of his life. ‘They thought they’d be supported,’ he tells Gary, ‘but they weren’t. And tha knows what they got called .
.
.’
‘Aye,’ says Gary, ‘I know.’
It is through Colin that, in the early weeks of 1972, Gary and David experience the first national miners’ strike in Britain since 1926. The strike begins in early January, but the discontent that prompts it has been fermenting for at least five years. Through the 1960s, British coal has had increasing competition from cheap imported oil. To help it compete, the NCB has been keeping wages down, reducing employee numbers and closing pits. Believing the Labour government to be committed to the coal industry, the miners’ union leaders have accepted the reductions in good faith. However, by 1967, when the government proposed the closure of seventy pits, the miners realised that jobs would go regardless of any pre-election promises. And there are other grievances. Mechanisation has improved conditions, but in many pits men still extract coal by hand, and where the new machines are introduced, their chains, blades and belts kill and injure hundreds, and their dust slows the rate of decline of pneumoconiosis. The rising cost of living diminishes wages still further: from being twenty-two per cent above the average manufacturing worker’s wage in 1957, the average miner’s pay is, by 1969, two per cent lower. Despite the claims of the NCB adverts, Yorkshire school-leavers now find they can earn more as bus conductors than as colliery surface workers.
Suspecting that government ministers are intent on running down their industry, men like Colin Greengrass, who had previously been wary of national strikes because of the experiences of their fathers’ generation, come to believe that they might as well risk a stand. There are some unofficial disputes, but the miners’ loyalty to the Labour government, and gratitude for nationalisation, makes many reluctant to strike. In June 1970, though, Edward Heath’s Conservative Party is voted in and the following year the miners claim wage rises of up to forty-seven per cent, a rise that would contravene the government’s incomes policy. When the claim is rejected and negotiations fail, they vote to strike.
The strike stops work at all of the 289 NCB collieries. Miners picket storage depots, power stations, steel works and docks to disrupt deliveries of coal and coke around the country, and the tactic works. On the last weekend of January 1972, a cold snap causes a surge in the demand for power which drains the national grid and rapidly reduces the remaining coal stocks. Twelve power stations close and steel works and cotton mills shut down because they have no coal. There are power cuts across the country, and some homes have electricity only on a three-hours-on/three-hours-off basis.
In Whitehall, traumatised civil servants discuss plans for governing a Britain without electricity. An episode of
Blue Peter
features Peter Purves and John Noakes telling children how to use newspapers to keep old people warm during power cuts. Police, pickets and strike-breakers clash on picket lines, and on Thursday 3 February, a lorry driver recruited by the Central Electricity Generating Board drives through a crowd of police and pickets at the power station in Keadby, near Scunthorpe, and hits and kills Fred Matthews, a thirty-seven-year-old miner from Hatfield. As the news of Matthews’s death spreads, the mood on the picket lines and in mining areas darkens. Pickets are arrested, and in the House of Commons Tom Swain, an MP for a mining constituency in Derbyshire, warns that ‘this could be the start of another Ulster in the Yorkshire coalfield’.
Colin Greengrass, who has been picketing power stations, comes home the night of Fred Matthews’s death looking disconcerted. He has seen lorries driving into the crowds before, he says, and thought someone might get killed.
A week later Colin, Margaret, Gary and David are eating tea in the sitting room, with the TV on in the corner. Gary is in his work clothes, with paint on his hands and plaster dust in his hair, and Colin still has on the old jeans and sweater he wears on picket duty. When the newscaster for the teatime television news mentions the miners, Colin lays down his knife and fork beside his unfinished fish fingers and chips, and listens intently. The story is about a mass picket of the West Midlands Gas Board coke depot in Saltley, a suburb of Birmingham. At the start of the miners’ strike, the Gas Board, like all coal and coke suppliers, had been given instructions, agreed between the NUM and the government, to supply only customers with pressing needs, such as hospitals. The board directors have ignored the instructions and the plant has been selling hundreds of lorry loads every day, undermining the miners’ efforts to choke off supplies. In the last few days news reporters have been covering the story as miners from different areas of the country travel to Saltley to picket the depot, and the police have brought in reinforcements. Arthur Scargill, a young union representative from Woolley colliery who is the spokesman for the Barnsley strike committee, has travelled down with 400 Yorkshire miners and is directing the surges of the pickets as they try to block the lorries’ paths. Government ministers, aware that the closing of the depot would be portrayed in the press as a victory for the miners, have told the chairman of the West Midlands Gas Board to keep the plant open.
Tonight, the news shows thousands of people converging on the coke depot. Trade union members, the reporter explains, have held one-day strikes in support of the miners and up to 20,000 have marched to Saltley to join the picket. Seeing the size of the crowd, Birmingham’s chief constable has instructed the Gas Board managers to close the depot; the television news pictures show the gates closing, Scargill making a speech, and a great mass of men and women, old and young, cheering him. When Gary looks away from the television and across the table, he sees that Colin is silently crying. Colin will later explain that the Saltley picket had made him think of his father, the public support seeming to show an understanding and vindication of his generation’s struggle in 1926.