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The fallout from the miners' strike of 1984/5 is still felt 20 years on. But two pit workers - now UNISON members - proved there is life beyond the coalface. Simon Vevers reports
Life after the mines
SWITCHING from coal mining to advising the public about their benefit
entitlements sounds like a dramatic career change. But for ex-Yorkshire
miner Steve Tulley becoming a welfare rights officer - and UNISON member
- was not such a culture shock as he had spent years as adviser, friend
and counsellor to his workmates as an NUM branch official.
"Basically I see my job as an area welfare rights officer as an
extension of what I used to do as NUM branch secretary, and while I loved
the camaraderie of working in the pit this job is the best I've ever had,"
says Steve (left), who played a prominent role in the miners' dispute 20 years
ago.
"There is stress, but it's a different type of stress to the pit.
I am dealing with people on a one-to-one basis, not dealing with all the
problems of 1,100 miners, their job prospects and the hopes of their families
all at once."
Steve, who is a member of his department's union negotiating committee,
joined Derbyshire County Council social services in Chesterfield in early
1994, a few months after Frickley colliery in South Elmsall closed. He
had sat in the NUM office on the last day and, after helping others prepare
for life after coal, realised that he had no job to go to the following
week.
Steve says: "I was really grateful to the council for giving me
this chance. We're a very proactive office, banging the drum to make sure
the people of Derbyshire are claiming the right amount of disability,
council tax and housing benefits. We also represent people at tribunals."
Frickley miners fought to keep their pit open for eight years after the
1984-85 strike, but they faced an increasingly hostile management.
"They adopted a 'we won and you lost' approach to industrial relations.
They were Dickensian days back in 1985. For the first three months after
the strike they wouldn't let us use the baths. It was like a scene from
the film How Green Was My Valley as we had to walk home covered
in coal dust. It was pure vindictiveness," he says.
Fellow Frickley miner Darren Price (below), who is now a UNISON member working
as a decorator as part of the maintenance team at Pontefract General Infirmary,
was 17 when the strike began in 1984.
"I'd
left school and within three months I was at Frickley and after 17 months
I was on strike. At the time I was a single man, with no ties and no bills
as I was living at home with my parents. I realise it was much harder
for the men with car loans, mortgages and families," he says.
But now aged 37, with a wife, two young children and a hefty mortgage,
Darren has no hesitation in saying, "If I were in the same position
again, knowing what this community went through I would still do it again.
We stuck together and believed in what we were fighting for and we were
proved right as they shut down the pits."
He was a regular on picket lines until he was hit by a police horsebox
outside Rossington colliery near Doncaster in October 1984. He suffered
head injuries, a fractured cheekbone and shattered sinuses and still feels
numbness on one side of his nose and under his eye.
With the support of the NUM he sued the police for damages, but the legal
action failed.
"I never had any real doubts that I would not win against the police.
As miners we were used to being treated like that," he says.
Now 20 years on from the strike and more than 10 years since the pit closed,
the winding gear at Frickley has long gone and all that remains is a large
mound.
Pointing to a row of derelict, vandalised houses on the old pit lane,
Steve Tulley says:
"If you look at the levels of crime when the pit was open they were
low. Most of the vandalism, drug-taking and car crime is the result of
the colliery closing."
There is some new housing in the village and a resource centre to help
retrain ex-miners and other victims of Thatcherite deindustrialisation.
But with the lifeblood of the community gone the transfusions of cash
to revive the area have been meagre so far.
While Steve praises the Labour government for acting to compensate miners
and other victims of industrial diseases and introducing the minimum wage
- "something the Tories would never have done" - he is angry
at the shift away from social justice and the encroachment of the private
sector into public services.
"I am in favour of getting rid of waste and spending sensibly, but
sometimes we go down the road of efficiency for it's own sake and the
workers and, more importantly, the people we are supposed to be looking
after suffer.
"I'm as pro-union as I always have been, and I have no regrets whatsoever
about the strike. Perhaps we could have handled things better from a PR
point of view, but I'm not one of those who harp on about how we needed
a ballot. We were targeted by the Tory government and we had to fight
back. The biggest lesson I feel for trade unions today is to make sure
the members are with them."
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BACKGROUND TO THE STRIKE At the start of the strike there were 170 pits employing around 200,000 men, by the end of 2003 there were just 15 mines left, all of them in private hands. |
LOTS MORE FEATURESIncluding stress in the workplace, getting out of debt and the pensions crisis more... |
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