Roadblocks, riots and a strike

Going through the 'in-by' doors at Grimethorpe Main in 1982 changed my mind about miners. Middle-class wisdom (which I'd clearly got plenty of from childhood years in Berkshire and Somerset) was that these were a bolshy Northern lot who, when they weren't bringing down Governments, wanted more and more money for doing no more than digging.
Such are the simplicities of ignorance.
The journey down to the coalface at Grimethorpe, part of my journalism training in South Yorkshire, swept the ignorance away. The in-by doors gave way to a wave of heat, dust, cramped conditions and mechanical noise.
Two hours later, and I had aches, bruises, a couple of cuts and a sweaty, dust-covered appearance to show for crawling round a coalface. I also had more than an inkling that I'd got one hell of a lot to learn about mining and its people.

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It is a dark winter morning and you are driving to work on an empty road. You come upon a roadblock, where men in uniform force you to stop, shine torches in your face, look suspiciously at you and your car and demand to see your papers.
It sounds like the stuff of some 1950s Communist dictatorship, but wasn't. It was my journey to work along the A38 near Sutton-in-Ashfield one morning in March 1984. Having shown the police my drivers' licence and my press card, I was allowed on my way. Others weren't: particularly if they looked like flying pickets who'd come down the M1 from South Yorkshire.
At the other end of my journey, with day breaking, was a huge, noisy picket line at Thoresby Colliery. Evidently plenty of Yorkshire miners had got through the rabbit warren of roads that runs south near the A1, and they were going to let those Nottinghamshire miners refusing to join Arthur Scargill's national strike know what they thought.
They were scab labour, class traitors. Or were they democratic heroes who weren't going to let a left-wing firebrand like Scargill use them to fuel his ego in some prehistoric political struggle with the Government?
Was this about stopping pit closures? Or was it about a union bringing down a democratically-elected Government again?
It wasn't just Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire who were bitterly, viciously divided on this issue. It was families living on the same pit village avenues, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, brothers in the same families.
You were either for the strike or against it. There were no ifs, no buts. The North of the county was the last mining area in the country still working, a situation which turned the villages into places where the ties that bind were sometimes torn apart.
And the picket lines? Sometimes it was just shouting and the banging of bus doors. On other, far more frightening and depressing occasions, it was a street-by-street riot where bones were broken, blood was drawn and property was wrecked.
This was not a dispute. It was a fight, with everything that implied.

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There was more than physical damage. Truth, justice and liberty all took a beating in the strike.
Stories of strike-inspired brutality turned out to be the settling of old scores, some of the tales of strike-breaking bravery were political put-up jobs, while Scargill's rabble-rousing condemnation of the 'Tory press' in speeches led to local journalists being manhandled or given a mouthful for doing no more than a decent job.
Mansfield Magistrates Court was turned into a legal playground where clever London lawyers committed to the strikers' cause played games with magistrates who struggled to conceal their own community loyalties.
I well remember a local solicitor shaking his head in shame and muttering "High Court fodder" as one union lawyer bated a well-meaning magistrate beyond breaking point. May be she had over-stepped the mark in voicing an opinion about his tactics. Or may be a small town court was being expected to adjudicate in a national political war.
The subsequent arrival of professional stipendiary magistrates to deal with the huge backlog of mining-related cases suggested the court had been placed under an intolerable burden.
As for liberty...if the roadblocks weren't enough then how about the case of a couple of activists supporting the NUM cause by handing out leaflets in Blidworth? They were arrested because voicing an opinion and distributing pieces of paper was deemed threatening behaviour.
How about the almost military operations that saw police escorting men along back roads simply because they wanted to get to work?
Many of these cases quietly faded away, but the routine muzzling of dissent on both sides left a nasty taste in the mouth.

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While some of the old mining communities have found a way forward, others still strike you as places without a purpose now, neat rows of houses built as homes for pitmen looking like industrial relics.
Yet North Notts is no wasteland. Indeed, in Ollerton a regeneration scheme spearheaded by ex-miner Stan Crawford was voted the most enterprising place in Britain. Sherwood Energy Village is built on the site of what was Ollerton Colliery, the place where striking Yorkshire miner David Jones met his death when he was hit on the head by a brick.
His family return every year to remember him. Just like the pit I went down in 1982, it disappeared years ago.