Dispute that left society scarred (From The Northern Echo)

Dispute that left society scarred

11:45am Wednesday 3rd March 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

The Miners' Strike came to an end on March 3, 1985. Twenty five years on, Mark Summers meets David Douglass, a miner and author who has recorded how he felt returning to the coalface after the year-long dispute.

DAVID DOUGLASS had been a vegetarian since the age of six, but when he went back to work after participating in the most bitter industrial dispute of modern times, he says it felt as wrong as if he had been eating meat.

Twenty-five years ago today, on Sunday, March 3, 1985, a delegates conference of the National Union of Miners (NUM) voted to return to work without reaching a settlement with the National Coal Board (NCB) over its programme of mass pit closures.

The year-long strike saw Mr Douglass, a Gateshead bornminer who moved to Hatfield Main, near Doncaster, South Yorkshire, when Wardley Colliery closed, organising pickets of pits in the area and once shut down a stretch of the A1(M) with a convoy of cars.

Mr Douglass, a divorced father- of-one who now lives in South Shields, said: “I felt like a scab. I felt as if I was doing something totally wrong. But we had nowhere to go. I wanted to fight on. My pit didn’t go back, so we stayed out, as did Kent and pits in Scotland, but we had to give in the end.’’ In his latest book, a part memoir-part history called Ghost Dancers, he records the return to the coalface “The feeling going down the pit lane knowing that we had been out a whole year and not succeeded started to become overpowering. Many of us wept,” he said.

Ghost Dancers chronicles the dispute, and the aftermath, including John Major’s “coup de grace” in the early Nineties that reduced a once mighty nationalised industry to a handful of private mines.

Mr Douglass, who served on the NUM Yorkshire Area Committee, said he set out to explode myths that perpetuated about the strike, which were not really about economic or efficient pits.

“It was an excuse,” he said.

“Thatcher needed to smash the unions to implement her free market neocon agenda and you couldn’t break the unions without breaking the NUM first. Whatever it took, that was the cost.’’ Myths, he said, include the strike being a personal battle between Mrs Thatcher and NUM national leader Arthur Scargill and that he prevented a national ballot.

“That makes us all appear dupes, but anybody who knows the history of miners knows that is utter rubbish.

“It is a myth that we called the strike at the wrong time of year. The Government picked the time of the strike when the stocks of coal were high.”

Mr Douglass said the outcome of the strike impacted on the lives of ordinary people in many different walks of life.

Its legacy can been seen today in the mothballing of the Corus steelworks on Teesside and the thousands of other manufacturing jobs lost since 1985, many overseas.

He believes it was also evident in the horrific case of the two boys who tortured two others in a former pit village near Doncaster – once a place where people left their doors open.

“We lost everything that generations of miners built up, not just for themselves but for the whole working class, in terms of union rights, civil rights, social welfare and a sense of justice and fair play.”

■ Ghost Dancers, part of a trilogy, can be ordered through any bookshop and online from centralbooks, AK Distribution, Amazon and the author at djdouglass@hotmail.co.uk for £13, including postage.

Speeches and poetry

THE NUM will mark the 25th anniversary of the end of The Miners’ Strike with an event in Newcastle on Saturday.

The Long March Back will be held in The Bridge Hotel, Castle Garth, at the north end of the High Level Bridge, at 11.30am.

Speakers will include Dave Guy and Dave Hopper, of the North-East Area NUM, the union’s national president Ian Lavery, Anne Scargill, the former wife of Arthur, and NUM vice-president Keith Stanley.

There will be a bookfair throughout the day, and from 7.30pm, a folk and poetry social evening.