41 A Pork Pie and a Pint of Milk

Thurnscoe; Goldthorpe; Highgate, 1971–72

‘Today you will be shown some of the opportunities that are now open to school-leavers like yourselves. Remember, this is a big employer. Those of you who’ll be looking for work after Easter or in the summer, make sure to listen, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Does anybody have any questions for me before we get on the bus?’

Thurnscoe comprehensive school’s fourth-year boys, gathered in the school hall for this briefing from their careers teacher, look down at the parquet floor, or out to the playground where two private-hire coaches are waiting for them in the bright, March morning sunshine. Several of them edge towards the exit in readiness for a race for the buses’ back seats.

‘Stay where you are, Crossley, McGregor, and the rest!’ Mr Clark, the teacher, bangs his clipboard on the table for emphasis. ‘I hope you’ll bear in mind this is an educational visit, and not an excuse for a day’s larking about. A lot of trouble’s gone into organising this trip for you. Now, if there’s nothing else before we go –’

A plump boy raises his hand. ‘What about us dinner, sir?’

‘Dinner? Is that all you’ve got to ask about?’

The boy blushes as the others jeer at him.

‘It’s all laid on for you, you’ll no doubt be glad to know, Spence. They’re being very generous. Make sure you repay their generosity with good manners. Right, off you go.’

The boys stampede out of the school, and scrabble aboard the two coaches. Among them is Gary Hollingworth, crop-haired, face framed by wispy, teenage-whisker sideburns the size of lamb chops. He sits with his friend Kenny near the back of one of the buses, and pitches in with the insults and banter about who will and won’t get taken on.

‘They’ll not take Spence on ’cos he’ll eat all t’ food in t’ canteen!’

‘They’ll not even gi’e thee a button job, Crossley, ’cos tha’s scared o’ t’ dark!’

‘They’ll not take thee on, ’Olly, ’cos thy hair makes thee look like a psycho.’

‘And they’ll not take thee on, McGregor, because tha’d want to take thy mam to work wi’ thee!’

Gary rubs his head, irritated by McGregor’s suggestion. He and Kenny had recently persuaded Kenny’s dad to shave their heads in the skinhead fashion because they thought it would look rebellious and nonconformist. On seeing them in school, Mr Taylor, the deputy head, made the two boys stand on chairs in assembly while he denounced them as the sort of thugs who mug elderly women. It was ridiculous; Gary is not at all violent, he just enjoys acting like an outsider. Almost fifteen, he believes that his dad’s absence has taught him to be strong and independent of other people; when he looks in the mirror he sees a kind of wispy-sideburned skinhead Iron Man. Like most of the other boys he is impatient for adult life. His mam says she needs another wage coming in anyway, and his dad tells him to get to night school and make something of himself.

He turns away from the pillocking. ‘Only a couple of months and we’ll be free, Kenny.’

‘Aye. Two months too long.’

Kenny’s dad works at Houghton Main colliery, a mile to the west of Thurnscoe. He has told his son what to expect on the trip. ‘We might get set on wi’ a job today tha knows. We’ll soon be earning, ’Olly lad.’

The coaches drive through the village and, ten minutes after leaving the school, turn into the car park of Hickleton Main colliery. Hickleton’s training officers have arranged today’s visit so the boys can be shown around and invited to apply for jobs, all as part of an NCB recruitment drive currently being promoted on television and in newspapers and boys’ magazines. That month an advert in an issue of Goal, with a grinning Gordon Banks on the cover, urges readers to ‘Get the Best Industrial Training in Britain and Nearly £10 a Week at 15’. Underneath this headline a comic strip shows a pretty blonde girl rejecting a grocery delivery boy named Paul. ‘Get lost,’ she tells him. ‘I only go out with real men!’ Paul’s friend sees that he’s upset and asks, ‘Why don’t you get a real man’s job and join me and my mates in mining? You get a darn good training in basic engineering.’ Paul heeds the advice and joins an NCB training scheme. In the final frame he is reunited with the now-adoring blonde. ‘Honestly, mate,’ his friend needlessly reminds him. ‘You can’t go wrong in mining . . .’

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.

On 11 February, the day after the Saltley gates are closed, the government imposes more power cuts and a three-day week on British industry. More than a million and a half workers are to be laid off, but public support for the miners holds. In deadlock, the leaders of the Board and the NUM agree to hold an inquiry into working conditions in the modern mines, beginning on 15 February, to be chaired by the law lord, Richard Wilberforce – descendant of William Wilberforce the anti-slavery campaigner. Across Britain people buy candles, add newspapers to their beds, and wait.

*

Six o’clock on the Friday evening after the Saltley Gates news bulletin. A gloomy dusk hangs in the valley: yellow lights in the houses, a mist haze out on the fields, rooks settling in the bare trees. On the bridle path that cuts across the fields, a young man is walking from Thurnscoe towards Highgate. He has cropped hair and wears a long black leather coat, and as he nears Highgate, he breaks into a jog, which makes the coat flap about him so that he resembles a giant, blown-about crow. Past the greyhound track, past a scrapyard with a smouldering brazier, past the school, then down into the backings, across the yard and in through the back door of Number 34 Highgate Lane.

‘Ayup, Gary love,’ says Winnie. ‘Have you come for your tea?’ She stands at the cooker frying fish and wild mushrooms from the Seels’s field. Yes, Gary says, he’d like tea, and his grandmother takes from the fridge another yellow fillet and lays it in the sizzling pan.

In the sitting room, Harry is roasting the backs of his legs against a big furious fire, the smell of heated Crimplene competing with the aromas of food from the kitchen. Lynda is at the table in dressing gown and towel turban, applying mascara.

‘I’ve come to borrow my grandad’s work boots,’ Gary tells Winnie, ‘if he’ll lend them to me.’

The boots are Harry’s highly polished oxblood Dr Marten’s, a form of footwear that, to Harry’s confusion, has become fashionable.

‘Course he will. They’ll look nice wi’ what you’re wearing.’

Winnie always encourages Gary’s experiments with fashion. She had been the only one of his family to approve of the leather coat.

He goes into the sitting room and Harry looks him up and down and says something about the Gestapo, then curses the uselessness of the coal as a hot lump is spat out onto the floor. He scoops it up with the shovel from the companion set and looks up at the television. Arthur Scargill is on the local TV news. ‘Has tha seen this one, Gary?’ Harry says. ‘He could brainwash his sen.’

‘I saw it on t’ telly last night.’ Gary is about to mention Colin saying Arthur did a good job, but stops short because mentioning his other family always feels like some sort of betrayal.

‘Pushing and shoving wi’t’ bobbies, look,’ Harry says with a note of sadness in his voice. He adds, as he often does, that the government should fill in all the pits and close them down, and Gary replies that he thinks the pits are a bit different now to what they used to be.

Winnie brings in the food, and tells her husband to stop running down mining. ‘T’ miners have to stand up for their sens,’ she says. ‘Nobody else will.’

‘Can I borrow your work boots to go out in, Grandad?’

Harry pretends to be amazed, as if such a breach of fashion etiquette is incomprehensible to him. ‘Going out in work boots,’ he says, and wearily shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. I think t’ world’s going mad.’

Winnie looks at Gary and rolls her eyes. ‘Gi’ o’er, Harry. You used to wear a swallowtail coat and hide in graves when you were his age.’

‘Tombs.’

‘In tombs then. Anyway, you don’t know what’s in fashion, you’re too old. Our Olive says that in Halifax they all wear rubber gloves to go out in.’

After tea, shod in his grandad’s boots, Gary walks back to Thurnscoe to meet Kenny and Les in the Fairway Hotel, a large pub with a concert room. The Fairway is favoured by people in their teens and twenties who like music, and on Fridays its concert room is usually given over to Sound Syndrome, a mobile disco with banks of multi-coloured lights and lamps that project psychedelic patterns onto the walls. Tonight, because of the power cuts, the disco is cancelled and the concert room closed. A transistor radio is playing at full volume in the candlelit tap-room bar, where the eccentric heavy-rock fans who usually come out for the disco have gathered among the regular drinkers. The heavy rockers express their sense of kinship with theatrical and unconventional rock bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Genesis. On one table there are four china cups and a teapot full of beer, and a young man a few years older than Gary pouring out cups of bitter for others seated around him, sipping at one himself, periodically asking the barman to pull fresh pints into the teapot. At another is a small group of young men and women dressed like the Marx Brothers. Elsewhere there are girls with glitter on their faces, boys with shoulder-length hair and long beards, and girls putting dabs of glitter on boys’ cheeks for a laugh.

Gary, Kenny and Les, who know most of the people, buy pints of bitter and move from conversation to conversation in the shadows. There are mentions of the strike, of picketing and the lads who have been down to Birmingham. To general agreement a man with long hair and a beard says, ‘It’s our turn now.’ He could be referring to fashion, music, work or politics, but to Gary at that moment they all feel like aspects of the same thing.

*

Lord Wilberforce’s court of inquiry hears evidence on 14 and 15 February, and at the end of the week publishes a report which endorses the miners’ arguments. Before them have been brought for testimony men working in different areas of the industry, including some who have been bypassed by the modernisation of the 1960s. Here, in 1972, is Jack Collins from Kent, who labours in a pit so hot the men work naked, and who in 1963 had earned the equivalent of £5.50 for a shift, but now earns £5. Here is James O’Connor, sixty-two, from Maltby, not far from the Dearne Valley, who is earning £5 a week less than he did in 1966. Here are men still creeping on their bellies, slopping through water, defecating in the best places they can find, trying to bring up families on £18 a week and whatever means-tested social security payments they can get. There is also testimony from Coal Board officials arguing against the wage claim. Derek Ezra, the NCB chairman, says the wages as discussed do not reflect the fact that miners receive benefits in kind, such as the free coal allowance worth £2.30. Lawrence Daly, the NUM president, points out that Ezra has not disclosed the benefits in kind that supplement his salary of approximately £20,000 per year.

Wilberforce’s report says the miners had been asked to make unfair sacrifices when their pay was rationalised in the mid-1960s, and that the closures and job losses have caused great hardship. ‘This rundown, which was brought about with the cooperation of the miners and their union, is without parallel in British industry in terms of social and economic costs it has inevitably entailed for the industry as a whole.’ The national economy needs competitive and efficient coal mines, and they need a satisfied and capable workforce to run them. The miners, it concludes, have ‘a just case for special treatment’. Lord Wilberforce and his colleagues duly propose pay increases averaging eighteen and a half per cent, enough to lift mineworkers twelve per cent above the wages of the average manufacturing worker.

The NUM, however, rejects Wilberforce’s recommendations and holds out for the full pay claim. They don’t get it, but in negotiations with the Heath government the leaders obtain fifteen further improvements in conditions. On Monday 28 February 1972, Colin Greengrass, Kenny and many of the boys from Gary’s year at school return to work as some of the best-paid industrial workers in Britain.

Like the closure of the Saltley coke depot gates, the miners’ victory in the strike has significances that vary according to perspective. For many miners it brings feelings of greater confidence and recognition, and of power. For certain government MPs, it has been a pay claim won by holding the country to ransom. For Gary, it means that his grandparents’ memories are not just stories, and that for once, the television news has some connection to him and the Dearne Valley.