52 The Future is a Foreign Country

Rustenburg, South Africa; Houghton Main Colliery; Grimethorpe Colliery, 1981–82

Although Roy now earns only a modest living as a part-time motor mechanic, he continues to mock Gary for taking a job at the pit. No family visit to Hinckley ever passes without a careers lecture being delivered over the caravan’s fold-down table. ‘What you should be doing,’ he usually begins, ‘is getting on with computers. That’s what it’s all going to be about.’

‘I’m already on with them, Dad,’ says Gary. ‘We use computers to monitor all t’ ventilation and air pressure at t’ pit.’

‘Pit.’ Roy says the word as if it disgusts him. ‘T’ pit’s not computers, it’s a bloody dead-end.’

‘We do alright. It’s not a bad wage, tha knows.’

‘You should have a better house and car, then. When I was your age I was earning £30 a week, which was a lot of money. Where’s your drive?’

These conversations embarrass Gary and make him feel he is a disappointment to his father. When he was a kid, his dad would talk proudly about what his son was going to achieve; now he berates him for owning a Skoda.

‘Get yourself a right job,’ says Roy. ‘Think about Scott. You’re providing for him as well, remember.’

In fact colliery employment is still, in the early eighties, relatively plentiful and among the best-paid work in South Yorkshire. As steelworks, textile factories and railways had closed down or cut workers, joblessness in the Dearne had been rising through the 1970s, reaching levels described by a phrase brought back from the past: mass unemployment. By 1980 unemployment in the valley stands at 12.6 per cent – more than twenty per cent discounting Youth Opportunity Schemes – and in some places one in four people are out of work. Few teenage lads have jobs, and the older men who are laid off are told not to expect to find work in the immediate future. With employers struggling, the remaining pits become more important to the area’s economy; of the jobs that are available in 1980, about thirty per cent are in, or dependent on, coal. And in the main these are good jobs to have. In the schools, the miners’ kids are envied for their new trainers and their dads’ new cars.

In February 1981, Joe Gormley’s request for a meeting with government ministers is at first rejected by Mrs Thatcher, but then she and her Energy Minister David Howell back down, and Howell meets the NCB and NUM leaders. Ezra’s figure of fifty closures had been misleading, as many of these had already been discussed and agreed with the union, but Howell says he will look at keeping the threatened pits open, reducing imports and removing the financial constraints the 1980 Act had placed on the NCB. Ezra withdraws the plans, miners who had already come out on strike go back to work, and in the end Gormley wins extra state aid for the industry. Everyone knows it will amount only to a skirmish in a bigger battle yet to come (‘Miners v. Tories: the supreme test that faces Mrs Thatcher’ runs a Times headline the day before the Howell meeting), but it seems grounds for optimism.

Meanwhile, the Selby complex is three-quarters complete and being promoted with images resembling the pictures in sci-fi books Gary and David read as children. The NCB is bullish, talking up the reconstruction of the coal fields as ‘one of the most extensive rejuvenation exercises in industrial history’. ‘By 1984, when we start to reap the full benefits of our major schemes,’ reads the NCB page in Barnsley, An Industrial Heritage, a booklet published by the city’s Chamber of Commerce in 1981, ‘Barnsley will be one of the most productive and profitable areas in the country.’

But Roy’s nagging gets to Gary and half-convinces him that if he stays at Houghton Main he could be in a doomed dead-end. A month after Winnie and Harry’s golden wedding anniversary, one of Roy’s scoldings spurs Gary to reply to an advertisement for mineworkers placed in the Sun newspaper by GenCo, a South African mining corporation. He has heard about these jobs at work. Some Canadian and South African companies set up recruitment offices in Barnsley, and offer good terms and grants to young families who want to relocate, and emigration has become a popular subject; Geoff Allan, Lynda’s first husband, has not long ago left for Australia. The old men at Houghton tell the young ones to go. ‘If I had my time again I’d be off, sirree,’ a fitter tells Gary one snap time. ‘I had my papers for Australia once, and I wish I’d gone. This country’s buggered, and we all know what Maggie’ll do to t’ pits.’

Gary travels to London for an interview at GenCo’s headquarters off Fleet Street, and receives a letter offering him an environmental engineer’s post in a mine complex at Bafokeng. He hesitates because of stories on the news about South Africa, because apartheid seems too strange and wrong, and because the NUM is opposed to its members working in South African mines. But then Roy rings and tells him he’d be a bloody fool to pass up the chance, and he wonders what was there to stay for; the coking plant at Manvers had closed, and you could see the same happening all over the county. Most people expected the high unemployment to be permanent. In Sheffield, where foundries and factories are closing down or else making redundancies, someone has spray-painted a bus stop with the words: ‘IT IS NOT A GOOD TIME TO BE YOUNG AND SINGLE’, and no one seems inclined to clean it off.

Elaine says if Gary wants to go, and if it’ll be good for his job, then they should go. What do they have to lose? He writes to accept the job offer, and hands in his notice at Houghton Main.

His dad is delighted, but the adventure goes badly. Three months before they are due to leave, as the newspapers and television news count down to Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding, Elaine finds out she is pregnant. She braves it out and decides to have the baby in South Africa, and they fly out from Heathrow in October, but even at the departure gate Gary realises his notion of their emigration as a singular, distinguished enterprise is false; the cordoned area is full of young men, women and children from Scotland, Wales and the North East, all part of the same exodus. At Jan Smuts International Airport in Johannesburg, a middle-aged sunburned Afrikaner with a clipboard and pistol at his hip directs three planeloads of mining families through the bright, blast-furnace air towards a waiting fleet of minibuses.

*

A South Africa story: one afternoon Gary comes home to his family’s apartment in the Bushveld city of Rustenburg and sees a bundle of greasy newspaper on the kitchen worktop beside a handbag. The newspaper contains the remains of the family’s fish and chips from the night before; the handbag belongs to Sima, their Zambian maid. Gary is looking at the paper when Sima comes in. She sees him and looks alarmed. When he greets her she mumbles and looks down, so Elaine has to explain that Sima has taken the food from the bin and asked if she can take it for her family. Gary wants to tell her about his grandma, and how she might have done the same thing when she was in service in the 1920s, but realises that even if Sima believed him it would only make her uncomfortable. He goes back out into the garden to spare her any more awkwardness.

For some of the expats, having the maids covet their crumbs feels empowering, because it means you were not on the lower rungs but up high, passing down your scraps. It does not feel like that to Gary and Elaine. What they feel is embarrassment.

They stay for five months, long enough for their baby, a girl they name Claire, to be born, and then decide to come back. The veldt has made them homesick, the terrorist attacks on the mines have unnerved them, and they have struggled to settle socially. The Afrikaners dislike the British, and the segregation seems to put everyone on edge. Gary develops a habit of looking out at the beautiful landscape and daydreaming about wintry weekend afternoons at home in England.

They land at Heathrow in heavy rain and low cloud. In the airport the newspaper headlines are full of the Falklands conflict, and the people in the shops look pale and tired under the over-bright lights. Having given up their house when they left, Gary, Elaine, Scott and Claire move in with Margaret and Colin, and Gary goes out looking for work on an old 100cc East European motorbike he buys from a classified advertisement in a newspaper. Seeing the towns and villages with back-from-abroad eyes, he thinks there has been a deterioration even in the short time he has been away: shops and factories that were open last October have closed, bus shelters have been vandalised, and some of the clubs have new fences, and bars on their windows. There are few job advertisements in any shop windows, and no one he asks has any idea of where he might even begin to look for work. The time of free pork pies and pit-top school trips is long gone. At Houghton Main, Eric the personnel manager blows out through pursed lips and rubs the back of his head. ‘No chance here, Gary,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a waiting list. Everyone has.’

He takes a job as a painter and decorator, just as he did when he was fifteen. After four months of checking in weekly with Eric, he gets his old job back after some of the ventilation men take redundancy packages. Then, because he has realised that regardless of what his dad says, he likes the Dearne and he enjoys pit work, he does what he should have done in the first place: he enrols at Barnsley Technical College to study for a qualification in air-measurement, ventilation management and environmental engineering. He moves his family into a pit house on Queen Street in Thurnscoe, and at night he sits at the kitchen table studying.

*

One morning in February 1983, as Gary approaches the gates of Houghton Main on his motorbike, he sees ahead through the cold drizzle a cluster of men in anoraks and donkey jackets, standing behind hand-painted wooded signs. They are pickets; it is not uncommon to find a picket line at a pit these days, but usually the men, and the dispute, are local. These men, however, are unknown to him, and their accents are Welsh. They have come to persuade Yorkshire miners to strike with them against the closure of another Welsh pit, Lewis Merthyr in the Rhondda.

A short, dark-haired man about Gary’s age, wearing an NCB donkey jacket, says, ‘They’re starting with us, closing them one by one to see what they can do, mate. Then they’ll go after ’em all. You seen Arthur’s list, now?’

Arthur Scargill, elected president of the entire NUM at the start of the year, has been campaigning with what he says is a leaked list of fifty pits the NCB wants to close. The Board has been closing the pits that it promised to keep open, and making thousands of men redundant.

‘Aye, we’ve seen t’ list,’ says Gary. ‘I don’t know about a strike though. Lads here are scared of losing their jobs.’

‘They’ll lose ’em anyway if they don’t fight.’

‘Aye, but . . .’

Aye, but; he means the union leaders seem to talk about strike votes all the time, and a lot of the men have grown sceptical. Besides, this is not 1926 or 1972, when there was little or nothing to lose. Some of them have car and mortgage payments to keep up. They are loyal, but it might take more than a threatened pit in the Welsh valleys to bring them out.

An older man in a nylon rally jacket and a flat cap studded with union and colliery badges joins in. ‘Come on, mate. Think about it. This branch has a meeting, you can vote to support us.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

But in March the NUM members vote against a strike. The Welsh miners go home, and Lewis Merthyr closes down in June. Meanwhile, the Conservative government is reviving its efforts to confront the NUM and shut unprofitable coal mines. In June, boosted by Britain’s recapture of the Falkland Islands, Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative party is re-elected with a manifesto that contains a coded commitment to reduce the NCB’s losses by closing loss-making pits. In September, the Energy Secretary Nigel Lawson announces that from September the NCB will be run by Ian MacGregor, a Scottish industrialist who has fought mining unions in America. In 1980, Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary of State for Industry, had made MacGregor chairman of British Steel, and he had spent his time there reducing losses by closing plants and making redundancies with little apparent sympathy for the unemployed. In the coalfields the significance of the appointment seems clear.

In pit yards in the Dearne, and across all the coalfields, stockpiles of coal rise and rise as the pit managers build up reserves. They tell the men to keep the new layers of coal on the piles thin and even, to reduce the risk of creating air pockets that could cause spontaneous combustion. This is what you do if you’re building a large pile that will remain in place for a long time; the sort of pile you might build as a reserve, for example, if you were expecting a long strike.

*

As the rumours spread and thicken across the valley like wet, winter mists, Gary Hollingworth moves to Grimethorpe colliery to become its dust control officer. Grimethorpe is a large village about three miles north-west of Thurnscoe, overlooked by mountainous black and grassy spoil heaps and a hulking church built on a hill. The colliery complex, comprising two pits, a smokeless fuel plant, a power station and the biggest coal preparation plant in Europe, is, like Manvers Main, a small city of girders, chimneys, hoppers, sheds and machinery-strewn yards. To an outsider it looks like a gigantic piece of electronic equipment with its lid taken off. Below the earth its tunnels take up seven square miles, so that when Gary goes down the Number Two Shaft, and travels to the faces, he is half a mile beneath Thurnscoe and miles away from Grimethorpe. He calculates one day that he is working more or less underneath his mam’s house.

Gary’s responsibilities are to keep the colliery and its six thousand or so men safe; if the dust ignites, the pit goes up. The job does not bring him automatic acceptance, however. All pits, like towns and villages, have their own character, and Grimethorpe is awkward: ‘bolshy’ in management terms. This is only partly to do with union politics. Despite its scale it is still a village pit in nature, and like all villages, it respects character rather than rank. For men on the lowest levels of management, as Gary now is, this means it can be difficult to give orders – particularly if you are a newcomer and the youngest on the team.

‘Get that box of bolts down to t’ pit bottom,’ the safety engineer tells him in the pit yard on his second day. ‘Ask Tommy.’ Tommy is the shaft service manager, the man who controls what goes up and down the shaft between pit top and bottom. Gary carries the box across the yard to the shaft top, where a slim man in his forties stands making notes with a pencil stub in a notebook. ‘Is thar Tommy?’ asks Gary.

‘Who wants him?’

‘I do, mucker. Will you get us that down to t’ shaft side?’

Tommy looks down at the box and back up at Gary. ‘Fuck off.’

Gary half-laughs, which he knows immediately is a mistake. ‘Go on, mate.’

‘No.’ Tommy turns to ostentatiously pick at flaking red oxide paint on a girder.

He pauses, which is a better move, because it acknowledges Tommy’s unofficial authority. Once this is acknowledged, Tommy can begin to feel some sympathy for him. He stands there, not saying anything.

Tommy cracks first. ‘What?’

‘It’s just that I’ve got to get this job done, and we’re behind.’

‘So?’

Gary knows enough not to say, ‘because my boss wants me to’. The men run the pit, that’s the real rule most of the time; the bosses are merely humoured.

‘It needs doing. There’s some lads down there can’t get on without it.’

Tommy affects boredom. ‘Leave it there,’ he sighs. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘That’s right, lad,’ says the safety engineer, when Gary says that Tommy seems an aggressive bugger. ‘But Tom’s alright. Blokes like that, you just have to learn how to talk to ’em.’

He does learn and he discovers that while some of the aggressive buggers are just bloody-minded, others are the most loyal and cooperative men he has ever met. It is a lesson that he will remember, and apply many years later, in very different circumstances.

*

MacGregor takes over and he and Scargill fall out over a pay claim and alleged pit closures. The mood in the pits grows fractious. NCB chiefs say that, having invested £3 billion to bring new capacity on stream, they need to close old pits that can’t be modernised. There are rumours that fifteen pits totalling 15,000 jobs will close by March 1984. The union imposes an overtime ban, but men in some collieries ignore it, and some managers reorganise shifts to fight it. Rag-ups break out at individual pits in South Yorkshire, and some of the men from these disputes picket others.

In January 1984, the NCB announces a new policy for coal, a familiar set of ideas concentrating production on the new, modern super-pits, and closing the older, smaller ones, with good redundancy terms. Tensions between managers and men increase. In February miners at Polmaise colliery near Stirling in Scotland go on strike when the NCB says it will close the pit. By March the mood in many coalfields is one of rising chaos. In Yorkshire the teatime local television news carries long round-ups from the local collieries, explaining who is and who is not on strike. In the Dearne Valley, in February, a row over new shift patterns at Manvers Main becomes a rallying point, and when the men walk out, others from Barnburgh, Wath, Kilnhurst, Cadeby and Silverwood walk out in support. In Thurnscoe, word goes around that Arthur Scargill is coming to the Cora to talk to the men, and David Hollingworth and Gary walk down to find the club packed.

Union meetings at the Cora are always well attended, but almost everyone in the village seems to be here, and the mood is urgent and serious. Arthur, in a dark suit, stands in the middle of the stage in front of a poster saying ‘NO PIT CLOSURES’, and warns them what is to come, telling them Ian MacGregor has been brought in to butcher the industry, and answering questions at the end. The pay claim is more or less forgotten; everyone in Yorkshire knows what it’s really about. The mountains of stockpiled coal in Hickleton pit yard are there to remind them.

The atmosphere afterwards in the Cora is opaque with cigarette smoke and rumours. Some of the men are ready to walk out now. David hears one man say he wants to get on with it and get a strike called. He reckons it could all be over in six weeks.