The Dearne Valley, 1985–89
If you were to peer down like a clairvoyant on South Yorkshire in the late 1980s you would see Lynda and John, Gary and Elaine, and David and Marie all reckoning that the gloomy predictions about mining communities that they hear on TV will not apply to the villages of the Dearne Valley. In frilly-curtained and velour-setteed sitting rooms, on local shopping streets, and at Sheffield’s new out-of-town, opulently domed Meadowhall retail centre, they and their friends meet and say, ‘Aye, Maggie’ll make us suffer, she’ll want to finish us off, but she’ll not shut all t’ pits at once . . . And even if they shut ours I don’t think we’d get all t’ crime coming in like they do in some places. Folks stick together, don’t they? They stuck together in t’ strike. They’ll not suddenly stop because t’ pit’s shut.’
From West Yorkshire come stories of closed-down shops, drug dealers on pit estates and break-ins. Well, they say in the Dearne, maybe some of them villages were a bit rough anyway. I can’t see that coming here, can you? Their tone is not boastful, naive or complacent, but based on a faith that the majority of people are decent and self-improving, and that, anyway, if someone was dealing drugs, the adults would find them and kick them back to where they came from.
You would also see, in the eighteen months after the strike, three South Yorkshire collieries closing without the immediate aftermath of dead white-eyed shops, empty houses and a rise in crime. In these cases there are other local collieries to take men who want to transfer, and neighbouring villages to supply jobs and customers for the shops and tradesmen. The men who stay in mining can earn good wages and bonuses because South Yorkshire is still a profitable and productive coalfield. At first it is less prone to multiple closures, though if you looked into the NCB’s Yorkshire Area offices in Doncaster at this time, you could see Lynda Burton bundling up sheaves of figures for the statisticians, feeding reports down fax lines to headquarters in London, and realising that the bureaucrats are now measuring up the collieries like undertakers measuring up bodies.
If you pan out you can follow those lines down to the NCB head offices near the Department of Energy in Whitehall, and see civil servants and politicians devising a new nameplate: the National Coal Board is renamed the British Coal Corporation and the politicians talk of the rebrand as a step to selling off the pits to private owners. They say the privatisation will accompany that of power generation and supply, and mean that Britain’s coal mines will no longer be the preferred suppliers to British electricity-generating power stations, which means that the power generators, whoever they may be, will then be able to import cheaper coal, from countries such as Russia, the United States and Colombia.
And if you move out far enough to take in Colombia’s capital city Bogotá, you might see at work a young freelance journalist who had come to England to cover the miners’ strike. The journalist had reported on conditions at the Colombian coal mines, where there were few safety standards and children were employed, and wanted to interview British mining families. On the picket line at Houghton Main he had met Gary Hollingworth, and asked him why no one had been at home when he knocked on the doors of the nearby houses. Gary had laughed and explained they were allotment sheds. ‘Funny to you, maybe,’ said the journalist, ‘but in my country the houses of the miners are all like this.’
At Grimethorpe colliery, Gary is made ventilation officer, with twenty-odd men reporting to him and a manager’s constant worry as part of the deal. Now, whenever he is outside, even in the garden at home or out with his family, he pays attention to the air; if he feels it dampening or drying he will nip to the pit to check the equipment that depends on atmospheric pressure. As an official he has to leave the National Union of Mineworkers for the Colliery Officials and Staff Association (‘COSA bastards’ as the men call them). In this position he is ragged and pillocked more than he was before, whether he is instructing people at work, or just getting in rounds in the Grimethorpe pubs, where the pit talk is so thick that the bored shout they can’t see for dust.
He has confrontations. If the gas levels are too high he has to have production stopped, and if the men think he is being over-cautious, they rail at him. When redundancies are being made and redundo fever sets in, tempers quicken. Managers push through new shift patterns or scrap old agreements, and there are butts and punches wrapped in the insults. Gary takes it. As he once learned how to talk to the older men to get things done, he now learns to deal with wary, suspicious men who mistrust their employers’ new conditions and promises.
Meanwhile, at Hickleton Main, David Hollingworth arrives at the pit for his shift and is then taken by coach with around forty others to Rossington, a big pit near Doncaster. In keeping with plans made at the British Coal head offices in London, and fed down the fax lines to Doncaster and then Thurnscoe, Hickleton has been merged with Goldthorpe and most of its miners transferred or made redundant. When the transfers begin, there are five coaches ferrying out men to their new pits; a year later they will fit into one. Finding it strange to work with men he has never met before, swapping rumours about which of them had scabbed during the strike, and disbelieving most announcements from management and British Coal, David feels a new edginess in the atmosphere, and a change in himself. There is still camaraderie among the men at work, but it becomes gradually less apparent in the village, and he and Marie find they are spending less time than they used to in the Coronation Club.
In March 1988, British Coal closes Hickleton colliery for good. The yard is emptied, the gates locked, and soon the only activity is the work of the trucks and earth movers on the vast black whalebacks of the spoil heap, soon to be grassed down and reclaimed as a public park. At the same time the corporation closes the Manvers complex and impatiently begins razing this old industrial Gormenghast to the ground. In the 1930s the old Manvers Main Colliery Company had owned more than a thousand railway trucks, each emblazoned with the company’s name, and recognised on lines across the country. It was so well known that the London Midland South Railway Company used it on its advertising posters. By the start of the 1990s it will be the biggest single area of derelict contaminated land in Europe.
The closure and demolition of South Kirkby colliery follows and after that Barnburgh Main and Royston Drift, near Barnsley. The demolitions leave uncanny spaces in the countryside; the collieries had not been picturesque places, but they had been busy and important and the view had cohered around them. To look at the bare land, with the rubble and raw earth scars underlining the nothingness, is to look at an absence, at missing teeth in a jaw. Passing Manvers, Winnie cannot quite remember where all its buildings had been. Maybe it is that she is just getting old, she thinks. Maybe her memory is growing stiff, like her back and her legs.
Move back now and pause above the Dearne. If you look carefully you will see that the older miners, the war veterans, the men who know all the mines’ tales, are melting away. Many of them feel guilty at taking the redundancy packages, because to them it means selling a job that belongs to the next generation, but times are hard and the redundancy packages can go up to £40,000. The deals and conditions seem strange to them. You are entitled to unemployment benefit without needing to look for work; you can draw your pension early, and in some cases you are entitled to free fuel for life. Some men take the ‘redundo’ and work as contractors at other pits. But as the older men go they take with them their knowledge, steadying influence and authority, there is less mixing between the generations, and managers promote younger men to their jobs.
Across the Yorkshire coalfield there are sporadic attempts to protect jobs for the future. When British Coal introduces a new disciplinary code, there is talk of an all-out strike, but the union goes no further than refusing to cut coal on overtime shifts. The code is dropped, but afterwards it seems more certain that the NUM will not be able to re-stage a campaign like the 1984–85 strike. Three months after Manvers Main and Hickleton pits close, Caphouse colliery near Wakefield reopens as the Yorkshire Mining Museum, employing ex-miners as guides. Lisa Hollingworth, aged nine now, goes there with a friend during the school holidays. As part of the experience the guides take them underground to disused workings, turn on speakers that broadcast the sound of coal-cutting machinery at actual volume, and turn off the lights. Lisa thinks about her dad, working underground at Rossington, and she is horrified. ‘How can he do it?’ she says to her friend. ‘It’s terrifying.’
The decade is ending. Listen closely and you might hear the Hollingworths saying perhaps Maggie might shut all the pits at once, after all, and that when several pits in neighbouring villages do shut all at once, you do see changes. People move away and are replaced by new families that no one knows. Shops close. You hear stories of drug dealers sending up fireworks over the valley to announce a new drop; of friends and neighbours being burgled, and when some little bugger breaks into a loft to steal copper piping, no one wants to say anything any more, because the old pulling together that was born of common experience has gone. A few years ago you could count on the blokes having a word with their fathers at work, or at the club. A few years ago you knew a lot of the kids would find pit jobs that straightened them out. These were not ideal, failsafe solutions, but they were something. In places where several pits shut at once, though, such self-regulation is becoming rarer. What will they do, they wonder, and what will their villages be like, if the pits close? Would any of their experience, or knowledge, be of use any more?
And in Thurnscoe, Jed Stiles, quiff threaded with grey, gait and grin unaltered, launches a sideline career selling cigarettes from a carrier bag at prices that undercut the shops and machines. He asks all his customers if they think he still looks like Elvis. Some people say that if you say yes, dead ringer, he’ll give you a discount.