WHEN miners voted for an overtime ban in October 1983, Tom Callan, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers in Durham, warned his members: "It's going to be a rough ride."
Eighteen months later, after countless families and communities had been torn apart by the most bitter industrial dispute in a generation – at least 26m working days were lost to strike action making it the largest action since the 1926 general strike – the general secretary's warning looked like a masterpiece of understatement.
The tinderbox mood in the Great Northern Coalfield was evident when newly-appointed National Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor visited Ellington Colliery in February 1984. Mr MacGregor had transformed the loss making British Steel Corporation into one of the most efficient in Europe by halving the workforce and closing uneconomic units. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had asked him to take charge of the National Coal Board (NCB) and do the same to the coal industry because many of the nation’s 173 pits were heavily reliant on subsidies.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill branded him "the American butcher of British industry", although he preferred to see himself as a “plastic surgeon” tried to rebuild the damaged features of the economy, which meant shutting all pits deemed unprofitable.
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At Ellington, he was greeted by 400 miners protesting against the closure of a nearby colliery at Blyth. His underground tour was cancelled for safety reasons and as police tried to ensure he safely left the site, the miners surged through a fence and he was jostled to the ground.
Temperatures reached boiling point on March 5, 1984, when miners at Cortonwood, in South Yorkshire, voted to strike over plans to close their colliery.
The following day, the NCB announced that it was looking to reduce annual coal output by four million tonnes, equivalent to the closure of 20 pits and the cutting of 20,000 jobs, and that five pits, including Herrington, near Sunderland, would go within weeks under an accelerated closure programme.
Using the obscure Rule 41 of the NUM constitution, local areas of the NUM called their members out on strike without holding a national ballot.
On Friday, March 9, the executive of Durham NUM passed a resolution calling for strike action and, the following day, a mass meeting of 1,000 union members at Easington Colliery became the first in the North East to vote for a walkout from Monday, March 12.
When Monday dawned, an estimated 13,500 men in Northumberland and Durham were out on strike, but 9,500 continued to work.
With Tom Callan warning that working pits would be "picketed out", union men from Easington persuaded Vane Tempest and Dawdon to join the strike.
The battle lines were being drawn in the North-East and across the country. On March 10, NUM leader Arthur Scargill told a rally at the Barbary Coast Club, near Wearmouth pit, in Sunderland: "In five years' time, you will be able to say we not only saved our pit, we not only saved our job, but we restored our dignity and our faith as human beings."
But, during a visit to Gateshead on March 12, the day the NUM declared the dispute to be a national strike without a ballot, Mr MacGregor warned: "Prolonged strike action could probably accelerate the programme of pit closures."
By March 14, not a single miner was working in the 12 pits in the Durham coalfield or the six in Northumberland.
Across the country, the picture was far less clear cut. Two weeks into the dispute, 123 of the country's 174 pits were idle, while most miners in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire defied the pickets.
Striking miners flooded into Nottinghamshire, where, amid escalating violence, the police drafted in officers from around the country and set up blockades to halt the pickets. The newly elected Sedgefield MP, Tony Blair, complained after he was prevented from entering Nottinghamshire at a police roadblock, while coaches carrying 200 Durham miners were stopped on the borders of Staffordshire.
Strikers from County Durham bolstered picket lines at Ravenscraig steel plant, in Scotland, at Orgreave coke works, in Yorkshire, while in August, Superintendent Bill Longmore, of Staffordshire Police, claimed that hit squads of Durham pickets were bringing "terror and intimidation" to working miners.
Back at home, pickets attempted to halt the movements of coal in and out of key sites, such as Redcar steelworks and Fishburn Coke Works; a Kelloe miner suffered a fractured skull outside Steetley Quarry, in West Cornforth; twice in ten days up to 700 strikers forced the closure of the NCB workshops and stores at Philadephia, near Houghton-le-Spring; while 32 pickets were arrested on July 26 during what police described as "running battles" after miners padlocked the NCB's administration offices at Whitburn, Sunderland.
But the most bitter scenes came that June at a privately-owned coal screening site at Inkerman, near Tow Law, where coal had been quietly stockpiled so that it could be distributed to power stations as the strike bit.
Up to 800 pickets a day tried to prevent the lorries getting out in what became known as “the siege of Inkerman”. One night a flying picket of 600 men from Easington arrived at midnight to find 24 Bishop Auckland policemen, who had received a tip-off a little earlier, inside. Stones flew and a police van was overturned until the 24 officers charged, with batons raised, to escape the compound.
In the first month alone of the siege, 77 pickets were arrested during the daily push and shove and at least nine police officers were injured.
The worst of the violence was, however, centred on Yorkshire. Two striking miners died on the picket lines and violent images of stone-throwing strikers taking on mounted police at Orgreave in Sheffield were flashed around the world, after which Mr Scargill said: "There have been scenes of almost unbelievable brutality reminiscent of a Latin American police state", while Mrs Thatcher referred to those who would "substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law".
In July, the Prime Minister went further, telling Conservative backbenchers: "We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. Now we are fighting the enemy within."
After the “battle of Orgreave”, 71 picketers were charged with riot and 24 with violent disorder, but their trials collapsed when police evidence was deemed "unreliable". In 1991, South Yorkshire Police paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution.
But the NUM also may not have been acting within the law. Two Nottinghamshire miners took the union to court to have the absence of a strike ballot declared unlawful. The action eventually led to a High Court fine, the union's assets being seized and Mr Scargill being found in contempt.
Twice – once in April and again in October – the pit deputies’ union Nacods came within a whisker of joining the strike, which would have brought every pit in the country to a standstill, but twice it pulled back from the brink after the offer of concessions.
In July, Labour leader Neil Kinnock told a 15,000 crowd at a rally in Durham that replaced the traditional Gala: "Mrs Thatcher can break families and she can break hearts, but there is one thing she should understand, and that is she will never break the mining people."
But for all the words of support and goodwill, the harsh realities were beginning to bite. Soup kitchens were organised by the growing network of women's support groups, while Durham witnessed the extraordinary sight of food aid for miners' families being brought in from the Soviet Union.
Through the first six months of the strike, there had been comparative calm in the North-East.
Everything changed on August 20 when Paul Wilkinson, from Bowburn, turned up for work at Easington colliery – the symbolic heart of the NUM in the Durham coalfield. He later told The Northern Echo: "There was a principle at stake. There should have been a ballot – it's as simple as that."
Pickets mounted a barricade at the gates of the pit and the coach was turned back. Over the next four days, there was a tense stand-off until finally, on Friday, August 24, the 28-year-old became the first working miner in County Durham.
Easington erupted into violence. Bricks were thrown, cars overturned and police in full riot gear were seen on the streets of the North East for the first time in history and for three days, Easington was under a state of siege. Mr Wilkinson's return to work did not open the floodgates, but it was a symbolically important turning point in the dispute.
The strike had now become a war of attrition. The “scabs” who returned to work were targeted both at the pit and at home as those who remained out faced mounting debts and the prospect of a Christmas without presents or even turkey.
On October 30, Mr Scargill released leaked documents, which appeared to show that, by 1995, the NCB expected only four pits to be open in the North East: Easington, Wearmouth, Westoe and Ellington.
Mr Callan said: "We know now that this is a fight to the finish and a battle we cannot afford to lose. If we do, it will mean the destruction of our industry and our communities."
As late as November 1, only 89 miners out of 22,800 in the North East were at work and not a single miner had crossed the picket lines at Herrington, Bearpark, Dawdon, Horden, Sacriston or Ellington.
Across the country, 114 pits were still at a complete standstill.
Then, the NCB announced a £650 Christmas bonus for anyone returning to work and hundreds took up the offer.
By the month end, there were still only 300 miners working in the North-East, but the momentum was now with the NCB: at the start of November, 52,000 miners had been at work across the country but by the end of December, it was 70,000.
The change led to desperation and criminal recklessness in the coalfield.
In desperation, Ashington miner Frederick Taylor was killed when he was hit by a fall of stone as he dug for coal on a cliff face, and on December 10, a 19-year-old from Seaham had a lucky escape when he was tunnelling for coal under the Hawthorn rail line in East Durham.
And recklessness: on November 30 in Wales, taxi-driver David Wilkie was killed when two striking miners dropped a concrete block from a footbridge onto his vehicle as he was driving two strike-breakers into Merthyr Vale (they were later convicted for murder, which was reduced to manslaughter on appeal).
That same day, a concrete slab was dropped onto a minibus in Whitburn, Sunderland, taking 12 men to work, one of whom was knocked unconscious.
The women's committee in the Murton Welfare Hall on March 4, 1985
At the start of the New Year, after nearly 10 months of action, the trickle of returning miners became a flood and on February 27 the NCB was able to declare that, for the first time in nearly a year, the majority of miners were now at work.
On Sunday, March 3, the national executive of the NUM met at the TUC headquarters in London. Hardliners, led by Yorkshire, wanted the strike to continue until they had won amnesties for the 700 men who had been sacked during the dispute.
Others wanted an immediate return. The executive was deadlocked at 11-11 and the decision went to a card vote which voted by a narrow majority, 98-91, to return to work, carried by the 20 votes of Northumberland and Durham.
The Times quoted Durham executive member Billy Stobbs as saying: "It is unreasonable, on humanitarian grounds, to call upon the membership to endure still further personal pain and sacrifice to themselves and their families in their loyalty to the union."
On Tuesday, March 5, 1985, the miners marched back into work behind their banners. The strike was over.
But, as the NCB concentrated on “superpits” on the east coast of the county, the writing was on the wall. Horden and Eppleton closed in 1986, Seaham in 1988, Dawdon and Murton in 1991, Easington, Westoe and Vane Tempest in the spring of 1993.
Which left just one: Wearmouth, where the final mining shift clocked off on December 10, 1993. Nine years after the miners had walked back to work, the industry in the county built on coal was, after more than eight centuries, over.
- This article is largely built on the legwork of the Echo’s former chief reporter in Durham, Tony Kearney
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