'I'll never forgive forgive the scabs

PERHAPS it is too much to expect the passing of 20 years to have healed the wounds opened by the miners' strike of 1984-5.

Even its tag as the most bitter industrial dispute in British history does not do justice to the divisions it created, in the country, in communities and even within families. Those wounds run deeper than the mines which provided the foundations for Britain's economic success, and close far less easily.

Today those wounds feel as raw as ever for Alan Cummings. As secretary of the Easington Miners' Lodge in County Durham, he took the miners out in March 20 years ago. Just under a year later, he took them back again, defeated and never again to wield the muscle which had brought down governments.

Alan helped organise the pickets, and food parcels for families left with no income for a year. He saw his lads beaten and arrested, and some of them sacked, after the most vicious picket line violence the country has ever seen. He saw the strike crumble as a trickle back to work became a torrent. Then, eight years later, he saw the pit at Easington close, even though its seams held enough coal for at least another 15 years. Is he still angry? You bet.

"I'll never forgive Thatcher for the way she kicked us. She is the most horrible politician this country has ever had. I'm angry at the police for letting themselves be used as a political force," he says, but, most of all, his anger is reserved for the scabs, those miners who crossed the picket lines to go back to work.

"I haven't got the time of day for any of those people. I will never, ever speak to them," he says, his eyes burning with conviction. "The majority of people I know don't talk to people who scabbed, and a lot of people blame them for the way the strike ended. There was no reason for them to go back to work."

For Alan, it was a simple equation: did you want to fight for your community or not? Talk of miners going back because they were desperately short of money is dismissed - everyone was short, but the lodge made sure no-one starved. Talk of questioning the handling of the strike are also waved away - if the cause was justified, who needs a ballot? And as for whether the threat to the miners was real, the fields where the pit once stood are answer enough to that.

'THE point is, you either believed that fighting for your community and your pit was right, or it was not right," Alan says, and in many ways it was as simple and as straight-forward as that. But it wasn't quite like that when the strike started. After the National Coal Board, under their new chairman Ian McGregor, fresh from taking a scythe to the steel industry, proposed closing six pits, the NUM saw it as just the start of a rolling programme which would eventually cost thousands of jobs and called its members out on strike, under an obscure rule which allowed each area to strike individually.

Conventional wisdom has it that the failure to call a national ballot at the start cost the miners and their leader Arthur Scargill dear, but Alan is not convinced that was a mistake.

"I was a little bit uneasy at the time, because traditionally we had always held a ballot on action and this was the first time we had not taken a ballot. But, talking to my marras at the pit, the lads I knew, I felt a national ballot was not winnable: the amount of job losses was pretty small, there had been a lot of closures before, and generally people thought our pit was safe."

There might not have been a pithead ballot, but a meeting of union delegates in Durham on Friday, March 9 voted to take strike action, and on the Sunday night Alan lit the first fire on the first picket line. As he says, in what is clearly an article of faith, "You either believed the fight for jobs and communities was right, or you didn't believe it. Why cloud the issue with a ballot?"

As the dispute dragged on, for far longer than anyone anticipated, the lack of a ballot did come back to haunt the miners. It provided the excuse for miners in more moderate areas, particularly Nottinghamshire, to refuse to strike, and, in turn, form their own breakaway union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers.

In return for continuing to work, Thatcher promised the Nottinghamshire miners they would be looked after. John Major was less grateful and closed their pits anyway. "The snakes in the grass get stood on sometimes," says Alan. "They got what they deserved. They got what we got." Long memories indeed.

After a month, the miners' determination had hardened, and Alan believes Scargill missed an opportunity then, when a ballot may well have been winnable. Scargill spoke of the logistics of holding a vote when the men were already on strike, and there was no ballot.

Easington, with its workforce of 2,400 men, was one of the most solid pits, an obvious source of pride for Alan, but in August the first miner, under heavy police escort and amidst a virtual riot, managed to get through the pickets, followed by a handful more. And the attitude of the strikers towards these scabs?

"Hate. Pure hate," says Alan, and the emotion is as strong as it must have been two decades ago. "I talked to one of these people who went back early and he said he had to go back, but no-one I represented ever starved. Anybody who had any particularly serious problems, we would sort it out. There was no reason for anybody to go back to work at Easington Colliery.

"I thought they were betraying the ideals of the strike. They didn't want to save Easington Colliery. They were betraying people."

But over Christmas, as the hardship really began to bite and a deal was further away than ever, miners returned to work in ever-increasing numbers, and by February 1985 too many were back for the strike to be sustainable. The union voted to return to work and on Monday, March 4, miners turned up at the main, picket-less, gates at Easington.

"The real hard core of the pickets were disappointed, and I could understand their feelings, but there was nothing else to argue on. You can't keep on saying to people 'Just a bit longer'. They want hope but there was no light at the end of the tunnel," Alan says. "It was a really, really sad time. We had been defeated. It was a magnificent and loyal workforce and they did it with dignity. They stuck it out for a year and they went through the mill."

BY the time Easington Colliery closed, in May 1993, the workforce of 2,400 had been whittled down to about 1,300. It was making a profit of £3m a year, and producing more coal than ever before, but it wasn't enough to save it.

The site of the pit, just 50 yards from Alan's back door, is now a huge field, with a playground at one side near the old manager's office, and a car park to the right where the rapid loader took the coal away. The stretch of grass in the centre was the south pit shaft, behind that the north shaft, where the coal came out. A small layby next to a low wooden fence enclosing the entire site marks the pit entrance.

"It was the heart of the community. That pit, when it was working, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, was a living thing. If you didn't work or live here you couldn't understand that," Alan says, gazing across the fields. "That pit provided work for generations. It was a hard job, not the best job, but if you asked lads if they would go back if it was working, they would say they would go, big time.

"It was a defining moment in British history, and whatever happened, the fight was right, irrespective of all the arguments about ballots. People are saying, after 20 years you should move on, but... ", and he shrugs. Sometimes, you just can't move on.

NEXT MONDAY

'They called us Scargill's slags'

How the strike turned the lives of the miners' wives upside down