09.12.2010

Tyneside bairn goes ghost dancing

Tom Pickard reviews David Douglass's 'Ghost dancers: the miners' last generation part 3: Stardust and coaldust' Christiebooks, 2010, pp540, £12.95

When the kids are getting noisy about being chiselled out of an education and history is being ditched from a lot of syllabuses, there is no more opportune moment than the present to turn to Dave Douglass’s insider’s account, amongst much else, of the last great coal strike and the conflict between organised workers resisting ideologically motivated industrial decimation by the agencies of a reactionary state.

It is hard to recall a more arresting image than strikebreaking police waving handfuls of £20 notes at impoverished strikers and their families. In my opinion there is little else more worthy of signifying the Thatcher era. Mind you, another image I’ll keep in mind, too, is of the police inspector who would regularly run his four-wheeled drive vehicle over the picket’s snowman. Each day they would build one to keep warm and alleviate the boredom, and each day he would knock it over with his vehicle. One morning the pickets built the snowman around an iron bollard. You can guess the rest. The first of the four-wheel fuckwits.

When any idiot can airbrush out or invent the past (or the truth, for that matter) and when books and information are increasingly filtered through the multinational media moguls and their trough swillers, we need a book like Dave Douglass’s just to find out what went on and why.

He chronicles the strike from the inside - an active inside. Although there are the minutiae of inter-union and inter-branch politics, there is also a very human story with real people and their failings, as well as their acts of quiet, communal heroism.

And it is told by a man who likes to tell stories as well as write history. Maybe that’s all history is, with the sources laid out in footnotes for the diligent scholar to examine and perhaps come to different conclusions. Some books you don’t go to for conclusions, just for the raw testimony - and you don’t get much rawer than this.

I have known Douglass since we were bairns, on Tyneside, sticking anarchist posters over the ton and he was a workyticket then and is one still. Perhaps a good example of it is the response to the police blocking off pickets from getting to the gates - the strikers organised a go-slow on the motorway.

There’s an element of the undisciplined imagination in the direct action of a convoy of pickets going slow along all the lanes of a motorway. Undisciplined in the sense that you’d never get permission from head office for that. Douglass gives us a great insight into how, as well as through democratically based organisations, creative spontaneity in political struggle can out-manoeuvre leaden mindsets - both of our enemies and friends. And for those of us who’d like to both remember and honour the miners’ struggle and learn how to build on it, because we cannot and must not be kettled by the bankers and their placemen in government, this is a book to go to.

It is available from branches of Waterstones, Freedom Bookshop on Whitechapel Road, and Housemans Bookshop in Caledonian Road, London. Online you can buy it from Christiebooks.com/christiebookWP. Signed copies are also available direct from the author via djdouglass@hotmail.co.uk.

Also highly recommended, by the way, are the first two books in the trilogy: Geordies wa mental (wa off wa fuckin’ heeds) and The wheel’s still in spin, from the same suppliers.

Tom Pickard is a well-known Tyneside poet and occasional film maker