01.12.2011

Pushed as far as we will go

David Douglass reviews Keith Pattison and David Peace 'No redemption: the 1984-85 miners' strike in the Durham coalfield' Flambard Press, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2010, pp104,

The limitation of words is soon encountered when trying to convey the power of this quite remarkable pictorial collection of scenes from Easington colliery during that historically dramatic year. Easington even without the strike was boldly typical of the Sunderland coastal pits. Huge winding towers dominating the blackened landscapes in all directions, the grey industrial mass of tips, chimneys and surface structures. On the skyline, stark and perhaps a little foreboding, the headgear of Easington, Hordon and Blackhall collieries dominating the teaming ranks of pit houses and dense communities like steel castles overlooking their subjects. These places were built and exist for one reason - to mine coal. Almost every living soul in this coastal strip is fed, clothed and housed on its industry. The pit dominates all aspects of life, labour, love and death.

This in itself would be a dramatic muse upon which to base an intense, highly focused black-and-white photographic study. But Keith Pattison was commissioned by Sunderland’s Artists Agency to photograph the strike in Sunderland over the period of a month. As it was, he stayed seven months, from August 1984 until the last days of the strike in March 1985. This place at this time stands like a rock of working class history; it will be forever fixed in our consciousness and memory and will never leave us, from the oldest to the very youngest. That this will now be a tangible and believable truth is made far easier with the images caught in this book by Keith.

There are few words in this book - in many ways perhaps, enough words have been spoken on the strike (not all of them useful or accurate), but the adage, ‘Every picture tells a thousand stories’, is certainly apt here and to a great extent they speak for themselves and offer a truth beyond argument. Those few words there are have been marshalled by David Peace, author of the deeply dark and troubling, fact-based fiction GB84, reflecting 25 years after the event (and incidentally on the eve of the 2010 election).

Alan Cummings, former Easington lodge secretary and area executive member of the National Union of Mineworkers, Jimmy Johnson and his wife, Marilyn, were all 12-month activists during the strike. They ponder their memories, these photos and what that all meant and perhaps still mean. Jimmy explains that the Durham area had not in fact voted to take strike action, and only did so, on the casting vote of the area chair, in solidarity with Yorkshire and Scotland, but, once out, they stayed out, in villages like Easington firm and solid.

Alan is one of the officials who still feel aggrieved at the lack of a national ballot, but all the evidence shows that we would have won such a ballot anyway - the National Coal Board commissioned two opinion polls and both confirmed that a strike vote - taken in the heat of an already rolling strike ballot - would be successful. He knows how we came not to have a ballot - because conference, after seven exhaustive proposals and mass pithead meetings, voted simply not to and to call instead on all miners to respect picket lines. Why that was he knows too, but perhaps still does not agree with that rationale.

The issue remains vexed in any discussion of the strike, but these pictures and this story demonstrate it was the strike, together with solidarity and community cohesion in the teeth of every sort of brutality and deprivation, which was decisive here and not the means of its arrival. Alan says: “We had a very young workforce. I mean the average age at our pit must have been 34 years. Didn’t have many people at the pit who were over 55. By virtue of the redundancy scheme. And so the strike was solid. And traditionally our pit has a name that goes back to the 1920s as a really militant pit. So men were really good. And the women. That was key and all. Because if women wanted her man back, I think the man went.”

Really that statement reflects the key focus of this book. Of 180,000-190,000 men on strike, the greatest number of pickets we managed to mobilise was 25,000 at Orgreave. This means 155,000 strikers never picketed, and yet remained loyal. That they were able to do so was without the slightest doubt due to the women’s support groups and the solidarity groups around the world who held the fabric and moral of these villages together. They fed the families, organised the holidays and day trips away from the heavy, imposing presence of the occupying police force, organised the parties and hardship funds under the sullen gaze of the welfare agencies, who were following instructions to starve the miners back to work.

The toughest battle for the miners and their families was not on the picket line, or in that field at Orgreave, but back within the four walls of the family home, as it slowly became depleted of furniture and possessions, coming in from the incessant rain and snow, wet and demoralised, to an empty hearth and cold, damp house. Hungry children, despondent teenage family members. That battlefield was here, the World War I trench of the strike.

There are many close studies of people’s faces in this book - deep, enquiring, searching photos. Intense, lost in thought and wracked by mental conflict. Photos of men on the cobbles, in idle groups, passing time. The intensity of the picket line, the sheer, raw anger at the audacity of scabs so wretched and shallow they break that link, that bond of solidarity and loyalty, in a social betrayal so deeply felt, the whole community reacts in a huge collective surge of repudiation.

The police enter these scenes, these alien and hostile streets as total outsiders, strange and at odds with everything around them; they look lost. They are unwanted, they do not belong here, they are the hostile occupation troops in a foreign country, they have neither the language nor the culture. They march, besieged on all sides by people standing on their own streets and looking from their own windows, just looking.

In scenes reminiscent of occupied Belfast or Derry, the town goes about its business, as the army of police stake out shops and street corners, fields and back lanes. The armoured transits push through crowds sullen and unwilling to move. One is reminded of the cops in Harlem ordering the black crowds, “Go home”, and their response: “We are home.” For crowds of old pit lads and their wives it is a revisitation from their youth in the 20s: the same scenes, the same bitterness, the same struggle. In scenes which could be interchangeable with the 20s or the 1890s, gangs of cops mount shotgun on solitary scabs, escorted through the back lanes, their heads bowed, their sin buried like their hands deep in their pockets, watched by betrayed children and their mothers from their doorsteps. An old lady in a headscarf walking with a stick passes the line of helmeted aliens, her facial resentment as evident as if she had been carrying a placard bearing the word ‘contempt’.

Then there is the desperate scrabble for coal from abandoned pit tips, from the beaches and the raging sea - anything to keep some cheer in the hearth and hot water at least enough for a bath once a day.

This book is a testimony and a monument, I think, beyond anything so far produced. It will stand forever in tribute to these coastal villages and the resilience of its population. Two thousand, five hundred men worked at Easington and only 54 went back before the end of the strike. But 32 of those men returned in the last two weeks, broken and dispirited, with no sense of direction or hope. It was the knowledge that we were now making scabs of good men that finally made us decide to end it together and march back together.

The final shot in the book is the mass lodge meeting voting to return to work with a forest of hands held erect. There are few smiles and cheers. Relief perhaps in this instance, but within 10 years it was all gone. Just the ghosts and the memories remain, though now too we have this book and a growing feeling that we as a class have been pushed as far as we will go and it is time to be bold and brave again.