VIEWPOINT
The miners’ strike may be history but up here it lingers on, says the Bard of Barnsley, Ian McMillan
SNAPSHOTS FROM AROUND the 1984/85 miners’ strike 1: I’m on the top deck of a bus from Barnsley into Wakefield. I can see lines of police minibuses crowding the road as coppers are transported to a picket line somewhere. My bus is crowded and angry; there’s a murmuring that’s almost musical in its disgruntlement. A man in a flat cap stands up and flourishes a piece of paper that he unfolds slowly. “Here’s a poem about the strike,” he says. “I hope you all like it.” The bus falls silent.
I can’t remember much about the poem except that it was on the side of the miners and the rhymes pounded along like police banging their truncheons on their shields, but I can remember the efect it had. The top deck took in every word, and then as we rolled into the station, there was a round of applause and somebody shouted, “Thee tell ’em, kid!”
Snapshots from around the 1984/85 miners’ strike 2: My father-in-law has been on strike for many months and we’ve gone coal picking in a place where coal used to be stored near an area that’s now an RSPB reserve. We bend and pick lumps of coal and pile them into buckets. The sound is rhythmic and almost mesmeric. A police car slows down and the off icers inside stare at us. We look back. “Well, I’m not sure what we’re going to do here,” my father-in-law says, wiping his brow, “ because I can’t run and tha can’t fight.” So we bend and carry on picking the lumps and the police car drives away.
And here’s a snapshot from a period after the strike: it’s sometime in a new century and I’m at Oakwell to watch Barnsley FC play Nottingham Forest. The teams come out of the tunnel and thousands of Barnsley fans begin to shout, “Scab! Scab! Scab!” at the Forest players and fans, a chant with origins in the reaction to the Nottinghamshire pitmen who worked throughout the strike. A woman turns to me and says, “This is the only match I ever come to!” and then carries on shouting. I see people who weren’t born in 1984 join the chanting, and I realise that memory is a seam that can run very, very deep.
It’s 40 years since the strike and our TV screens and newspaper columns are full of it – this week Miners’ Strike: a Frontline Story airs on BBC2. That momentous year is held up to the light because it seems to contain the seeds of so much that has happened since, politically, economically and culturally. We can see the widening of the North/South divide in it, and the idea of “ left-behindness”, and a simmering anger that slid us towards Brexit.
When I see old photographs or films of that time, and when I ex
