The Friends and regular volunteers returned to site in mid-January, the 13th to be exact. 2024 will be the tenth year of volunteer activities on site since the Friends first took it on. A cause for celebration indeed! It is also a time for reflection, for renewed focus on the challenges ahead.
After welcoming everyone back on site, the Friends used a cold day to gather indoors on the 13th to review their plans for the year, including the costs to be met for site insurance, and some outline suggestions of the priorities amongst the many ‘jobs to do’.
Thanks go to all present for staying awake during the planning meeting, although the warm fire and good humour definitely helped get through business.
Storm-tossed
Not the least difficulty to face is the force of nature itself; how recent storms have tested – and on several occasions found wanting – the roofing of Pump House Cottage.
In December some minor edging loss was noted to the flat roof work which was completed in 2021 with National Lottery Heritage Fund support.
However in January 2024 the even greater storms Henk, Isha and Jocelyn left their marks in the lifting and removal of several sections of flat roofing, as well as a return of water ingress into Pump House Cottage itself.
Repairs underway
On Saturday 27th January, after a further wet and windy weekend had postponed actvities on site, the Friends risked a return and did some urgent repairs to the Pump House Cottage roof.
Despite spot repairs, it is likely that 2024 will require us to raise funds to reassess the roof on Pump House Cottage.
Material world
Elsewhere on site, the regular volunteers continued brick reclamation, sorting and selecting the right bricks.
All these efforts go to help rebuild the parapet wall on top of the rear retaining wall.
How does our garden grow?
Also in the works is a Springtime renaissance in the garden of Pump House Cottage. Thanks to the efforts of regular volunteers the beauty and wonder of fresh planting will be ready for the coming of brighter days. Bulb planting, weeding and tender loving care make this a wonderful area on site whatever the weather.
The needs of our local wildlife were not forgotten either. The popularity of our wild bird feeding station behind Pump House Cottage continued to be a marvellous area to watch the comings and goings of a wide range of species. Roll on the longer days of February!
40 years on – 1984
2024 marks 40 years since the start of the 1984-5 Miners Strike, pitting many members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against the National Coal Board (NCB) and, ultimately, the Conservative government of the day.
It was an event which still divides political opinion nationally, and which cast a long shadow over communities throughout South Yorkshire, forever tying the name of a local pit – Cortonwood Colliery – to the history of industrial strife in the UK. Along with it go the names of national leaders whose words came to epitomise the positions of the main trade union, (Arthur Scargill), the National Coal Board (Ian MacGregor) and the then government (Margaret Thatcher).
How it came to this point will no doubt be the subject of many retrospective programmes, exhibitions and historical reflections, but in this short post at the start of the 2024, we will start with just a little bit of contextual history.
The Yorkshire Coalfield in 1984
At the start of the strike the Yorkshire coalfield, consisting of 4 NCB Areas, looked like this:
It consisted of 53 NCB collieries spread across 4 NCB Areas, employing a total of 53,920 (59,193 in 1983):
- North Yorkshire Area (Area Director Michael Eaton) – 12 pits, employing 12,885 (14,161 in March 1983) with 4 fatal accidents.
- South Yorkshire Area (Area Director George Hayes) – 15 pits, employing 13,947 (15,392 in 1983) with no fatal accidents
- Doncaster Area (Area Director Albert Tuke) – 10 pits, employing 13,355 (14,674 in 1983) with 1 fatal accident.
- Barnsley Area (Area Director [acting] Frank Ramsden) – 16 pits, employing 13,733 (14,966 in 1983) with 2 fatal accidents.
Plan C – Diminishing returns?
A decade earlier, in 1974, the National Coal Board had developed a strategy for the nationalised coal industry entitled, surprisingly enough, ‘The Plan for Coal’. It was not in fact the first plan, that was 1950’s ‘Plan for Coal’, followed by ‘Investing in Coal’ in 1956, and the ‘Revised Plan for Coal’ in 1959; equally this plan would certainly not be the last.
Governments, the nationalised industry and unions had struggled to adapt an ageing network of formerly private collieries – half of the total production by 1974 came from pits which were over 70 years old – into an efficient and affordable system of supply as energy demands changed rapidly in the almost three decades since nationalisation in 1946.
Coal had struggled to compete with cheap imports of oil, although this rapidly changed due to conflict in the Middle East, as the Arab/Israeli Yom Kippur war triggered the first Oil Crisis in October 1973, when OPEC nations embargoed crude oil exports leading to skyrocketing and unstable energy prices globally.
This made coal – a nationalised energy resource with large reserves – suddenly appear to be a somewhat safer bet, as long as it could be developed and worked to advantage. Two national strikes (1972 & 1974) and a change of government later, there was cautious optimism under a Labour government despite severe inflationary pressures and ongoing industrial unrest as wages were squeezed:
The industry has ploughed steadily ahead, reshaping its path as experience, events and, not least, geology dictated, but holding fast to its overall objectives. It cannot be denied – and nobody in the industry attempts to do so – that the more recent results have been disappointing. But it is a situation that the unions and the Board have recognised and are making big efforts to tackle together…In the longer term I am convinced that the industry will have to fill a role which will be vital for the well-being of the country.
Tony Benn, Secretary of State for Energy, Coal for the Future, progress with Plan for Coal and prospects to the year 2000 (p.1 Foreword), HMSO, May 1977
Despite unprecedented public sector industrial action in 1978-79’s disastrous Winter of Discontent, this strategic optimism and large-scale investment in coal did filter down, albeit slowly, alongside generous redundancy packages for older miners which continued to be taken up in significant numbers. An NCB South Yorkshire area report from just a few years before the strike gives a sense of the changes:
A number of major projects under the “Plan for Coal” have already been completed, including the surface drift at Kiverton Park Colliery, major reconstructions at Dinnington and Thurcroft collieries and an extended coal preparation plant at Manton colliery.
During the financial year, the Area invested over £30 million of capital. This brings the total amount of capital invested in the South Yorkshire Area since the “Plan for Coal” was launched in 1974, to over £100 million.
Many of the schemes still in progress take many years to complete, especially those which involved large amounts of underground drivages. […] Other underground projects in progress include the development of a new area of reserves in the Silkstone seam at Cortonwood colliery (£2.5 million) and the north-east area at Thurcroft colliery (£4 million). These schemes will not be complete until after the end of the new financial year.”
George Hayes (Area Director), NCB South Yorkshire Area Annual Review 1979/80
Even on the eve of the 1984 strike, under a Conservative Government, the Secretary of State for Energy, Peter Walker (1932-2010) spoke to the future hopes for the success of the British coal industry in distinctly hopeful terms:
…there is a great future for a productive, profitable and well-paid mining industry. The “Plan for Coal” and its revision consisted of three parts. The first was good investment for the industry. That has been honoured. Since 1979, through the taxpayer, the Government have provided about £2 million per day investment in coal mining. The second part was increased productivity. Productivity was due to increase by about 4 per cent. per annum. That was 10 years ago and it has risen by only 4.7 per cent. over the whole period. The third part was the closure programme, which is also behind. If we concentrate on putting investment into the good pits and carry out the rest of the programme, there is a good future for the industry.
Peter Walker, Energy minister, Hansard House of Commons [8th March 1984, 55/983-88]
There had been 79 pit closures nation-wide in the decade leading up to the strike, 58 of them were agreed at the local level by NCB and union negotiation. 21 were referred for national review, and 10 of those determined by a national decision, leaving 11 cases referred back to the local NCB Area and closed with local agreement.
But at what cost?
At the end of 1983, a local Barnsley MP had commented:
Closures are easy to discuss, but the social consequences, which some people seem to think do not exist, are very severe indeed. I have witnessed 10 collieries close in my constituency and seen the effects of those closures in human terms. Families have had to move out, and as the closure programme has gone on, people have had to move further away. Apart from the social consequences locally, one must bear in mind the effects on the children of mining families, who are moved in the middle of their education.
Mr. Allen McKay, (Barnsley, West and Penistone), HoC Hansard Volume 50, Monday 12 December 1983
Two more collieries have recently closed in my area. Elsecar, where I spent most of my working life, finished this year after a successful run; one could not find a better pit in which to work. Rockingham colliery finished last year. Those two pits were closed due to exhaustion and there were no problems; the men who worked in them realised that those pits had come to the end of their useful life.
Strike actions – Branch, Area, Regional & National
What had ostensibly started from 31st October 1983 as an overtime ban from a NUM Special Conference on 21st October 1983, developed into local disputes and strike action when on 28th February 1984 the NUM South Yorkshire Area panel called for a strike of all pits in the Area from 5th March.
This call came just as the NCB South Yorkshire Area Director, George Hayes had on 1st March 1984 – perhaps misguidedly – presented plans for the next financial year from April which included Cortonwood Colliery’s proposed closure as part of regional and national plans to cut production by 4 million tonnes.
And this despite previous undertakings a few years earlier that men from the closed Elsecar Colliery had expected to see further years of work at Cortonwood.
Fateful cascade
After September 1983, under the newly appointed NCB Chair, Ian MacGregor (1912-1998), the tone of NCB-NUM relations was to change forever. Media briefings raised fears of a more drastic pit closure programme, and the local disputes and national industrial and political tensions collided. The 5th March 1984 proved to be a decisive date. Although only 8 out of 15 South Yorkshire Area colliery branches had voted to strike, a Special Council meeting of the Yorkshire region NUM decided a strike would be called across all Yorkshire pits from 9th March.
The dominoes began to fall in other mining areas. An NUM National Executive Council meeting met on 9th March 1984 in Sheffield where the Scottish and Yorkshire regions asked for national union backing for strike action under the now infamous Rule 41, of which we shall no doubt hear more in historical reassessments of the year.
The acrimonious dispute triggered was characterised by cross-regional picketing, resultant heavy policing, antagonism, previously unseen violence, and all manner of political and media interventions that would last for a long, tragic and bitter year of conflict.
The prospect of a negotiated settlement between the NUM and NCB came and went amidst what at times became a televisual media circus. In some area pits did not join the strikes as not all regions agreed with the case for action and particularly the process adopted by NUM leadership.
Nevertheless mining communities throughout Britain endured great hardships for a whole year finally the NUM held a Special Delegate Conference at Congress House in London on Sunday 3rd March 1985 at which it was decided to return to work from Tuesday 5th March 1985 without an agreement with the National Coal Board. The motions then put were were painful but passionately pressed, and indeed speak for themselves:
“I’m saying now, search your hearts, search your hearts, comrades, and make your minds up. The men are calling for leadership, and you have two alternatives. You either give them leadership and repay the loyalty they have given us, or you sit back with your blindfold on and you let the strike collapse around you. That is not leadership. I believe it is leadership if you are men enough to decide that the time is right when you have to make a strategic withdrawing, if you like. Many people might not like the words, but we have got to live in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be…”
Terry Thomas [1938-2016] (NUM Delegate for South Wales Area), Report of Special Delegate Conference held in Congress House, Great Russell St, London, Sunday 3rd March 1985, p.91
The verdict of the President of the NUM was equally forceful, and unrelenting:
“It is clear that the Board, backed by the Government, have taken the hardest line seen between any employer and Trade Union in the last 50 years, and for them to insist we sign an agreement which accepts the principle of pit closures on the grounds of economics is something that no Trade Union and no Trade Unionist can ever come to terms with. To accept this would be to give away your birthright, to prostitute your principles as a Union and a Movement, and this Union has already made clear that we will not concede to that impossible demand.”
Arthur Scargill (President NUM), Report of Special Delegate Conference held in Congress House, Great Russell St, London, Sunday 3rd March 1985, p.101
Much more on the strike’s origins, NCB management decisions and government influence and intervention will no doubt be explored during 2024, but for many people the strike marked the beginning of the end of the national coal industry. Nine years later it was privatised and continued to contract until Kellingley Colliery, the last deep-mined coal pit in the country, closed in December 2015, 30 years on from the strike.
Friends of Hemingfield Colliery 