What did you do in the strike? A miners strike mix

It is now more than 30 years since the 1984-85 miners strike, the last great stand of what had once been seen as the most militant and powerful section of the working class in Britain. The dispute started in South Yorkshire in March 1984 with miners walking out in response to the announcement that Cortonwood pit was threatened with closure. The miners claimed that there was a Government and coal board plan to close down large parts of the industry, and the National Union of Mineworkers called a national strike.

The strike finished a year later in defeat. The miners’ claims that the industry was under threat were soon proved correct – the last deep mine in the UK closed last December. The full forces of the state were mobilised against the strike. New laws were passed, more than 11,000 arrests were made and almost 200 miners were imprisoned.

On the other side there was significant support for the strike, with miners support groups being set up across the country. On the music front there were many benefit gigs involving a wide spectrum from folk singers to punk bands, and as the strike progressed songs were written about it and records released. What follows is a mix I have put together of music related to the miners strike. It includes songs and tracks about the strike, mostly from the time of the dispute but in some cases looking back in its aftermath. The mix also includes some spoken word recollections from the strike, including my own of one particular day in Mansfield. It reflects the diversity of the musical output related to the strike, so does leap from industrial noise to acoustic ballads – and in some cases mixes the two together. The collision of Norma Waterson and Test Dept sounds great!

The mix is based on a set I played in March 2014 at an Agit Disco benefit night for Housmans bookshop, held at Surya, Pentonville Road, London N1. It included a selection of DJs most of whom had contributed to Stefan Szczelkun’s Agit Disco project/book on political music. The full line up included: Sian Addicott, Martin Dixon, John Eden, Marc Garrett, Nik Górecki, Caroline Heron, Stewart Home, Paul Jamrozy (Test Dept), Micheline Mason, Tracey Moberly, Luca Paci, Simon Poulter, Howard Slater, Andy T, Neil Transpontine. Tom Vague and Stefan Szczelkun. I chose to focus on music relating to the miners strike as the event took place in the week of the 30th anniversary of the start of the strike. This is not a recording of the live set, but a mix put together later reflecting what I played that night. If some of the sound quality is not great, hopefully it will stimulate you to search further...

Here's the full playlist with some details of the tracks:

00:00 Keresley Pit Women’s Support Group - You won’t find me on the picket line

From 7” EP ‘Amnesty – reinstate and set them free’ put out by Banner Theatre company in 1985

00: 21 South Wales Striking Miners Choir – Comrades in Arms

From the album Shoulder to Shoulder by Test Dept and South Wales Striking Miners Choir (1985)

01:19 – John Tams - Orgreave

From BBC Radio Ballads: The Ballad of The Miner's Strike (2010), including miners recalling  the Orgreave picket.

03:58 - Test Dept – Fuel to Fight

From the album Shoulder to Shoulder by Test Dept and South Wales Striking Miners Choir (1985)

04:32 – Norma Waterson – Coal not Dole

Song written by Kay Sutcliffe and originally recorded by Eve Bland for the album 'Which Side Are You On: Music For The Miners From The North East' (1985). The song has also been recorded by artists including The Happy End (1987), Chumbawamba (1992), The Oyster Band and Norma Waterson. The song’s popularity perhaps relates to its melancholy anticipation of the actual outcome of the strike – not a heroic victory but the desolation of closed mines and industrial ruins. Sutcliffe asked ‘What will become of this pit-yard, Where men once trampled faces hard?’, imagining a future of ‘tourists gazing round. Asking if men once worked here, Way beneath this pit-head gear’. Now all the pits have closed all that remains is the National Coal Mining Museum. 

 

07:46 - Dave Burns – Maerdy, Last Pit in the Rhondda

A song written by Dave Rogers of Birmingham-based Banner Theatre, it was recorded by Dave Burns for his album ‘Last pit in the Rhondda’ (1986), released with the backing of South Wales NUM with proceeds ‘to help miners sacked as a result of the 84/85 strike’. Like ‘Coal Not Dole’, the song’s image of the strike-imposed silence of the mine foreshadows its future: ‘There's mist down in the valley and the snow lies on the hill, No men walk through the empty street the pit lies quiet and still’

11:29 – Bourbonese Qualk – Blackout

From the compilation album Here we go: A celebration of the first year of the U.K Miner's Strike 1984-1985 (Sterile Records 1985), featuring bands associated with the industrial scene.

12:00 – Neil Transpontine – Mansfield Memories

My recollections of the violent end to a miners demonstration in May 1984

13:25 - Dick Gaughan – Ballad of 84
 

First performed at a benefit for sacked miners at Woodburn Miners Welfare Club in Dalkeith, Midlothian in 1985, this song recalls the strikers who died amidst the massive police operation:

‘Let's pause here to remember the men who gave their lives, Joe Green and David Jones were killed in fighting for their rights / But their courage and their sacrifice we never will forget / And we won't forget the reason, too, they met an early death / For the strikebreakers in uniforms were many thousand strong / And any picket who was in the way was battered to the ground / With police vans driving into them and truncheons on the head’

 
17:26 – The Enemy Within – Strike

The Enemy Within was John Deguid and Marek Kohn, produced by Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc with sampled speech from Arthur Scargill. Released on Rough Trade 1984 – insert sleeve included statement – ‘Play this record at six and support the miners' campaign to create a surge of demand for power at six o'clock every evening!’

19:18 Council Collective – Soul Deep

Paul Weller and Mick Talbot’s Style Council with guests including Motown singer Jimmy Ruffin, Dee C. Lee, Junior Giscombe, Dizzy Hites and Vaughan Toulouse: 'Getcha mining soul deep with a lesson in history, There's people fighting for their communities, Don't say their struggle does not involve you, If you're from the working class it's your struggle too'.

19:30 – Ann Scargill

Spoken word reflection on women joining the picket line by one of the founders of Women Against Pit Closures.

22:34 and 24:55 - Alan Sutcliffe

Excerpts from speech by Kent miner, taken from the album Shoulder to Shoulder by Test Dept and South Wales Striking Miners Choir (1985). Last April (2015) I went to a great Test Dept film/book launch at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. Alan Sutcliffe was there in the audience and said a few words.

25:28 – Nocturnal Emissions - Bring power to its knees

This track was included on the compilation album Here we go: A celebration of the first year of the U.K. Miner's Strike 1984-1985 (Sterile Records 1985).  This version is from the 1985 album 'Songs of Love and Revolution'.

27:33 – Pulp – Last day of the miners strike

‘overhead the sound of horses' hooves, people fighting for their lives’. From the 2002 album ‘Hits’

31:54 - Chumbawamba – Fitzwilliam

From the compilation album ‘Dig This: A Tribute To The Great Strike’ (Forward Sounds International, 1985). 'Smiles for the cameras as the miners return,  They say no one has lost and no one has gained,  But wiser and stronger the people have changed,  And it won't be the same in Fitzwilliam again'.

34:23 – Banner Theatre song group - Amnesty

Includes spoken word by miners from Keresley Pit, Coventry. From 7” EP ‘Amnesty – reinstate and set them free’ put out by Banner Theatre company in 1985

38:50 - The Country Pickets - Daddy (what did you do in the strike)

From the album ‘Which side are you on ?’ (Which Side Records, 1985) – song written by Ewan MacColl, his version was included on a cassette he and Peggy Seeger put out in 1984. ‘Daddy what did you do in the strike’ on their Blackthorn records was 'a musical documentation of the 1984 miners strike' with 'profits to National Union of Mineworkers'.

42:35 - Style Council – A stone’s throw away

An internationalist response linking the miners strike with other struggles across the world at that time: 'For liberty there is a cost, it's broken skull and leather cosh, from the boys in uniform, now you know what side they're on... In Chile, In Poland, Johannesburg, South Yorkshire, A stone's throw away, now we're there'.

See also other posts about the miners strike:

'Sound of police truncheon against body': David Peace's miners strike soundscape

'Riot in Whitehall' - London Miners demo 1985

Miners strike memories: Durham miners rally 1984

Miners demo in Mansfield 1984

Miners support in Kent

The 'Here we go' chant

Miners Strike: (4) Mansfield (5) Soul Deep

On Monday 14th May 1984 some of us from our Miners Support Group at Kent University went on the Kent miners' coaches up to Mansfield for a big demonstration. I remember Jack Collins, the Kent NUM leader and sometime Communist Party militant, was on our coach. Sadly he was to die from leukemia just a couple of years after the strike, in 1987. 

Despite being in Nottinghamshire, where many of the miners did not join the strike, there was a good atmosphere on the demonstration until right at the end when we were waiting to get on the coaches home. We were standing by an ice cream van when out of nowhere a police horse came charging along the pavement scattering people in all directions. Someone got knocked over and was lying on the ground - I am not sure they'd even been on the demonstration. A line of police on foot followed up behind and a big group of miners and supporters formed up to confront them. My friend Tracy got some amazed looks as one of the few women in the thick of it as she stood at the front taunting the police.  Soon bottles and bricks were flying, and the police charged. The buses back to Kent left soon afterwards but the clashes continued. 88 people were arrested, of whom 55 were charged, some with the serious offence of riot - though they were to be acquitted after a lengthy trial when cases came to court. The police claimed that 40 of their number were injured; there were certainly plenty of casualties on our side too.

 

Advert for the Mansfield demonstration in The Miner, 9.5.1984

The following account of Mansfield comes from Bobby Girvan, and was published in Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield and Guy Boanas (eds.), The Enemy Within: Pit villages and the Miners Strike of 1984-5 (London: Routledge, 1986): 

'I think it was 14 May, it was a sunny day and we went down to Mansfield and it was a lovely carnival atmosphere if you like, it was brilliant. The thing that got me, the television cameras were there, there were a few drinks and that and singing and that. Arthur Scargill come on. We were told to get back to the buses pretty early, cos the one driving the bus wanted to go. But the thing about it was that the camera started setting up when half the people had gone and we went walking up the road towards the bus and the bus had gone and we were sitting on a grass verge and then I seen something and I couldn't believe it cos I'd had a few drinks and it was like watching one of these science fiction movies, like a dark cloud coming over the place. You just saw the police coming out of the streets from every... you hadn't seen a policeman all day ... on horseback, they were just getting anybody. It was pandemonium!

And they were getting nearer and nearer to us and I thought, What's going to happen? Some of us went running down the road to see what the trouble was and I went to speak to this copper to see what were happening. One of them got me against the wall, another policeman grabbed him and asked him what were happening, and he says, oh he's all right this lad is. This copper went and stood with some of the women so they wouldn't get hit because they were just going mad. I see policemen get on buses, pulling people off, knocking hell out of them with sticks. As I went down the road I kept ducking and diving out of the way. I see a young schoolgirl coming round the corner with a satchel over her shoulder and a horse went flying by and knocked her flat. I went to pick her up and got kicked on the shoulder as a policeman were running past hitting people. And as I got up near the crowd there was people chucking stones and that.

I never felt so frightened or so angry in my life when I seen what I seen. You've got horses, then policemen, then people chucking bricks and from what I could see in the middle of it, three or four, probably six policemen kicking hell out of a youth of probably 17 or 18. He managed to stagger to his feet and his face was covered in blood and that and one of them ... it was like one of these African executions, he got his stick out about a yard long and whacked him across the face with it and the ambulance men was angry and was effing and blinding to the police and they had to put that young lad in an oxygen tank for about 20 minutes before they even moved him and I've never seen a sight like it. And I never thought I would pick up a brick in anger but that day I did. I was totally disgusted with what the police were doing. I'd heard things that they'd do. I'd seen one or two incidents on the picket line but never anything like that'

Here's another account left as a comment to this post:

'The police were itching for trouble and as the march and rally had been a good humoured peaceful day they were frustrated that they were given no reason to start any. Their frustration finally got the better of them outside the Dial pub in the market place. The police just started to wade into anyone drinking there (many were nothing to do with the Rally) knocking pint pots out of their hands then telling them to drink up as their drinks fell to the floor. This in turn caused angry words to be exchanged as tempers were raised. The ones who had attended the Rally started to walk back towards Chesterfield Road to get their buses home along with a few local striking miners. Some of the police were kicking peoples heels as they were walking along and trying to goad them. Just across the road from the Evans Halshaw garage on Chesterfield Road, the bait was taken, the crowd turned on their tormenters and a few police were attacked and knocked to the floor. This gave the police there the opportunity they wanted, and they steamed into anyone there, lashing out with their truncheons and cracking heads. But some of the marchers there, were made of sterner stuff and they stood their ground. A pitched battle then ensued with casualties on both sides. The fighting, in between short lulls must have gone on for an hour or more. Some of the local striking miners were still fighting running battles with the police a long time after the buses had left. The 55 charged with riot were acquitted, not one policeman was charged with any offence after all the brutality they had dished out'.

Mark W, one of those arrested, also left a comment:

 'I was one of the Mansfield 55, over twenty of us in a small cell in Hucknall police station, charged with riot and affray, yep I was worried, I did grab a police inspector around the neck because he had me mate by his neck, however as two coppers grabbed me i went quiet and spent over 48hrs locked up, i saw a lot of abuse of power over the 12 months. power to the people'.

'Battle in the Streets - rampaging miners and police fought a pitched battle in a busy street yesterday. Mothers with young children were caught up in the violence. Stones and bottles were hurled as police horses charged into the crowd...The flare-up in Mansfield, Notts, followed the biggest demonstration yet in support of the minder strike, now in its 10th week. The demo, which attracted more than 15,000 strikers passed off peacefully. But when the pubs shut two hours later, the violence began/... One police man lay unconscious on the lawns of a Baptist church. Fifty yards up the road one miner, Jim Edwards from Lanacashire, was stretchered out, also apparently badly hurt. His friend, Tom Keen, said: 'We were walking towards our coach when we were suddenly charged by a police horse. Jim was forced into the side of a bus and collapsed' (Daily Mirror, 15 May 1984).

From Socialist Worker report of Mansfield demo (19/5/1984): 

'On Monday a massive number of trade unionists marched through Mansfield in the heart of the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Miners from every coalfield in the country including Nottinghamshire were there… the ,arch ended with a rally at which Jack Taylor, Dennis Skinner and Arthur Scargill spoke. Arthur Scargill was wildly applauded when he said ‘Thatcher was successful in the Falklands but she will lose this battle’.

Under the heading 'police riot', Socialist Worker included a couple of eye witness accounts:

‘Groups of miners were standing around with the police trying to provoke them. Scuffles broke out and the police baton charged the miners, forcing them off the car park where they were waiting for their coaches. Mounted police drove some demonstrators half a mile down a road, lashing out at anyone who got in the way'

‘I saw coppers smash a guy against a coach. He fell to the ground and was jumped on by three policemen, crushing him. More police came round to prevent the crowd rescuing him but eventually they went because he was lying unconscious with the crowd shouting “you've killed him”'

The aftermath: police torture in Rainworth

On the evening of the Mansfield demonstration a group of Yorkshire miners were violently assaulted by police in the nearby mining village of Rainworth, as documented in the book 'State of Siege: Miners' strike 1984 - politics and policing in the coal fields' by Jim Coulter, Susan Miller and Martin Walker.

'Mansfield or its environs was a dangerous place to be if you were a Yorkshire miner on that evening. Squads of officers were out looking for blood to avenge any injuries which their comrades might have received in the fight. Twenty men from Frickley colliery in Yorkshire volunteered to stay in Nottinghamshire after the rally'.

Later that evening  some of the these miners left the Rainworth Miners' Institute Club and were walking down the road in the direction of the nearby Robin Hood pub when they were set upon by police as described in these accounts:

Miner One: 'Suddenly there was running and shouting and I thought some police officers were coming for me but they went for the man who was in front of me. They started pushing him one to the other and then threw him to the floor and then began jumping on him. I stood there shocked and stunned. I could only watch because this was the worst manifestation of evil I have ever witnessed; four or five police officers bullying a man and enjoying it. I have seen violence before but this was sheer sadism [...]

The next thing I knew was that the Inspector who I had spoken to outside the club came up to me and said to his rank of uniformed thugs, "We'll have this bastard next!' and also perhaps "Give him the special treatment". I remember two or three police officers coming up to me casually, grinning. They seized me and frog marched me to the rear of the transit van. They put me on the ground in a prone position, with my arms out in front of me, my hands handcuffed tightly. From then on began the most traumatic experience of my life. A truncheon was brought horizontally from the back over my head, in front of my eyebrows and across the bridge of my nose. My head and torso were the levered up from the ground with the truncheon. Some kind of foreign body was inserted into each nostril and stuffed up my nose with what I assumed to be a ball point pen. I think that the foreign body was paper of some kind; throughout my stay in the police station I was constantly picking largish crumbs of what I thought was dried blood or matter out of my nose. The truncheon was then placed under my nose and this was used as a levering point instead of the bridge of my nose. I was lowered back to the ground and my back was jumped on several times, rhythmically so that the air in my lungs evacuated explosively every time that my back was jumped on. This created the effect that my body was being used as a bellows. I remember thinking at the time, in a detached manner, how organised it was; not a bit spontaneous and that they must do this quite often, and must be confident of getting away with it. Finally my head was turned sideways to the ground and something soft like a cloth was put under it, then someone jumped on my head. I was then thrown bodily into the back of the transit and I believe that two other men were thrown in on  top of me. I couldn't breathe and I struggled to get out from under them'.

Miner Two: 'I was standing on my own on the pavement. One police officer ran at me, he came from the back of me and put his truncheon across my throat, holding it at both ends and pulled on it. I was pushed from behind across the road to a van. I was gasping for breath. I was thrown into a van on the floor with the truncheon still around my neck. I was face down on the floor and he had one knee in the small of my back. He said something like, "put your hands behind your back bastard". I did that and I was handcuffed. After I had been handcuffed and the officer had taken the truncheon from my neck he hit me hard with it twice, once on the right hip, once on the right shoulder.

 
Miner Three: 'The officers ran across the road, a number of them were holding truncheons. Two officers ran towards me; they held me by my arms and hair, one of them grabbed one of my legs. I struggled because I had done nothing wrong and I was being assaulted. As I was carried to one of the vans, halfway across the road, a third officer came up and hit me violently on the back of the head with a truncheon. My scalp was split by that blow and I began to bleed. I did not struggle after that. 

Another of the miners, aged 24, had just left the Robin Hood when he saw what was happening to his mates. He was next to be attacked: 'We were standing outside the chip shop eating when we saw the rest of our lads being attacked by three vans loads of police officers [...] I was eventually pushed on to a seat still handcuffed; the two PC's sat behind me and began swearing at me then nudging me. I stood up to try and move to the front of the van away from these two. One grabbed me by the hair and pulled me forward over the seat. I was then dragged out of the van and thrown to the floor. I was circled by officers who began kicking me on the body and one kicked me in the face. My lip was cut on my teeth when this happened and my left eye began swelling. I was very frightened and I began shouting at them to leave me alone. I was then picked up and dropped onto a metal fence round the edge of the pavement; one officer was pushing down on my neck and forcing me to lift my feet off the ground. This meant that all my weight was on my stomach across the fence and I couldn't breathe. One P.C. then pulled a sticker from my cardigan ('Support the miners. NUM Stop Pit Closures) and said, "What's this fucking rubbish"; he then folded the sticker up and pushed it  my left nostril and pushed his finger up my nose to push it further up. The two officers stood talking almost conversationally to each other and began kneeing me in the face in turn. After a while an Inspector came over and said, "'Has he quietened down yet?''

Needless to day it was the miners not the police who ended up being being charged with a variety of offences from Breach of the Peace to Assaulting a Police Officer. The book's authors noted 'Torture is the same the world over... Such organisation and method though needs training and these processes must have been practiced'.

'Mansfield 55: Up against the law' badge

Also from Socialist Worker - a debate about sexist slogans being chanted by some on the Mansfield demo:

(Socialist Worker, 9/6/1984)

[post updated 16/4/2023 with SW material, sourced from Splits and Fusions archive]

More Music of the Strike: The Council Collective - Soul Deep (click for Youtube)

Soul Deep was a 1984 benefit record for Women Against Pit Closures recorded by The Council Collective - essentially The Style Council (Paul Weller and Mick Talbot) plus friends including D.C. Lee, Dizzy Hites, Junior Giscombe, Vaughn Toulouse, Leonardo Chignoli and most remarkably former Motown singer Jimmy Ruffin, whose father had been a miner in the US.

The song starts 'Getcha mining soul deep with a lesson in history, There's people fighting for their communities, Don't say their struggle does not involve you, If you're from the working class it's your struggle too. Weller criticises the TUC, bemoaning 'as for solidarity I don't see none' before concluding with a stirring chant of 'Strike Back, Fight Back, Let's Change That, No Pit Stops, No Closures, We want the truth, we want exposure NOW!'

According to John Reed's biography, Paul Weller: My Ever Changing Moods (2005), Paul Weller delayed the release after a taxi driver driving strike breakers in Wales was killed by a concrete block dropped on his car from a bridge. Weller donated some of the royalties to the taxi driver's family as well as to the strikers.

The B-side of the record was called A Miner's Point - an interview with two miners undertaken by Paolo Hewitt.