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Scars remain for former pitmen

The scars of the miners' strike are still etched on the minds of thousands of former pitmen up and down the country.

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It is 30 years to the day since the notorious year-long strike was called off after months of violent clashes, fractured communities and the tragic loss of lives.

"We were fighting not only for our jobs but those who stayed working. We knew that we were all under threat," says Alan Pearson who worked at Littleton Colliery for 20 years, starting when he was just 15 years old.

March 1, 1984 – National Coal Board announces plans to close 20 mines, with a loss of 20,000 jobs. The Thatcher government had prepared against a repeat of the 1974 strike by stockpiling coal, converting power station to burn heavy fuel oil and recruiting road hauliers to transport coal.

March 1 – The announcement of the closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire proves to be the spark for strikes across the country. Picket lines are set up at the Littleton Colliery in Huntington and the Lea Hall Colliery in Rugeley

March – Arthur Scargill, president of NUM, unites various strikes into nationwide industrial action, without a ballot.

April 25 – Yorkshire miners' leader Jack Taylor does deal with the ISTC steel union to allow 30,000 tons of steel a week to be produced at Scunthorpe works

May 14 – Some 40,000 striking miners march in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire

June 18 – The 'Battle of Orgreave' takes place at the Orgreave Coking plant near Rotherham. Some 5,000 striking miners clashed with the same number of police and violence broke out resulting in 51 picketers and 72 policemen being injured.

June 27 – TUC day of action. Some 50 schools take unofficial strike action and over 50,000 people march for the miners.

July 19 – Thatcher refers to the striking miners as 'the enemy within' and says that giving in to them would be surrendering the rule of parliamentary democracy to the rule of the mob.

July 31 – The High Court fines South Wales NUM £50,000 under anti-union laws – the first time the union is fined under the laws. Labour leader Neil Kinnock says: "The courts will have their way."

August – Two miners from Nottinghamshire take the NUM to court over claims that the strike was not 'official' without a ballot. In September the high court rules that the NUM breaches its own constitution and is fined £200,000, which it refuses to pay.

September 21 – Thousands of miners and police clash at Malty Colliery near Rotherham. Protestors have been out of work for six months and the lack of income is starting to take its toll.

November – A growing number of miners decide to return to work as Christmas looms. Violence on the picket lines becomes more widespread.

At the height of the violence, a South Wales taxi driver is killed when a concrete block was dropped onto his car as he carried a working miner to the pit. Two miners are later jailed for life for his murder.

February 24, 1985 – A mass rally in London for the miners sees many arrests

March 3 – Delegates at an NUM conference decide by a vote of 98 to 91 to end the strike.

August 1989 – Numerous pit closures began across the country.

1992 – Further pit closures were announced by John Major who was already drawing up plans for privatisation.

1993 – Littleton Colliery in Cannock closes with more than 600 workers losing their jobs – just a year after the Government said it would survive as it was a 'core' of the industry.

He was a member of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and stayed on the picket line for the duration of the 1984/85 mass walkout.

The 61-year-old said: "It was an easy decision to support our fellow workers. We were fighting the Establishment and there were doing everything they could to make it hard.

"Some people could stick it out longer than others but we had support from across the country."

The strike, led by NUM president Arthur Scargill, began after an announcement by National Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor that four million tons of capacity was to be taken out of the industry by closing 20 pits, leading to a loss of 20,000 jobs.

The closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire was the spark which led to the historic showdown with Scargill and the miners believing it to the the thin end of the wedge.

In Cannock Chase the Littleton Colliery in Huntington and the Lea Hall Colliery in Rugeley saw picket lines and workers faced with entering the pits or protesting at the gates.

Nick Platek was another Littleton miner who went out on strike for the whole year.

He was arrested four times and served eight days in Winston Green jail during the industrial action.

Now aged 63, Mr Platek, who lives in Hednesford, said the legacy of the strike lived on.

"It was a difficult period. I served in the army and was awarded a general service medal but then was being described as the 'enemy within'," he said in reference to a speech by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

"I was arrested four times. One of them was because we were staging a sit-down protest outside the pit in the road, I think another was because we created a barricade. The police used any excuse to arrest you to lower our numbers.

"By the end I think there was around 200 of us on strike. But in the end history proved us right – it was the government's plans to close all the pits and Thatcher used the strike to break the vanguard of the unions. If she could break the miners she could break the whole movement and clear the path for privatisation."

Dennis Southwell, now 75, worked at the pit bottom at Lea Hall. He was also on the picket line for the duration of the strike with his two sons. There was just over 2,000 workers at Lea Hall and Mr Southwell estimates there was around 180 still on strike by the end. He said: "I had no sympathy at all for those who carried on working. How can you have sympathy with people who are brought in and out on buses waving their pay packets at you. We were fighting for their jobs – not just ours. We expected more would come – and we were right. We knew this was political and Thatcher was trying to destroy the trade union movement.

"You had families and friends who were torn apart by it. It was a dark era. It could be hostile and nasty on the pickets. There was one time when some of the men sat in the road to block it and policemen on horses just ran straight over them. During the strike we survived on our savings and with the support of my wife. After all that time it was strange going back."

The strike split the country in 1984 and 1985 – pictured clocking on at Lea Hall Colliery are miners defying the pickets

As a deputy overman at Littleton, Mick Drury, now 78, was a middle manager at the pit.

He was a member of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers, and did not join the 2,000 NUM members on the picket. He takes a different view on the dispute. He said: "Just a few were out for the whole time. By around halfway through I'd say that 50 per cent had returned to work and at the time the strike ended it was just a few. I think they realised they had been taken for a ride.

More than 200 pitmen were returning to work at Littleton Colliery, Cannock, in March 1984

"The Government had built up sufficient stocks to keep the country going and some started to realise Scargill was not all that he was made up to be – but that is just my opinion.

"Our union did not strike. There were a couple of others who walked out but they were back quite quickly.

"Most would come back through fear. A lot had taken advantage of the Right to Buy and had mortgages to pay – that made a huge difference.

Nick Platek has a scrapbook of memories
Deputy overman Mick Drury, pictured down the mine at Littleton in 1977
Nick puts a 'coal not dole' badge on a shopper
Former Littleton miner Nick Platek, left, from Hednesford
Mick Drury, 78, with his old miners lamp

"It was awful because it did set people against each other and there were fallouts between friends and families – I had my own relatives who went out on strike, including my son.

"The only time we had trouble was when a group of miners came up from South Wales at night and somehow got round the security and shoved an 8ft steel girder through the spokes of the winding wheel. They stopped there and the police were called, and we couldn't go in that day. Eventually they came down for food.

"It was an upsetting year. We had some miners come down from Yorkshire for the work.

"One day we had a our snap (mining term for stopping for food) and one of them told me that he couldn't get through the picket lines because of how strong the strike was there. He said his wife was a teacher and there was not a week that went by when they did not buy a pair of shoes for children in her class – because all their families worked down the pits and were on strike."

Twelve months after the start of the strike, three were dead, 200 had spent time in prison and 20,000 were injured nationally.

On March 3, 1985, the NUM national executive voted 98 to 91 for a return to work.

Participation in the strikes was lower in the Midland than elsewhere in the country with estimates of around 20 per cent observing the strike by the time it was called off.

Mr Scargill told reporters: "We have decided to go back for a whole range of reasons. One of the reasons is that the trade union movement of Britain with a few notable exceptions has left this union isolated. Another reason is that we face not an employer but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police and you people in the media and at the end of this time our people are suffering tremendous hardship."

Cheers greeted Mr Scargill when he emerged from Congress House – but the mood quickly changed and he was booed and jeered as he announced the return to work.

The chief spokesman for the National Coal Board, Michael Eaton, said: "There is no victory. The coal industry has lost, it's the victim. We have lost markets, we have lost good labour relations over the course of this dispute."

Mr Pearson, who is now chairman of Cannock Chase District Council, returned to work with his striking colleagues. He said: "It wasn't the same when we went back. We did look at each other differently but we got on and still produced coal but we knew where we stood with people. The government used the strike to actively break up the unions and to break up working-class communities. It still hurts. Ex-miners are still living all over Cannock Chase and when we get together it is like being back down the colliery."

The strike was seen as a major political victory for Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party. It became a symbolic struggle, as the NUM was one of the strongest unions in the country and viewed by many as having brought down the Heath government in the union's 1974 strike, the second stoppage in two years.

A total of 24 pits closed in 1985, 16 the following year and a further 35 before 1990. At the time, Scargill had been ridiculed when he warned that the number of pits would be cut to 12. But last year the National Archive released Cabinet papers from 1984 revealed a plan to shut 75 pits over three years, and cut 64,000 jobs.

There are just three deep mines still in operation in England but all are on course for closure.

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