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'Voices of Frickley': the Struggles of the Miners at a Yorkshire Colliery, 1984-1993

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'Voices of Frickley': the Struggles of the Miners at a Yorkshire Colliery, 1984-1993 ... - 'VOICES OF FRICKLEY': THE STRUGGLES OF THE MINERS AT A YORKSHIRE COLLIERY, 1984-1993 J. E. Nightingale University of Sheffield Submitted for the degree of PhD, 1997. .. 'VOICES OF FRICKLEY': THE STRUGGLES OF THE MINERS AT A YORKSHIRE COLLIERY, 1984-1993 James Edwin Nightingale Submitted for the degree of PhD, the University of Sheffield, Department of History, October 1997. - ., 'VOICES OF FRICKLEY': THE STRUGGLES OF THE MINERS AT A YORKSHIRE COLLIERY, 1984-1993 James Edwin Nightingale In this study the author focuses on the actIvItles of the National Uniol1" of Mineworkers at Frickley Colliery during ten years of industrial conflict prior to the - pit's closure in November 1993. While the initial part of this period, the 1984-85 miners' strike, has been well documented by scholars, the conflict in the following years has received scant attention. Following the miners' defeat, the NUM members at Frickley played an important part in sustaining the tradition of niilitant trade unionism in the Yorkshire coalfield at a time of general retreat for the British labour movement. Other studies have concentrated mainly on the activities of union leaders and management figures when chronicling the confrontation in the coalfields."In contrast, a substantial part of the present author's account is based on the oral testimonies of pit level activists, thus aspects of the conflict that have been otherwise ignored or overlooked are brought to light. At the core of the study is the contention that the labour movement had become disabled by the defeatist notion of 'new realism'. Moreover, it is illustrated how the NUM leadership in Yorkshire, conventionally portrayed as being militant, was often instrumental in suffocating the resistance of the NUM rank and file as they challenged the authoritarian working practices being imposed by the management of the industry . • f CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Frickley and the miners' union 9 Chapter Two: The early days of the Big Strike 25 ... Chapter Three: Steel and Orgreave 45 Chapter Four: Digging in 53 Chapter Five: The battle of 13 November 69 ., Chapter Six: Solid to the end 85 Chapter Seven: The return to work 99 Chapter Eight: Fighting back 116 Chapter Nine: The new gaffer 132 Chapter Ten: The Code of Conduct 146 Chapter Eleven: The overtime ban 164· Chapter Twelve: Peace 176 Chapter Thirteen: Into the 1990s 189 Chapter Fourteen: Retreat 201 Chapter Fifteen: Closure 214 Chapter Sixteen: Conclusion 237 Appendix: The Frickley activists interviewed ··243 Bibliography -, 245 INTRODUCTION On Friday 26 November 1993, the miners at Frickley Colliery in the Yorkshire coalfield worked their final shift at the pit. Frickley was the latest on a list of pits that had closed in the pre"10us decade as the British coal industry was reduced to a shadow of its former self Two days earlier, of the 357 men who took part in a pit-head ballot, just 27 had voted to oppose the plans to close the pit. 1 The very size of the vote at Frickley gives the impression that those responsible for shutting pits, the Conservative government and the management of the coal industry, had things their own way during this period - but such a view would be mistaken. Britain's coal miners had formed one of the country's most powerful trade unions, the National Union of Mineworkers, and in the ten years prior to Frickley closing, its members had been involved in an almost continual struggle. From March 1984 to March 1985, the government had to confront the miners in Europe's longest mass strike - the Big Strike, as Frickley miners often preferred to call it. 2 During its course, the Frickley miners, previously regarded as a 'moderate' workforce, gained a militant reputation because of their aggressive stand. Even though the miners' strike was eventually beaten, at many pits their spirit was not entirely broken and a guerrilla war of attrition against the imposition of new working practices took place. The NUM memhers at Frickley Colliery - the 'Frickley Fighters' as they duhhed themselves - were in the forefront of this action, a beacon of resistance as the labour movement ret.reat.ed. The 'Voices of Frickley' is an account of those ten years of struggle. Certainly the Big Strike has been extensively documented, and being the most important industrial confrontation in Britain since the General Strike of 1926, rightly so. Unfortunately, there has been little written about the strike's aftermath. And in what has been written, too onen the focus has been on the changes in mining communities rather than the struggles of the miners at the point of production, the place where they had their greatest collective power. Thus Waddington et al. 's Split at the Seams included interviews with miners, but also 'their families, trade union otlicials, local politicians, police officers, social workers, health workers, school teachers and the local clergy'. 3 Similarly with a sociological study of four W ~st Yorkshire mining localities by Dennis Warwick and Gary Littlejohn from 1981 to 1989. In their 1986 survey they collected data from 123 women and just 31 men -­ and few of these had been active participants in the strike. 4 Hemsworth and South Elmsall f.xpress, 2 December 1993. .f 2 This was by no means a unique concept amongst miners. Robert Roberts, for instance, uses the same term to refer to the 1972 national miners' strike. See R: . Roberts, 'The Big Strike', in 1. MacFarlane (ed.) l,-~ssaysfrom the Yorkshire Coa(field, (Sheffield, 1979). 3 D. Waddington, M. Wykes, and C. Critcher, Split at the Seams? (Milton Keynes, 1990), p.l. 4 D. Warwick and G. Littlejohn, Coal, Capital and Culture: A Sociological Analysis (?f Mining Communities in West Yorkshire, (London, 1992), pp.83-87. Introduction Even two of the later and most valuable texts which do focus on the .miners' struggle, Jonathan and Ruth Winterton's Coal Crisis and Conflict,5 and Andrew 1. Richards' Miners on Sfrik.e,6 each devote only one chapter to the strike's aftermath. Moreover, both have shortcomings in what they do discuss. Considering that the Wintertons collected much of their data by interviewing a 'key activist' from each pit in Yorkshire, there is little in their account of the resistance at grass-roots level in the Big Strike: the barricade building, the stone throwing and the collecting of strike funds, the leaflet writing and the campaigning, - or the intensity and range of debate amongst ordinary miners, be it at work or the social club, the branch meeting or the picket line. This is partly because there is little oral testimony presented, but perhaps also because too many of their respondents had one foot in the lower levels of the NUM bureaucracy. Although Richards' book is packed with oral testimonies, his respondents are also from the same layer, predominantly pit-level union officials. Indeed there is little ·, acknowledgement that a bureaucracy existed in the miners union, or that there may have been any conflict of interests between the leadership of the union and the rank-and-file membership. In 1972, Raphael Samuel described what he saw as a common feature of much of the literature on coal mining trade unionism: 'They are for the most part bureaucratic works in which the miner is treated as 'synonymous with his Union, and the Union itself identified with the activities of the area officials.,7 It is an apt description of many later works too. In the present writer's view, the concept of bureaucracy is an important one when discussing trade union issues. When Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons8 analysed the 1984-85 strike, unlike most other observers,9 they came to the conclusion that the miners' defeat had not been inevitable. Certainly the miners had been forced to fight in far from ideal conditions, and for sure the state repression they faced was beyond that experienced by most workers in struggle. But these were of nothing compared to the weaknesses in the working class movement. For Callinicos and Simons, ,the fundamental reason why the miners lost in 1984-85 was because they were betrayed by the leaders of the trade union movement; and furthermore, leading fIgures within the NUM itself could not be absolved of all responsibility for the defeat, having blocked action which was required for the miners to win. It is the present writer's contention that not only were CaIlinicos and Simons correct in their judgement in_ 1985, but that their analysis holds true for what happened in the years that followed. Callinicos and Simons do not argue that it was the personal failings of trade union leaders that led them to betray the miners in 1984-85. Miners had been betrayed 5 1. Winterton and R. Winterton, Coal, Crisis and COJ!f!ict: 171e 1984-85 lvlincrs ' Strike in Yorkshire, (Manchester, 1989). 6 A. J. Richards, lvliners On Strike: Class Solidarity and Division in Britain, . (Oxford, 1996). 7 RSamuel, 'Forword', in D. Douglass, Pit L!fe in County Durham: Rank and File Movements and Workers' Control, History Workshop pamphlet No.6, 1972, p.i. 8 A. Callinicos and M. Simons, The Great Strike, (London, 1985). 9 See, for instance, A. 1. Taylor, 'Militancy is not enough', Labour History . Review, VoI.55, No.3, Winter 1990. 2 Introduction before - by the Triple Alliance in April 1921, and then after the TUC had left them to fight alone aaer calling ofT the General Strike in 1926. And the same pattern was evident during the guerrilla war in the pits after the Big Strike, and yet again in the campaign to stop the final pit closure programme in 1992/93 Callinicos and Simons point out that such behaviour is actually a result of the trade union leadership constituting a particular social grouping within modem capitalist society.
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