Shifting Horizons * * * Published by Canary Press, London October 1985. * * * CONTENTS Introduction 3 1. Pauline. Getting Started 6 2. Doreen. Chasing Dreams 17 3. Pauline. Breaking Through 30 4. Pauline. Getting Places 40 5. Doreen Hotting Up 51 6. Doreen. Disturbing the Peace? 60 7. Pauline. Moving Out 73 8. Doreen. Bruising 85 9. Pauline. Changing States 96 10. Doreen. Winter 105 11. Doreen. What Next? 115 Afterword 119 Lynn Beaton is an Australian who before travelling to England during the miners strike worked in a ‘Working Women’s Centre’ attached to the ACTU, the Australian equivalent of the TUC. During four years work she researched and published bulletins on a variety of subjects related to women at work. In Australia she has written for Trade Union journals and papers. She also wrote and produced a manual for trade unionists to help them deal with cases of sexual harassment. Her history honours thesis was on women’s employment in Australia during the Second World War and was published as a chapter in Worth her Salt (Hale & Iremonger. Sydney. 1980). 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank the whole of Blidworth striking community for enabling me to stay with them and write the book. In particular I want to thank Pip Humber and Alan Radford for their support and friendship. I know there must have been times when they got sick to death of me forever spiriting their wives away to do yet another interview, and I know there were times when they felt some infringement of their personal lives to have intimate details relayed first to me and then to the world. But throughout they both went out of their way to make sure I felt at home and had everything I needed. I want to thank Karen, Laggy and in the last month Ricki Langford, David, Paul, and Mark Humber and Amanda and Michael Radford for making me feel so at home in their homes that I became ‘one of the family’ in both houses. All three of us would like to thank also those strikers and their families and members of support groups who play a part in this book; Alison, Allan, Noreen Baker, Ann Bradley, Dennis Browne, Sylv Browne, Cambridge Support Group, Mick Carter, Chris, Claire, Clare. Terry Dunne, Fletch, Gay, Nicki Glegg, Margaret Groves, ‘Yorkie’ Groves, Annette Holroyd, Howard Hayman, Mal Howarth, Pauline Howarth, Louise, Sue Maddock, Maureen, Alison New, Maureen North, Gareth Pearce, Ann Petney, Ken and Sue Petney, Ralph, Tony Rose, Jim and Sarah Ryan, Betty Savage, Peter Savage, Doug Shaw, Simon, Lois Smith, Sue, Paul Thomson, Chris Tucker. I also want to thank my own family for their incredible support and perseverance. In particular my daughters Lucy and Chloe whose understanding of the importance and demands of my work has amazed me. First of all they understood the necessity for me to be away from them for much longer than any of us wanted and secondly they have provided enormous support and help in the final compilation of all the material. I want to thank the many people who gave me support and encouragement throughout the time it has taken to complete this manuscript. Many of the people who visited Blidworth as supporters of the Strike and many of my own friends in London and in Melbourne have provided me with all sorts of support, encouragement and inspiration which has enabled me to continue. I want to thank Gerry Beaton, Mary Clarke, Loy McCarthy, Bernadette O'Connell, Betty Sturtivant, Martin Walker and Von Woodhead for help with the production of the manuscript itself. 2 Introduction I went to Blidworth because of a chance meeting with some miners at Brighton during the week of the TUC Congress. When I reached the Nottingham Bus Station I wasn’t at all surprised that there was no-one to meet me despite having been assured less than twenty hours before that there would be. I had even said to the man on the phone, whose thick Nottinghamshire accent I had a lot of trouble understanding, that if no-one was there I would just catch a bus. I was convinced that the striking community of Blidworth would have much more on their plates than to come into Nottingham to meet someone who had described herself as an Australian journalist, coming to write some articles for Australian journals. In fact I was afraid that my presence would be a nuisance and I determined to make myself useful and not become an added burden. But my estimation of my reception couldn’t have been more wrong; as the bus pulled into Blidworth, I was shocked to realise that there were two women waiting there to meet me. Even more shocked to discover that these two women had been to Nottingham, but a communication error had sent them to the train station while I had arrived from London by coach. One of the things that amazed me most of all about Blidworth was the extent to which the striking community accepted me without question. I suppose that even if you think you are clear about the issues of something like the Miners’ Strike, you are still to some extent influenced by the media presentation of things. One of the biggest surprises in going to Blidworth, was the extent to which everybody was real. Some of my first impressions of life in the Strike Centre were the interactions between the adults and kids. I arrived there at about two o'clock, at three, some of the younger kids came in from school. It was like being in any house when the kids get home from school, except this wasn’t anybody’s house, it was a Strike Centre and because there were so many families there, there was, of course, inter-action between all the kids and all the adults. I realised I was witnessing an experiment in communal living. But this experiment had not been born, like others I'd known out of a conscious effort to change lifestyle, but out of a necessity to survive unexpected attack from a Government determined to smash the mining communities. Because over half the village were scabbing, the only refuge was in the Centre. Late one night Pauline and I sat in her kitchen as she described some of the events of the last few months. The house was in that state of eerie quiet that comes late at night when everyone else has gone to bed and you talk softly to make sure you don’t disturb them. The soft steady tones of Pauline’s voice were in stark contrast to the content of her words. Her descriptions of police intimidation the likes of which no-one in Britain could quite believe were not new to me, I'd read accounts in the left-wing press and since I'd first arrived in Blidworth nearly two weeks before I'd heard the stories a number of times. What made this night so powerful was that in those two weeks Pauline and some of the other women in the village had become close friends. The stories were no longer something that had happened to someone somewhere, I had lost the ability to maintain a distance between me and the stories because the striking community of Blidworth had become a part of my life. Later, as I lay snug in Pauline’s caravan I kept thinking that everybody should know what had happened here, in the way I now knew. The next morning I asked Doreen and Pauline what they thought about me trying to write a book about it. At first my suggestion was met with off-handed agreement, I knew the two women well enough to know that the off-handedness didn’t come from disinterest but from the fact that I was proposing yet another venture which neither of them could have imagined possible before the strike had started. The strike at this time was six months old, and the whole six months had been a series of challenges, which the women had met, but each accomplishment was accompanied by a disbelief that such things could happen. Having decided we would write the book, we then had to decide how we were going to do it. I was determined that as much as possible the story must be told in Pauline and Doreen’s words so we started a series of long tape recorded interviews. 3 The interviews became a very special event in themselves, I think in a way we all enjoyed them, but they created moments Of tension as well. We'd spend hours sitting in one of the houses or in the caravan with the tape recorder between us. At times it was hard to make the time available to do it but Doreen and Pauline’s commitment to the project always made it possible. I became part of the community and for six months, lived its ups and downs, its tensions and its energies. In the normal course of living, we would often discuss things, and then, during an interview, I could bring it up. There was always a tension between interviewer and interviewee, but all of us somehow understood it as a part of the process and it never really got in our way. Doreen often expressed exasperation at my constant, ‘How did you feel about that?’ ‘What were you doing just before that happened?’ ‘What did you think about such and such at the time?’ She would yell, ‘How do you expect me to remember, it was four months ago.’ But she, would always remember, sometimes days later, she'd come and tell me some small detail that had slipped her mind during an interview, or answer a question I'd asked that she hadn’t been able to answer at the time.