Distant Voices Read online

  During the general election campaign John Major showed us Brixton, his childhood home, from his chauffeur-driven, bullet-proof Daimler. As he drove along Denmark Hill the camera picked up King’s College Hospital, over which the commentary extolled the government’s record on the Health Service. It did not say that the previous October the health secretary, William Waldegrave, had announced more cuts to London’s hospitals. Waldegrave was also in the area at that time and was asked by the Community Health Council to visit King’s College. He did not acknowledge the invitation. ‘The secretary of state’, said an official, ‘cannot possibly be everywhere at the same time.’40 Nor could Julia Branch, Michael Mulhall and Jim Armfield before they died.

  January 3 to March 25, 1992

  THE MINERS

  ON A DURHAM beach in the early morning a figure approaches, etched against a grey veined sky, buffeted by a freezing wind. The sea is so black that the breakers are incandescent. The beach is black, a quarry of polished black stones and scabrous mud. There is no colour. The whites of his eyes peer from beneath a sack of coal so heavy he is doubled.

  ‘Coming back is worse than going,’ wrote George Orwell of miners in The Road to Wigan Pier, ‘not only because you are already tired out but because the journey back to the shaft is probably uphill. You try walking head down as miners do, and then you bang your backbone. Most of the miners have what they call “buttons down the back” – that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra.’41

  The bent man with the sack is another kind of miner. It is likely he, too, has ‘buttons down the back’ from his yoke of coal. From dawn it takes him five hours to scavenge and load just three sacks of ‘sea coal’ and to carry them up a steep incline, past the Fair World Bingo Club; for this he gets £6. A few of the scavengers have bikes; most have nothing. In his ragged hat and enforced poverty, he is from another age, which has returned. ‘Don’t show m’face,’ he says to my photographer friend John Garrett. ‘They’ll take away m’dole. Can’t live on it; can’t live without it.’

  We are near Murton, Vane Tempest and Easington collieries. Murton, sunk in 1838, was closed just over a year ago. ‘They told us on the Friday and closed it on the Monday,’ says Dave Temple, a former Murton miner. Easington and Vane Tempest are among the thirty-one pits which the President of the Board of Trade, Michael Heseltine, announced last October would close; following protests that almost brought down the Government, they were spared to await his ‘review’. Vane Tempest is one of ten pits that have not been allowed to work on, in spite of a High Court ruling that Heseltine’s action was illegal. Some 10,000 miners are now turning up for work and being sent home. The other day Arthur Scargill called at Newcastle-upon-Tyne police station to ask if the thousands of riot police who had forcibly kept open pits during the 1984–5 strike would now be available to go to Vane Tempest colliery to do the same thing. Such panache has helped to see the man through.

  I have known these communities for almost twenty years, though my first encounter with Durham miners was as a boy in the coalfields of New South Wales where both my grandfathers and my father worked, and where there was a ‘Durham pit’. The miners there had emigrated en masse from three villages and spoke a dialect that owed as much to Norway as England; I first heard the word ‘marra’ (friend) and ‘crack’, meaning everything from comradely talk to gossip. They are a remarkable people, preserving and expressing vividly that sense of community that is often spoken of, across class lines, as society’s most abiding strength. I first went to Murton just before Christmas 1973, on the eve of only the second strike that the miners have ‘won’. That is to say, they went from being very low paid workers to moderately low paid workers. (Today a miner’s average weekly take home pay is £240. A third of miners take home less than £200. Just to earn a decent wage, many work the equivalent of seven days a week.) By ‘winning’ in 1974 the miners helped to bring down a Tory government, for which they were never forgiven and are now paying what is clearly the final instalment of the price.

  Murton then was the archetypal pit village. With its Democratic Club, Colliery Inn, ribbons of allotments producing champion leeks and pigeons, there were relatively few ‘travellers’, as pitmen from closed mines are called. Everybody knew everybody in an easy freemasonry. John Cummings, then secretary of the Murton mechanics, was the sixth generation of his family to work at the pit. They had lived in the same house in Albion Street from 1839 to 1957 and John remembers the lavatories in the middle of the street and the three public water taps.

  Long before governments thought seriously about providing social welfare, the miners of Murton were looking after their most vulnerable, building homes for the old, providing for pensions, convalescence, recreation. All this was paid for at the pit. There has always been an ambiguity among miners about the nature of their job, but there is none about their loyalty and pride. In the cemeteries the inscriptions speak much about ‘respect’ for those who died and who ‘rest appreciated by all his friends’.

  Standing at the heart of the town, the mine was both provider and enemy, a Hell’s Kitchen into which men went like troops. This is not a romantic notion, as I learned in January 1974, when I joined a night shift at Murton. I went down a difficult seam called F32, a third of a mile beneath Murton, extending to the sea. This is how I described it at the time:

  It was approaching midnight at the pithead, and the first hand I took was a claw. ‘It’s me . . . Harry,’ said its owner, knowing I had failed to recognise him in his helmet, lamp and overalls. His hand, with three fingers gone and a stump, was no guide; so many hands were like that, which helped to explain why so few were offered. Except for brief, muttered monosyllables and the catching of breath, there was silence as we filled water bottles and strapped on rubber knee-pads and the ‘self-rescuer’, which is a small metal box with gas mask designed to keep you alive until they reach you.

  We walked to the cage. We each carried two numbered metal tokens, one to hand to the banksman on the pithead as we went down and one to surrender when we came up. A missing token means a missing man. The banksman frisked us for matches and cigarettes and slammed shut the cage, which rocked with the gale hitting the pithead at 70 miles an hour. There was total blackness now; no one spoke.

  Just before one o’clock in the morning we reached 1,100 feet and the shift only now began; this was the time the Coal Board started paying, although most of the men had been at the pit, preparing to go down, for an hour or more.

  Now we were walking downhill through the swirls of stone dust, judging the man in front from the beam of his lamp. Bill Williams, who had been doing this since he was 14, bit off some tobacco. ‘Aye, that’ll catch some of the muck,’ he said. He also lifted his ribcage, as someone might hitch up his trousers, and attempted to clear his lungs of ‘the muck’, but without success.

  Now suddenly the atmosphere was humid, almost tropical, and the pit’s first sounds were the hissing of the compression pumps, pumping out 200 gallons of water every minute. At two o’clock we reached the coal-face. Joe Ganning and Doug Walton wore masks of white clay as they worked a drill at the stone; the noise was incessant and the sting from the dust and water was relieved only when I lay on my stomach in the slush and crawled into the tunnel beside the coal-face, which was three-and-a-half feet high and slightly wider than my shoulders.

  This was the core of the mine and, except for the machinery, it might have been a scene from a Victorian etching; the men, their bodies contorted, ‘titillating’ the roof to test for a fall and moving the hydraulic chocks, as heavy as cannons, which propped up the roof. They reminded me of men bringing up artillery under fire. Our lives depended upon on how they worked; and in every sense – the clipped commands of the deputy, the tense, planned assault on a stubborn adversary, the degradation of a filthy wet trench and the spirit of comradeship, of watching out for each other – this was another kind of front line. ‘Over there,’ shouted a voice behind me, ‘our last one was killed; Peart was his name.
He was impaled by the machine. Just not quick enough, poor lad.’

  It was now twenty past eight in the morning. The walk back seemed eternal, the breathing of the men in time with their long steps metallic. Then, at last, the cage! Now the Coal Board had stopped paying. In the lamp room Harry Mason, the man whose hand was a claw, said, ‘This is where we keep the wounded.’ Silhouetted behind the wire mesh Nick Gowland walked in pain with his smashed hip. He is 22 and, because he was too young at the time, received no compensation.

  Now the young men sprinted for the baths, while the older men tried. Black faces and white bodies darted from lockers to showers, along aisles of steam, at the end of which were private showers ‘for the lads with a bit missing’. I was conscious of a background noise of wheezing and hacking. The lung disease, pneumoconiosis, known as ‘the Dust’, often doesn’t show up on X-ray for decades. ‘It’s been difficult to breathe for a long time,’ said Ron Sugden. ‘You know what the doctor said to me? He said I should keep out of ‘the Dust’! The laughter at Ron’s remark resounded in the baths, and when they laughed the hacking reached a crescendo.

  I returned to Murton in July 1984 with the great strike under way. All around pits had closed, the Consett steel works had been levelled and the shipyards were empty. The miners’ victory a decade earlier had led to seductive productivity deals, which provided their enemies with a new weapon of divisiveness. A spurious ‘social contract’ had seen a Labour government side squarely with capital. Now, with Thatcher in power, the miners’ union was the target. To be in a village like Murton then was to understand just how little the rest of the country knew about the state’s tactics during that strike. While the government and the media spoke virtually as one and incessantly highlighted the violence of miners, paramilitary police cut off the villages and assaulted almost anybody, including the old. As it was later revealed, most arrested miners had committed no offence and their arrests were illegal.

  ‘You’re bringing bloody revolution to the streets of Britain,’ Robert Maxwell railed at Arthur Scargill in my presence. ‘You are doing nothing less than attacking the sovereignty of this nation’ – at which Scargill asked for a cup of tea.

  An insidious violence was directed at miners’ families through an increasingly politicised bureaucracy. The case of Patrick Warby’s daughter, Marie, was fairly typical. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. She was denied benefit by the Department of Social Security. After Patrick went to a tribunal I obtained records of the case showing that Marie had been turned down because her father was ‘affected by a Trade dispute’.42

  Murton remained solid until the end when, said John Cummings, ‘The banks and finance companies turned the screws at once.’ The trade union establishment had hoisted the white flag long before that. In February 1985 I happened to be in the Murton Miners’ Institute when the television news showed the recently retired TUC leader Len Murray doffing his cap three times to Lord Hailsham, as ‘Lord Murray of Epping Forest’ took his seat in the unelected upper chamber. Before departing for the Lords, Murray had called for an attitude of ‘reality’ from the miners, as had Margaret Thatcher. Such a spectacle of ritual betrayal caused an embarrassed silence among the men I was with. Either they were too incredulous, too exhausted or too generous to say what was in their minds. ‘There goes Len,’ said one of them finally.

  Today, yellow street lamps illuminate the town’s dead heart. When the pit was closed in December 1991 it was levelled, leaving one listed building like a monument set in gravel. Even the swimming pool which the miners built, the only Olympic-sized pool on the coalfields, was demolished; the council didn’t have the money to take it over. Tom Parry was the last man out. ‘It was a Friday at about three in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘As I left, Mr Thomas the demolition expert blew up our workshops. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe they’d take away not just our jobs, but the lives we’d given to it.’

  The closing of Murton Colliery followed a murky campaign that is not untypical of British Coal, whose incentive to destroy and prepare for privatisation has swept aside all vestiges of the old paternalism. A divisive ‘review procedure’ offering redundancy ‘sweeteners’ led to the interrogation of individual miners and a threat to withdraw bonuses and overtime, which represent up to 50 per cent of miners’ pay. ‘Look at what’s happened in Germany,’ said Dave Temple, who was secretary of the mechanics. ‘Murton is twinned with Baersweiller. When the pit closes there the men will have had five years’ notice, retraining and guarantees of new jobs. The town has been given grants for new industry. We’ve none of that.’

  Murton’s biggest employer now is the Co-op, employing women on a part-time basis: a microcosm of the post-modernist nation. Then there is the bakery. Then nothing. Unemployment is around 30 per cent. Emmanuel Shinwell, the Minister for Fuel and Power in the Attlee Government, openly discouraged post-war industry from going into the coalfields, and ‘providing warm factories’, so that the men would have no choice but to work in the mines. Ask why miners do it and there is part of your answer.

  Youth unemployment in all the pit villages is up to 80 per cent. For them, the denial of choice is explicit. Wheel clamps in the streets indicate the rise of youth crime. Teenage pregnancies are more numerous than ever, it seems. Of all the subjects that provoke anger here, ‘youth training schemes’ lead the list. Dave Temple’s daughter, Corina, was one of 50 on a scheme farmed out to a private agency. She is the only one to have found a job: as an audio-typist. The agency was not pleased. Her qualifications, her character and the health and safety conditions of the office of her future employer were questioned. Only when she demanded to be released, and threatened to take it further, was she allowed to take the job. Private agencies lose a substantial subsidy when they lose a ‘trainee’. The more unemployed youngsters, the greater the profit.

  Most of the Murton miners were transferred to Easington pit. Their brief sense of security ended with Heseltine’s announcement last October. One British Coal executive broke ranks. Ian Day, the area production manager, wrote to the Sunderland Echo, describing the Government’s action as ‘criminal . . . To talk now about measures to help the mining areas affected, to attract new jobs, is unbelievable. What new jobs and when? How can anyone replace 4,500 jobs in the north-east overnight?’43

  In the north-east most local authorities have their own ‘development unit’. Government policy has forced them to compete with their neighbours, no matter how close and common their interests. What matters is that they are seen to be vying for ‘business’, trying to catch the eye of a passing Nissan man, offering everything on the cheap, especially labour.

  By any measure of economics, there is no logic to this: it is purely doctrinaire. This is demonstrated by the Government’s refusal to allow £7,500,000 in European Community money to go to east Durham simply because it would break the ideological embargo on allowing local authorities to decide how to spend resources. Easington District Council has been allowed to spend just £600,000, about enough to fill in holes and paint the lamp posts.

  There is no shortage of studies that conclude the obvious: that the cost of providing alternative employment is far greater than any subsidy to, or investment in, the mining industry. The coal reserves are there; British Coal continues to suppress the results of its bore-drilling off the Durham coast, having admitted that ‘the information is commercially valuable’.44 Reports by McCloskey Coal Information Services and experts at Durham and Newcastle universities show that the retention of both Easington and Vane Tempest pits makes economic sense.45 In one of its own glossy brochures, British Coal describes Easington as ‘one of the North-east’s undersea super pits’, which two years running produced a million tons of coal in record time.46

  Of course, all this is irrelevant to the aims of privatisation, the spirit of which is expressed in a series of national newspaper advertisements. There is a photograph of a miner, Arnie Makinson, who is lauded as ‘on
e of Britain’s most successful businessmen’. The caption reads, ‘Meet Arnie . . . a member of a workforce that’s more than doubled productivity in just five years. He may not be Sir John Harvey-Jones but, as far as we’re concerned, he’s got as much to offer. We’re tapping the richest seam of all – the hidden talents of our workforce.’47

  Mr Makinson has his arms folded. So you cannot see that one hand is mutilated. Last year he lost the little and index fingers of his right hand in a terrible accident at Stillingfleet Colliery in Yorkshire during the week that Stillingfleet set out to break the European production record, and succeeded. Mr Makinson was working at the coal-face and his hand was so badly crushed that it seemed amputation might be necessary on the spot. Although he has to undergo more surgery, he has returned to work at the coal-face. If he joined other injured men at the pithead, he would be paid considerably less. ‘One of Britain’s most successful businessmen’ is still awaiting compensation.

  Under privatisation, the British coal industry is to be sold off in order to ‘compete’ in a home market that is about to be decimated by the importation of cheap foreign coal. In the meantime, pits that produce the cheapest coal in Europe are to be closed. Fewer pits will mean big profits – profits at the expense of the future. Some people are about to get very rich indeed.