The Valley (63 page)

If you pan out you can follow those lines down to the NCB head offices near the Department of Energy in Whitehall, and see civil servants and politicians devising a new nameplate: the National Coal Board is renamed the British Coal Corporation and the politicians talk of the rebrand as a step to selling off the pits to private owners. They say the privatisation will accompany that of power generation and supply, and mean that Britain’s coal mines will no longer be the preferred suppliers to British electricity-generating power stations, which means that the power generators, whoever they may be, will then be able to import cheaper coal, from countries such as Russia, the United States and Colombia.

And if you move out far enough to take in Colombia’s capital city Bogotá, you might see at work a young freelance journalist who had come to England to cover the miners’ strike. The journalist had reported on conditions at the Colombian coal mines, where there were few safety standards and children were employed, and wanted to interview British mining families. On the picket line at Houghton Main he had met Gary Hollingworth, and asked him why no one had been at home when he knocked on the doors of the nearby houses. Gary had laughed and explained they were allotment sheds. ‘Funny to you, maybe,’ said the journalist, ‘but in my country the houses of the miners are all like this.’

At Grimethorpe colliery, Gary is made ventilation officer, with twenty-odd men reporting to him and a manager’s constant worry as part of the deal. Now, whenever he is outside, even in the garden at home or out with his family, he pays attention to the air; if he feels it dampening or drying he will nip to the pit to check the equipment that depends on atmospheric pressure. As an official he has to leave the National Union of Mineworkers for the Colliery Officials and Staff Association (‘COSA bastards’ as the men call them). In this position he is ragged and pillocked more than he was before, whether he is instructing people at work, or just getting in rounds in the Grimethorpe pubs, where the pit talk is so thick that the bored shout they can’t see for dust.

He has confrontations. If the gas levels are too high he has to have production stopped, and if the men think he is being over-cautious, they rail at him. When redundancies are being made and redundo fever sets in, tempers quicken. Managers push through new shift patterns or scrap old agreements, and there are butts and punches wrapped in the insults. Gary takes it. As he once learned how to talk to the older men to get things done, he now learns to deal with wary, suspicious men who mistrust their employers’ new conditions and promises.

Meanwhile, at Hickleton Main, David Hollingworth arrives at the pit for his shift and is then taken by coach with around forty others to Rossington, a big pit near Doncaster. In keeping with plans made at the British Coal head offices in London, and fed down the fax lines to Doncaster and then Thurnscoe, Hickleton has been merged with Goldthorpe and most of its miners transferred or made redundant. When the transfers begin, there are five coaches ferrying out men to their new pits; a year later they will fit into one. Finding it strange to work with men he has never met before, swapping rumours about which of them had scabbed during the strike, and disbelieving most announcements from management and British Coal, David feels a new edginess in the atmosphere, and a change in himself. There is still camaraderie among the men at work, but it becomes gradually less apparent in the village, and he and Marie find they are spending less time than they used to in the Coronation Club.

In March 1988, British Coal closes Hickleton colliery for good. The yard is emptied, the gates locked, and soon the only activity is the work of the trucks and earth movers on the vast black whalebacks of the spoil heap, soon to be grassed down and reclaimed as a public park. At the same time the corporation closes the Manvers complex and impatiently begins razing this old industrial Gormenghast to the ground. In the 1930s the old Manvers Main Colliery Company had owned more than a thousand railway trucks, each emblazoned with the company’s name, and recognised on lines across the country. It was so well known that the London Midland South Railway Company used it on its advertising posters. By the start of the 1990s it will be the biggest single area of derelict contaminated land in Europe.

The closure and demolition of South Kirkby colliery follows and after that Barnburgh Main and Royston Drift, near Barnsley. The demolitions leave uncanny spaces in the countryside; the collieries had not been picturesque places, but they had been busy and important and the view had cohered around them. To look at the bare land, with the rubble and raw earth scars underlining the nothingness, is to look at an absence, at missing teeth in a jaw. Passing Manvers, Winnie cannot quite remember where all its buildings had been. Maybe it is that she is just getting old, she thinks. Maybe her memory is growing stiff, like her back and her legs.

Move back now and pause above the Dearne. If you look carefully you will see that the older miners, the war veterans, the men who know all the mines’ tales, are melting away. Many of them feel guilty at taking the redundancy packages, because to them it means selling a job that belongs to the next generation, but times are hard and the redundancy packages can go up to £40,000. The deals and conditions seem strange to them. You are entitled to unemployment benefit without needing to look for work; you can draw your pension early, and in some cases you are entitled to free fuel for life. Some men take the ‘redundo’ and work as contractors at other pits. But as the older men go they take with them their knowledge, steadying influence and authority, there is less mixing between the generations, and managers promote younger men to their jobs.

Across the Yorkshire coalfield there are sporadic attempts to protect jobs for the future. When British Coal introduces a new disciplinary code, there is talk of an all-out strike, but the union goes no further than refusing to cut coal on overtime shifts. The code is dropped, but afterwards it seems more certain that the NUM will not be able to re-stage a campaign like the 1984–85 strike. Three months after Manvers Main and Hickleton pits close, Caphouse colliery near Wakefield reopens as the Yorkshire Mining Museum, employing ex-miners as guides. Lisa Hollingworth, aged nine now, goes there with a friend during the school holidays. As part of the experience the guides take them underground to disused workings, turn on speakers that broadcast the sound of coal-cutting machinery at actual volume, and turn off the lights. Lisa thinks about her dad, working underground at Rossington, and she is horrified. ‘How can he do it?’ she says to her friend. ‘It’s
terrifying
.’

The decade is ending. Listen closely and you might hear the Hollingworths saying perhaps Maggie might shut all the pits at once, after all, and that when several pits in neighbouring villages do shut all at once, you do see changes. People move away and are replaced by new families that no one knows. Shops close. You hear stories of drug dealers sending up fireworks over the valley to announce a new drop; of friends and neighbours being burgled, and when some little bugger breaks into a loft to steal copper piping, no one wants to say anything any more, because the old pulling together that was born of common experience has gone. A few years ago you could count on the blokes having a word with their fathers at work, or at the club. A few years ago you knew a lot of the kids would find pit jobs that straightened them out. These were not ideal, failsafe solutions, but they were something. In places where several pits shut at once, though, such self-regulation is becoming rarer. What will they do, they wonder, and what will their villages be like, if the pits close? Would any of their experience, or knowledge, be of use any more?

And in Thurnscoe, Jed Stiles, quiff threaded with grey, gait and grin unaltered, launches a sideline career selling cigarettes from a carrier bag at prices that undercut the shops and machines. He asks all his customers if they think he still looks like Elvis. Some people say that if you say yes, dead ringer, he’ll give you a discount.

66 Born Wi't Silver Spoon in Thy Gob

The Selby Complex, Barnsley Main Colliery, Highgate; Doncaster; Hull, 1990–98

In March 1990 news breaks of a scandal involving financial corruption in the NUM. For two weeks it seems that half the pits in South Yorkshire have TV news crews camped at their gates, and journalists pushing microphones at miners for opinions. The accusations, denied by the leaders, are that in the 1984–85 strike the union took large donations of money from Soviet miners and from Colonel Gaddafi and that officials used part of that money to pay off home loans. The NUM members, even the ones disenchanted with Scargill, are sceptical; after the disinformation during the strike, a lot of people suspect that press stories about the NUM are government-generated black propaganda. ‘They reckoned he was lying when he said they'd shut pits,' says a ventilation man at Grimethorpe to Gary Hollingworth, as they listen to the news on a battered radio in the safety team's cabin. ‘Bollocks to the lot of them.' By ‘the lot of them' he means the union as well. There is a lot of this among the men now, grumbling that the NUM won't stand up to the managers or British bloody Coal when they cut corners or put their favourites in the best-paying jobs. Trust is harder to earn than it once was.

A Fraud Squad investigation collapses and the Inland Revenue finds no impropriety. However, Gavin Lightman QC conducts an official inquiry for the union and although he clears Scargill and other officials of using Libyan money to pay their mortgages, he does find there have been ‘a number of misapplications of funds and breaches of duty'. To Gary, following the radio news updates, these specific findings are less important than the fact of the story surfacing in the first place. He remembers the skirmish with the Coal Board in 1981, the Welsh miners coming to Yorkshire with their warnings, the coal stockpiles rising before the strike, and wonders if the Scargill story could be a sign. What if someone was raking over the union muck for a reason? The South Yorkshire pits are turning over stories about closures and privatisation like coal on a retreat face, and if the government was going to privatise British Coal, as it was threatening to, it would most likely begin by attacking the NUM.

The uncertainty at work makes Gary feel this may be a good time to move on, and he talks to Elaine about looking for another job. Their standard of living is good: £23,500 a year, a nicely furnished house, a Vauxhall Cavalier SRi outside, Scott training as a civil engineer and Claire at university studying zoology. Even as collieries are closing and an economic recession settles on Britain, some miners are earning good money from new bonus schemes, and from promotions as men leave the industry with their redundancy payments. Like many miners, though, Gary thinks the Conservative government will come for them again; he feels as if he is making the money in the shadows of coming ruination.

What he would secretly like to do is the same as it ever was – teach children, or at least do a job helping other people. Unsure of how to go about it, uncertain about his abilities and nervous of a career change, he distracts himself by enquiring about different engineering jobs. He applies for a couple, and in 1991 is offered a job on the Channel Tunnel project down south, but then as he is considering that he is asked to take the well-paid post of ventilation officer at Whitemoor pit, part of the Selby complex twenty-five miles north of the Dearne.

The Selby complex began producing coal in 1983, its five pitheads living up to their 1970s billing as new-worldly visions. These are posher than Nottinghamshire's very poshest pits, built of buff brick and coordinated chocolate-brown cladding, and screened by rows of fir and laurel trees to blend in with the pretty, non-industrialised North Yorkshire landscape. The headgears are low and encased in rectangular towers so that seen from certain angles across the fields they resemble plain churches rising above the trees and hedges. Underground, Selby is one of the most technologically advanced coal mines in the world, and it is predicted to have a long future. Gary and Elaine plan to move to the area once Gary is settled there, but it soon becomes apparent that even the superpit of the future is insecure, and the mood there is volatile. Managers have been told to be tougher on the men; personnel are going after the ones with records of absenteeism, and area directors' reports assessing the prospects of mines are said to be gloomy. To Gary, it seems that safety measures are being reduced. Soon after he starts work there, the same managers that had been paying generous relocation packages begin offering generous redundancy deals. The basic sell is always the same: thousands of pounds available but for a few days only, take it now or risk losing it for ever. In the spring of 1992, Gary takes it.

As a miner leaving the industry he is entitled to an interview with a Personal Evaluation Consultant, an advisor paid for by the government who is supposed to help redundant miners consider their employment options. Gary is eager for the consultation because it will be a chance to find out how he can retrain to become a teacher. At the meeting, the consultant, a man in his thirties who smiles and admits he doesn't know much about coal mining, refers Gary on to a scheme that helps men to sign up for new jobs and training courses.

At this next interview, conducted in a new, dark-green Portakabin in the pit yard at Barnsley Main, which had closed in 1991, Gary sits across a plain table from a man and woman who are both about his age. The woman wears her hair pulled back from her face, and has on a black cardigan and black trousers. The man wears glasses, and a crew-neck sweater with shirt and tie.

Gary kneads his hands together, and shifts around in his chair. He feels self-conscious, as if he is watching himself in the room.