The Valley (66 page)

The teatime news, watched in the sitting room as the family eats lasagne from plates on their laps, leads with the story that mining families have been half-expecting for years. In the House of Commons, Michael Heseltine, the President of the Board of Trade, announces that British Coal is to close thirty-one of the last fifty working pits, and make 30,000 miners redundant. The new private power-generating companies, National Power and PowerGen, are, as predicted, reducing the amount of British coal they will use because they can buy cheaper on world markets. This, an economist tells a TV news reporter, will be the largest mass redundancy in British history and another 70,000 jobs will be lost through knock-on effects.

At a press conference Arthur Scargill, sitting in front of a red banner bearing the words ‘THE PAST WE INHERIT, THE FUTURE WE BUILD’, says he will be urging NUM members to take action. Neil Clarke, the British Coal chairman, says ‘the whole situation is a very sad, very damaging, very distressing one, but it is forced on us by the market’. He says the market is ‘unfair’, which some commentators will take as reference to the government encouraging the new private energy-generating companies to burn gas rather than coal.

A graphic lists the Yorkshire closures one by one, with the number of jobs at each. Maltby, Prince of Wales and Hatfield/Thorne will be mothballed, and eight closed:

Sharlston (750 miners)

Bentley (650)

Frickley (1,000)

Grimethorpe (959)

Houghton Main (440)

Kiveton (775)

Markham Main (734)

Rossington (880) .
.
.

When Rossington’s name appears David grimaces and says he wishes he’d stayed in bed.

‘They’ll probably close that and all,’ says Marie.

*

Later, in the bright, banging locker rooms at Rossington, some of the men are shocked and sad, and some others say, ‘Sod it, let me get my figures and get out now.’ Pessimism has been thickening since May, when the government formally revealed its plans to privatise coal, but stirred in with it now is confusion. British Coal’s recent reports show some of the pits to be productive and profitable: could it really not find other customers? There is talk of strikes and protests, but inside David feels that this time opposition would only put off the inevitable. As he walks to the lamp room in his orange overalls, he notices a Coal Not Dole sticker has been amended with marker pen to ‘Dole Not Coal’.

Public opposition is strong though, and most people appear to side with the miners. Perhaps trying to maintain the mass support, Arthur Scargill withdraws calls for a strike. The NUM challenges the legality of the government’s announcement in the High Court, and the Labour Party requests that the process be stopped while the Select Committee on Trade and Industry examines the future of coal. Miners’ wives revive the Women Against Pit Closures campaign. The police officer who arrested Arthur Scargill at Orgreave, Chief Superintendent John Nesbit, tells the
Daily Mirror
that, in his opinion, Scargill had been right in 1984. The outcry is such that backbench Conservative MPs threaten to vote down Michael Heseltine’s bill, and it looks as though John Major, who had replaced Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1990, will be defeated in the Commons. In response, the Cabinet announces a freeze on the closures pending the outcome of a Department of Trade and Industry investigation of new markets for coal. The report will be published in January 1993, this stalling an old tactic that the miners with their history know from 1925 and 1981.

On Wednesday 21 October 1992, over a hundred thousand miners and supporters march through London with Scargill at their head. Crowds along the route cheer the miners; in Park Lane someone comes out of the crowd and gives Scargill a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. In Kensington and Knightsbridge people lean out of hotel windows and applaud. Four days later, 200,000 people march again. Nevertheless, British Coal stops production at ten of the thirty-one pits listed for closure – Grimethorpe being one of them – and sends the men home on basic pay, no bonuses. They allow men to volunteer for redundancy, hinting that the terms will not be so generous again.

Then, four days before Christmas, the High Court rules that the government has broken the law in announcing the shutdown of such a large portion of the industry without consultation. It also finds invalid Heseltine’s offered compromise of closing ten pits after a ninety-day consultation period, and orders a review of the other twenty-one. Government ministers backtrack and John Major declares that he now has an ‘open mind’ about the industry.

There follow three months of debate, political dealing and protests. At Grimethorpe and the other threatened pits, women set up permanent brazier-lit vigils outside the pit gates. In Westminster, Michael Heseltine solicits the support of MPs. Managers from British Coal propose a compromise plan that would repeal a 1908 Act limiting shifts to seven and a half hours. In March, Heseltine publishes a new White Paper that promises to save thirteen pits, but only for two years while they reduce production costs.

Questioned about this, with the vote on his White Paper approaching and demonstrations outside the House of Commons, Heseltine blames the miners. They may have improved productivity levels but they have not changed quickly enough, he says, and the market has been filled by more competitive fuels. The White Paper passes with a majority of twenty-two, and later the High Court rules that the government has now consulted and is free to make the closures. There are one-day strikes in the NUM pits – members of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers continue to work – and Anne Scargill and three other members of Women Against Pit Closures hold a four-day sit-in at Parkside colliery in Lancashire. (‘One hundred thousand people could lose their jobs if these pits go,’ Anne tells journalists afterwards, ‘yet we mine the cheapest deep-mined coal in the world. We’re not dots on a computer screen.’)

But British Coal begins the closures immediately. Production stops at Rossington in April, and Grimethorpe, Houghton Main and the other South Yorkshire pits follow. By the end of June even the ‘saved’ pits are closing. Within a year, thirty-three – two more than had been announced in the first place – have closed, and six of them are sold to private operators.

In the towns and villages and pit yards there is bitter quitting that inverts the optimism of 1947: ‘FUCK THE PIT’, ‘SHUT THE PIT’, ‘GIVE ME MY MONEY’ written on lockers, etched into girders, scrawled over walls in NCB paint. Managers and union men alike are goaded, heads turning away at meetings, voices singing, ‘Shut the pit, shut the pit, shut the pit!’ to the tune of ‘Here we go’ when officials come in earshot. As men learn that irreparable large-scale breakdowns can hasten closures, machinery suffers mysterious damage. Those who want to keep the mines open argue and fight with those seeking redundancy. The fever also grips the men who come in trucks and cranes to clear the yards and cap the shafts. Shearers, roadheaders, roof supports, conveyor systems, bucket loaders, machinery worth millions of pounds, is abandoned in tunnels, or tipped down the shafts and sealed under the grey plugs of concrete tipped after it. No one seems responsible. In the Cora, at Highgate Club and in the Unity, people add up the figures: four new locos left down at one pit, barely driven million-pound dumper trucks thrown down the shaft at another; little visible concern for economy there, then, and little sign too of the promised millions of pounds of aid.

*

When British Coal mothballs Rossington in April 1993, David Hollingworth is given compulsory redundancy. He finds the months leading up to that date unpleasant, worse than the strike, because the sour-salted atmosphere corrodes old comradeship. As men leave, the passenger numbers on the bus that still collects them from Hickleton pit dwindle to twenty, then to single figures. Some mornings David walks to work with the streets entirely to himself, as if he were the last man in the village. He meets four or five others on the bus, and they and the driver speed through the valley dawn to Rossington on the near-empty miners’ ghost coach. In his second to last week there is just David and one other man. Then the other man leaves and, in his final week, when David walks down the empty road to the deserted pit he sees a single minicab waiting in the darkness. He puts his head to the door and the driver winds down the window.

‘Is this for Rosso?’ David asks.

‘Aye. Is it just thee?’

‘Aye.’ He gets in, and the driver pulls away. ‘Not bad this,’ David says. ‘My own driver. And they say British Coal are tight.’

David remains unemployed for twelve months. In that time he and Marie notice changes in the valley, though the changes are uneven, some of them hidden. In some places shops and pubs stay open; in others, particularly the larger villages where retailers rely on neighbouring areas for trade, the high street closures are numerous and notice­able. Unemployment rises to fifty per cent in some areas, but the figures are kept down because many of the ex-miners are able to claim long-term disability benefits. There are stories of local crimes which David and Marie find bizarre and incredible. In Highgate, police use the Seels’ farm straw stacks to stake out a suspected drug dealer on Highgate Lane and this makes Marie laugh because it sounds like an incident from a TV cop show.

But there are also projects for the future, talk of a new link road, enterprise zones, a university for the valley, a wetland nature reserve at Manvers Main. Spoil heaps are grassed down, and in some places the wild, handsome country is restored to the way it must have looked almost two hundred years ago. Lots of people welcome the promises, because they will bring money, work and choices, but some parts could have done with the regeneration earlier. By the mid-1990s, Grimethorpe is the poorest village in Britain and the Dearne Valley is designated one of the sixty most deprived areas in Europe by an EU study, and one of the four poorest in the UK.

In March 1994, Rossington is leased and reopened by a private owner, RJB Mining – the whole industry is privatised later that year – and the Rossington manager calls to offer David his old job. Within a week, he is back working with Houdie in the headings. The work itself is much as it had been under British Coal, though the union has less influence, and there are fewer men.

In the summer, RJB introduces some new management techniques. ‘Everybody reckons they’re sending us on a course next,’ David tells Marie as they sit in the back garden one afternoon. ‘It’s to teach us all how to work in a team.’

Marie wrinkles her forehead. ‘To teach you
what
?’

‘To work as a team. They’ve got experts that tell you what to do.’

‘But how do they teach you that?’

‘I don’t know. I think they get you to do exercises, and give you tasks to do together, but I haven’t a clue.’

‘Don’t you help each other anyway?’

‘Aye,’ he says, shrugging. ‘I suppose so.’

Marie thinks, staring at the sunlit foxgloves around the garden. ‘Do you think it’ll be like when we made them canoes, Dave?’ They both laugh. ‘Or like you learning me to fish when I fell in?’

As it turns out, the managers invite only a few dozen men to go on the courses, those presumably marked out as having the potential to be deputies. Most of the men, including David, are relieved not to be asked.

*

Goldthorpe colliery, the last working pit in the Dearne Valley, closes in spring 1995. On a clear but dullish morning in late March the indifferent cranes come to swing their black iron balls into the buildings, and bulldozers finish off the walls. A small crowd of people stands watching, some of them recording the demolition with cameras and camcorders. Driving past, Lynda Hollingworth slows down to look. She sees the offices go, and then watches as a crane jabs its boom into an iron hopper as high as two houses. The hopper slumps to the ground like a shot cow and black dust hangs over the yard like a veil.

She hadn’t known they were knocking it all down today. As she drives away, she thinks of Walter Parkin, Harry and John’s family having worked there, and then of all the colliery names she once learned:
Askern
,
Barnburgh
,
Bentley
,
Brodsworth
,
Cadeby & Denaby
,
Frickley
,
Goldthorpe
,
Highgate
,
Hatfield
,
Markham
,
Rossington
and
Thorne.

She drives to Doncaster College’s arts faculty, where she now works in the admin department, organising, minuting and orchestrating the aesthetes of South Yorkshire in an old redbrick building that had once been Doncaster’s Institute of Mechanical Engineering. She likes the work, though most of the academics need all new information to be explained twice, and take days to reply to questions, and use a jargon obscure as pit language. The students are not what she had expected either, all wildly coloured hair, ripped jeans and language that would have made a Hickleton miner blush. Some of their work didn’t look much like art to her, but she asks students about their abstract painting and murky, plotless videos and tries to get it, and sometimes she finds their explanations quite interesting. She adapts her mind to them as she has learned to adapt it to the computers and gadgets. If you didn’t adapt, you got old.