The Miners Strike

[Tuerto]

Why is this thread not on the politics section there is no football content?

Cardiff 2 Sheffield United 0.

I think that's enough to keep this thread.

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

I'll echo some of those sentiments Bob.

I grew up in Aberfan, Merthyr Vale colliery in sight of my parents house and heated the pit hooter daily. Played football for a local boys club that was just outside the grounds of Deep Navigation.

The miners also contributed to a number of local services which were benefits of the community. In Deep Nav's case most miners contributed a few pence to the Boys club. Miners Gala's, local events and services all receiving money from the miners also.

In relation to the 'strike', I was 12 or 13 when it started. It had a big impact on me as I saw mates rummaging for coal on tips, soup kitchens, food parcels for families within the close community.

Throw in the death of David Wilkie and a number of suicides, probably brought about by the strike, the whole human wasn't lost on me at all.

Families fractured, communities shattered and then left to get on with it.

Do you know Carlton ?

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

Why is this thread not on the politics section there is no football content?

Thatcher has risen from the grave

[The Bloop]

Why is this thread not on the politics section there is no football content?

Because it had (and still has) a massive effect on a big part of the club's fan base.
With my little pick and shovel....

[JamesWales]

Genuine question - what was the relationship like between Cardiff and that Valleys at that time? Obviously many would show solidarity and many would not support it, I just wonder what the general view was given that this was happening close to Cardiff but we had no mines and also had seen our role in coal (exports from the docks) dramatically decline and we're seeing our own industrial job losses etc

Also, did any elements of the strike reach ninian park? Collections? Chants? Conflict?

[chrisp_1927]

The more I read about the miners strike, the more I think both sides were in the wrong. Scargill is vermin, real disgusting piece of filth. Maggies actions towards the mines and miners seemed personally motivated and were unacceptably nasty.

I read that imported coal was cheaper. But when you add in the extra costs of closing the mines, the lower tax/vat take, benefits, loss of energy security. It just doesn't seem to add up.

As a country we have had abundant energy resources, coal, gas and now renewables. We flared billions of pounds of gas away in the North Sea, and we imported coal when we had our own sitting underground and miners out of work. I just hope we don't make the same mistakes going forward

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

Genuine question - what was the relationship like between Cardiff and that Valleys at that time? Obviously many would show solidarity and many would not support it, I just wonder what the general view was given that this was happening close to Cardiff but we had no mines and also had seen our role in coal (exports from the docks) dramatically decline and we're seeing our own industrial job losses etc

Also, did any elements of the strike reach ninian park? Collections? Chants? Conflict?

Bucket collections outside NP

Thatchers Boot Boys sung at the police down the vetch

I vividly remember there's only one Arthur scargill ! being sung

[NYCBlue]

One by product of the demise of the pits was the flooding of the labour market, particularly construction. Certainly not knocking the ex miners but the redundancy pay/severance pay, whatever it was called, subsided retraining enabled them to square up their debts and make a fresh start. The ‘go to’ industry was construction. Cardiff and I’d imagine places like Sheffield, Newcastle, Barnsley etc were hit by the working man’s worst nightmare ‘Glut of labour/lack of work’. We still had our ‘city’ mortgages & bills to pay and, unfortunately, peace work was the norm on sites, the ‘new tradesmen’, fresh from their crash courses were undercutting us left, right & centre due to their relatively lower outgoings. Our little Saturday fiddles went west as well, especially for valley based brickies, chippies, for years the miners had the cash to have these minor house improvements done (it made the world go around), now they were doing them themselves.

I stress that I’m not knocking the lads at all, they had to do what they had to do but I lived through it and the situation in my trade was dire, we’d done four year apprenticeships and the six month diluties (as we called them) were killing us. Where we’d once had the whip hand it now became a dog eat dog world, negotiating money had gone out of the window, it was take it or leave it.

All part of that woman’s master plan in my opinion, keep the workers in fear for their jobs. Legitimate unrest in the workplace completely quelled, 15% interest rates for those of us with mortgages meaning a fair wedge to be shelled out monthly. People with a council house having the safety net of rent subsidies should work dry up being encouraged to buy said council house to put that monthly noose around their necks.

We had the added blow of East Moors closing in Cardiff as well which flooded the labour market a few years previously as well. The knock on effect of the crushing of the pit men & steelworkers reached far & wide not just in their communities.

Ironic though how the greedy and ruthless attitudes of those in power of those days has come back and bitten society on the arse. Apprenticeship & training schemes were obliterated, the short sighted reason being that it wasn’t cost effective having youngsters making mistakes, working at a slower pace, having time off site to attend college etc. The result being now that decent tradesmen are at a premium and demanding the type of remuneration that must sicken any of those advocates of Thatcherism who are still around who wanted the likes of me kept firmly in my place in the pecking order.

So, the miners strike did define the intervening years, no long term investment in pit communities to provide sustainable long term employment to replace the coal face. Quangos like the WDA milking money off their government mates , building phoney units on ‘made up’ trading estates, then disappearing when the grants dried up and these units employing low paid staff changing hands and types of business many times over the years.

Bit of a long rant for a Saturday morning, sorry for that. F*ck Thatcher & Up The City.

Good post. The sad thing is that Thatcher got exactly what she wanted. The unions were obliterated. Socialism was demonized. And now we live in a world where there is no society.

[Rock_Flock_of_Five]

I was working at GKN in 1980 when the steel industry went on strike. Many of the drivers who refused to cross picket lines were blacklisted by haulage companies afterwards. This impacted the decision for many of them to cross the picket lines during the miners' strike, they were in fear of being permanently shunned by the haulage bosses.

[Jordi Culé]

Do you know Carlton ?

Yes butt.

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

Yes butt.

Havnt seen him for years

He's from merthyr Valley rather than town ?

He used to travel with us , his mate stav who worked the doors as well

He was in the pub trade ?

[bobh]

The more I read about the miners strike, the more I think both sides were in the wrong. Scargill is vermin, real disgusting piece of filth. Maggies actions towards the mines and miners seemed personally motivated and were unacceptably nasty.

I read that imported coal was cheaper. But when you add in the extra costs of closing the mines, the lower tax/vat take, benefits, loss of energy security. It just doesn't seem to add up.

As a country we have had abundant energy resources, coal, gas and now renewables. We flared billions of pounds of gas away in the North Sea, and we imported coal when we had our own sitting underground and miners out of work. I just hope we don't make the same mistakes going forward

Mostly thrue.
Thatcher wanted to crush the NUM, built up coal reserves, allowed mine closure plans to be "leaked - knowing full well how Scargill would react, but didn't expect the amout of support the miners would get.
In fact, if the scabby Nottingham miners hadn't caved in (they were promised better treatment, I believe) then the strikers may well have won a few weeks later.

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

Mostly thrue.
Thatcher wanted to crush the NUM, built up coal reserves, allowed mine closure plans to be "leaked - knowing full well how Scargill would react, but didn't expect the amout of support the miners would get.
In fact, if the scabby Nottingham miners hadn't caved in (they were promised better treatment, I believe) then the strikers may well have won a few weeks later.

Nottinghamshire were a bunch of tossers. The Tories used them and threw them out soon enough once they had served their purpose .

[Jordi Culé]

Havnt seen him for years

He's from merthyr Valley rather than town ?

He used to travel with us , his mate stav who worked the doors as well

He was in the pub trade ?

Merthyr boy.

Still watching City as far as I know. I used to do a load of aways with him with Big Sam etc. Spent many a trip with Carlton drinking beer in the back whilst Sam charged us a quid for the bridge even though we're going to Rochdale.

[Tuerto]

Merthyr boy.

Still watching City as far as I know. I used to do a load of aways with him with Big Sam etc. Spent many a trip with Carlton drinking beer in the back whilst Sam charged us a quid for the bridge even though we're going to Rochdale.

Big Sam.

[Gofer Blue]

My grandfather was a miner in Mountain Ash and he was caught up in the General Strike of May 1926 and the subsequent Miners' Strike that continued until the autumn of that year. My Dad was a 13 year old teenager at that time and the events of those days were deeply embedded in his memory. He was the youngest of four brothers, the two eldest worked down the mines but they and his parents were determined that he and his next oldest brother were not going to follow them. There was “real” poverty in the Valleys in 1926 compared to the 1984 strike with little or no financial help. He told me stories of how the local Methodist minister raised support from friends in London and in this way obtained shoes for kids who had none and clothes to replace the rags they were dressed in. Indeed it affected his political outlook for the rest of his life, no doubt enhanced by the death of his father in a mine accident just 7 years later in 1933.

He was a staunch Socialist and supported the nationalisation of the mines but he was always wary of Scargill from the start. He and I could see that the latter was simply looking for an opportunity to bring down the government, quite a different scenario to 1926 where miners were striking for fair wages and working conditions. Unfortunately Scargill's timing was disastrous for various reasons and Thatcher won the day; so not only did he not succeed in preventing mine closures but he also, unwittingly maybe, caused the demise of the trade union movement as a whole so that it became a shadow of what it was originally was/intended to be.

[Jordi Culé]

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the.../9781781683422

Decent read.

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

Merthyr boy.

Still watching City as far as I know. I used to do a load of aways with him with Big Sam etc. Spent many a trip with Carlton drinking beer in the back whilst Sam charged us a quid for the bridge even though we're going to Rochdale.

I went to QPR in a transit with him , a tall chap called Sam and a few ruffians .

He was a lively chap back in the day

[life on mars]

My grandfather was a miner in Mountain Ash and he was caught up in the General Strike of May 1926 and the subsequent Miners' Strike that continued until the autumn of that year. My Dad was a 13 year old teenager at that time and the events of those days were deeply embedded in his memory. He was the youngest of four brothers, the two eldest worked down the mines but they and his parents were determined that he and his next oldest brother were not going to follow them. There was “real” poverty in the Valleys in 1926 compared to the 1984 strike with little or no financial help. He told me stories of how the local Methodist minister raised support from friends in London and in this way obtained shoes for kids who had none and clothes to replace the rags they were dressed in. Indeed it affected his political outlook for the rest of his life, no doubt enhanced by the death of his father in a mine accident just 7 years later in 1933.

He was a staunch Socialist and supported the nationalisation of the mines but he was always wary of Scargill from the start. He and I could see that the latter was simply looking for an opportunity to bring down the government, quite a different scenario to 1926 where miners were striking for fair wages and working conditions. Unfortunately Scargill's timing was disastrous for various reasons and Thatcher won the day; so not only did he not succeed in preventing mine closures but he also, unwittingly maybe, caused the demise of the trade union movement as a whole so that it became a shadow of what it was originally was/intended to be.

Mining started to decline from the first world war though to the second , then as rail moved to diesel further recline occurred interestingly Labour under Harold Wilson closed more mines than Thatcher and the unions then decided to take the fight to the government and Thatcher decided to win that fight and break the Scargill politically motivated strikes ( he was a nasty, Decline in demand for coal. Even as late as the 1960s, British railways were run coal power. But, steam power soon vanished in place of diesel and electric. Households used to burn coal for central heating. But, after the Clean Air Act of the 1950s, this rapidly declined as people switched to more modern forms of central heating.Political Issues. The coal industry had the most powerful unions in the country. Unions were highly organised, often by leaders with strong political (left wing) allegiances. Miners strikes, such as 1924, early 1970s and 1984 Miners strike had the capacity to bring the country to a standstill as Thatcher)

Coal was well in decline from WW2

Then rail was moving to diesel Wilson Labours new that as they closed many more mines than Thatcher .

Scargill was as bad as Thatcher both driven politically , the country was forever being held to ransom as a last grasp of union power, as tyey knew rail travel would stop and folks homes were deprived of heating , in a way the coal unions accelerated thier own demise .

[Sloop_Jon_Bee]

One by product of the demise of the pits was the flooding of the labour market, particularly construction. Certainly not knocking the ex miners but the redundancy pay/severance pay, whatever it was called, subsided retraining enabled them to square up their debts and make a fresh start. The ‘go to’ industry was construction. Cardiff and I’d imagine places like Sheffield, Newcastle, Barnsley etc were hit by the working man’s worst nightmare ‘Glut of labour/lack of work’. We still had our ‘city’ mortgages & bills to pay and, unfortunately, peace work was the norm on sites, the ‘new tradesmen’, fresh from their crash courses were undercutting us left, right & centre due to their relatively lower outgoings. Our little Saturday fiddles went west as well, especially for valley based brickies, chippies, for years the miners had the cash to have these minor house improvements done (it made the world go around), now they were doing them themselves.

I stress that I’m not knocking the lads at all, they had to do what they had to do but I lived through it and the situation in my trade was dire, we’d done four year apprenticeships and the six month diluties (as we called them) were killing us. Where we’d once had the whip hand it now became a dog eat dog world, negotiating money had gone out of the window, it was take it or leave it.

All part of that woman’s master plan in my opinion, keep the workers in fear for their jobs. Legitimate unrest in the workplace completely quelled, 15% interest rates for those of us with mortgages meaning a fair wedge to be shelled out monthly. People with a council house having the safety net of rent subsidies should work dry up being encouraged to buy said council house to put that monthly noose around their necks.

We had the added blow of East Moors closing in Cardiff as well which flooded the labour market a few years previously as well. The knock on effect of the crushing of the pit men & steelworkers reached far & wide not just in their communities.

Ironic though how the greedy and ruthless attitudes of those in power of those days has come back and bitten society on the arse. Apprenticeship & training schemes were obliterated, the short sighted reason being that it wasn’t cost effective having youngsters making mistakes, working at a slower pace, having time off site to attend college etc. The result being now that decent tradesmen are at a premium and demanding the type of remuneration that must sicken any of those advocates of Thatcherism who are still around who wanted the likes of me kept firmly in my place in the pecking order.

So, the miners strike did define the intervening years, no long term investment in pit communities to provide sustainable long term employment to replace the coal face. Quangos like the WDA milking money off their government mates , building phoney units on ‘made up’ trading estates, then disappearing when the grants dried up and these units employing low paid staff changing hands and types of business many times over the years.

Bit of a long rant for a Saturday morning, sorry for that. F*ck Thatcher & Up The City.

Brilliant post Splott P. Many thanks for taking the time to write it up; respect.
Spedger

[SLUDGE FACTORY]

Mining started to decline from the first world war though to the second , then as rail moved to diesel further recline occurred interestingly Labour under Harold Wilson closed more mines than Thatcher and the unions then decided to take the fight to the government and Thatcher decided to win that fight and break the Scargill politically motivated strikes ( he was a nasty, Decline in demand for coal. Even as late as the 1960s, British railways were run coal power. But, steam power soon vanished in place of diesel and electric. Households used to burn coal for central heating. But, after the Clean Air Act of the 1950s, this rapidly declined as people switched to more modern forms of central heating.Political Issues. The coal industry had the most powerful unions in the country. Unions were highly organised, often by leaders with strong political (left wing) allegiances. Miners strikes, such as 1924, early 1970s and 1984 Miners strike had the capacity to bring the country to a standstill as Thatcher)

Coal was well in decline from WW2

Then rail was moving to diesel Wilson Labours new that as they closed many more mines than Thatcher .

Scargill was as bad as Thatcher both driven politically , the country was forever being held to ransom as a last grasp of union power, as tyey knew rail travel would stop and folks homes were deprived of heating , in a way the coal unions accelerated thier own demise .

Ladies and Gentleman

That was a party political broadcast by Margaret Thatcher

[RichardM]

Ladies and Gentleman

That was a party political broadcast by Margaret Thatcher

I think it was a post from someone who has had a few beers and has limited copy and pasting skills. But the essence of what he says his right, mining was in decline from the early part of the 20th century.
Doesn't alter the fact that Maggie was evil.

[JamesWales]

It's not hard to seperate out the personal stories of the strike; the decline of an ancient industry, the devastation inflicted upon communities, the loss of self respect for many people and towns, many of which wouldn't exist without pits etc and the economics and politics behind it, which were very complex and included, off the top of my head, geopolitical issues, the development of the EEC, growing environmental issues, a stubborn PM and a stubborn union leadership, lack of diversity in the S.Wales economy, technological changes, shipping advances etc.

I really don't subscribe to this evil Thatcher idea, as there's always winners and losers but what always struck me as heartbreaking is that while the industry was clearly in decline and we couldn't produce it as cheaply as other places it was artificially shut down at a greater pace. Tower Colliery shows that. Even that didn't last but if a dozen or so more pits had lasted a dozen or so more years it may have made the 80s and 90s an easier time for many.

[the other bob wilson]

Scargill was an idiot for not holding a ballot which he probably would have won. About ten years earlier Ted Heath’s Government were, effectively, beaten by the miners and I’ve always thought that the Conservative Party were bent on revenge after that and that the miners days were numbered once Thatcher won her landslide in 79 which was then backed up by a bigger win in 83.

It’s fair to say that mining was into its final phase at the time of the 84 strike and it would have gone the way it did if the strike hadn’t have happened, but there was no need for the situation to have been handled the way Thatcher did. There could have been a gradual phased closure with more thought and sympathy given to what was going to be left behind when the mines closed.

I can only speak for the Rhondda really and
it does has outstanding natural beauty, but it doesn’t have a great deal else in its favour. It’s an area and community which has clearly seen better days - as I said before, it wasn’t as simple as just closing the mines, it was all of the other things that disappeared with them.

[Seabird]

Nice post, Bob.